Advanced Stats Pitching Charts - Wed 7/9
Oh, wow, so yesterday happened. There was a lot of pitching and most of it was bad…except Franklin Morales. He was great. Now it’s over and you don’t have to see it anymore thankfully. We try to do better on Wednesday. It’s a full day today starting at 1pm EST with 4 day games before 11 more at night, so it’s going to be a bit briefer in order to get posted in time. The charts are also going to make a rare Thursday appearance tomorrow to make up for off days during the All Star break next week.
Most of the stats in these charts are pulled directly from the Fangraphs.com database. If a stat is used that you are not familiar with and want to learn more about, their glossary does a terrific job of explaining all of the advanced stats I use in these charts.
Starting Pitching Main Chart
We’re using Seamheads.com 3 year park factors. Team Def = UZR/150. L2Yrs is a rolling calendar. 2013+ is since the start of that season. Combo stats are explained below.
Alex Cobb – hasn’t been getting the results lately, but the estimators still love him, especially at home.
Alfredo Simon – the Cubs have been hot lately, but are 2nd worst in MLB vs RHP.
Brandon Cumpton – went to the minors for a week and now he’s back to sub for Cole again. He has the day’s reddest K% and greenest HR/FB.
Brandon McCarthy – gets a tough Cleveland lineup in his Yankee debut. They are top 5 at home and vs RHP via wRC+. At least he gets a pitcher’s park today.
Bud Norris – attempts to take the mound for the first time since 6/21 again today.
C.J. Wilson – has hit a rough patch. It’s been HR’s more than anything else. He’s allowed 5 in his last 3 starts.
Chris Sale – bounced back in a big way in his last start and this Red Sox lineup has become a bit of a joke. He has the day’s 3rd best K% and IFFB, though both lag far behind the leader.
Dallas Beeler – did some fluky things in his ML debut, but has always been a low K guy in the minors.
Dallas Keuchel – has walked as many has he’s struck out in each of his last 3 starts (10 & 10 total). See below for information on that HR/FB.
Dillon Gee – returns to a major league mound for the first time in 2 months. He struck out 10 of 22 Low A batters in his last rehab start.
Doug Fister -has been a little bit smoke and mirrors this year with one of the tougher matchups today, but does have the greenest BB%.
Eric Stults – I guess it doesn’t matter how cold the Colorado offense is at home. He might be just what they need.
Ervin Santana – has gotten back on track, but the Mets have been hitting the ball better in recent days.
Jair Jurrjens – yuck.
Jason Hammel – his first AL start this year is against an NL team in a great spot.
Josh Collmenter – has a lot of light red in his line, seemingly someone to avoid.
Josh Tomlin – has been getting hammered, but with great peripherals. He hasn’t been walking anybody and snuck in a complete game 1 hitter with 11 K’s sandwiched in around 3 starts with 5 ER’s allowed in less than 6 IP.
Kyle Gibson – has 4 K’s and 3 BB’s total over his last 3 starts, but is in one of the most enviable spots today in a great park against ice cold bats.
Kyle Lohse – has today’s potentially best matchup, cold bats who are 3rd worst in MLB vs RHP. The Phils did bust out for 9 last night, but totaled 14 runs in the 6 games preceding it.
Lance Lynn – has a tougher matchup than you might realize. The Pirates hit RHP well and have been some of the hotter bats in the majors over the last week. He has the reddest K% today.
Marcus Stroman – has only had 2 road starts and he shut out the A’s over 7 in his last one. The matchup may be too tough today though. We’ll have to look at that pop up rate on the Batted Ball Chart because it’s pretty absurd.
Matt Cain – as the series shifts to SF, Oakland loses a lot offensively when they leave home. Cain hasn’t been all that good at home or on the road.
Max Scherzer – has the top set of peripherals and we see we’ll look at his last month below, but has a tough lineup to navigate today.
Nathan Eovaldi – has allowed more runs than strikeouts in 4 of his last 5 starts. At least he keeps the ball in the park.
Roberto Hernandez – may fare better than the numbers suggest as the Brewers lean RH. He’s still not a desirable pitcher today.
Roenis Elias – has been up and down, but with a solid matchup today.
Rubby de la Rosa – spent a few weeks in the minors and returns in a favorable spot.
Yordano Ventura – aside from the defense and park has some trouble finding much green in his line today.
Yu Darvish – was disappointing in his last start vs the legend killing Mets, but matches up against a team he’s dominated in the past. K’s should be a dime a dozen today. Yes, I’m predicting at least a dozen.
Zack Greinke – has the day’s worst matchup. The best home offense is crushing the ball.
Combo K/BB Chart
These are the Combo K & BB numbers from above fleshed out. They are weighted equally in the main chart above. They probably shouldn’t be, but were originally due to space limitations. What’s the correct weighting? Who knows, but now, you have all 6 components (Pitcher: L2Yrs, H/R, L14Days – Opposition: H/A, vL/R, L7Days) that make up the above numbers.
Brandon Cumpton – has red across all the K numbers. It’s not a good matchup.
Chris Sale – the Red Sox neither really add nor take away from his impressive K-rates.
Dallas Keuchel – has 1 start over the last 2 weeks where he struck out just 1 batter.
Dillon Gee – we know the Braves attack the baseball and often miss it.
Doug Fister – hasn’t walked a batter in 2 starts and only 3 in 5 home starts this year. The O’s are up there hacking.
Kyle Gibson – today could be the day we see the rise in the K-rate with help from a Seattle team that has the 3rd highest K% in the majors.
Max Scherzer – we knew where that K-rate was coming from before we even looked today. The Dodgers actually drag him down in the main chart.
Roberto Hernandez – is just going to have a tough time finding K’s today.
Rubby de la Rosa – should find a few K’s in that lineup.
Yu Darvish – I guess the biggest shock here is that the Astros don’t strike out an atrocious rate on the road. Otherwise, bombs away.
Combo Batted Ball Chart
Ditto for the Combo Batted Ball stats in the Main Chart above.
Brandon Cumpton – has allowed 1 HR in 9 starts and the Cardinals don’t hit many.
C.J. Wilson – the Blue Jays still have some pop in the lineup and may add to the recent HR woes today.
Chris Sale – whiffs and pop ups. What else could a pitcher ask for? The Red Sox seem fit to comply here.
Dallas Keuchel – allowed 2 fly balls in the 1 start he’s made in the last 2 weeks. 1 of them left the yard. He has a career 24 FB% and 19.4% this year, which kind of makes his exorbitant HR rates ok, even though it’s been league average this season. The HR’s should be the least of his current worries.
Josh Tomlin – though the 10 line drives in his last start skews it, the boxes are red straight across.
Lance Lynn – has been giving out walks and the Pirates are ready to accept them.
Marcus Stroman – pop up MACHINE!
K/SwStr Chart
Getting called strikeouts can be a skill, but it’s usually not a sustainable one at a large deviation from the league rate (catcher framing can make some difference here). K% correlates heavily with SwStr% though. Look for a large difference and you might find a potential adjustment before anyone else.
Alfredo Simon – should be striking out a league average number of batters with that SwStr%. Nothing about this guy makes sense. It’s not like his SwStr% is consistent either. In his last 5 starts, twice it was in double digits and twice it was below 6.
Brandon Cumpton – the SwStr% goes up, but the K% goes down?
Brandon McCarthy – if everyone is still all nuts about the strikeout increase this year, it’s been going down.
C.J. Wilson – is striking batters out about 1 % point above his career rate (21.1%). His career SwStr% is the same as this year (8.1%). So, I guess we should expect the same results as he’s had for the rest of his career, which means just a few less strikeouts.
Dallas Beeler – the 6 K’s in his debut vs 23 batters seems a bit of a fluke.
Dallas Keuchel – the strikeouts too have gone south. He had a 3.6 SwStr% and just 1 K in his last outing. Perhaps he deserves a bit better in that department over the last month, but he’s turning back into a pumpkin unfortunately.
Doug Fister – had his 2nd highest SwStr% of the season in his last outing at 6.3. He’s going to be near useless in a fantasy setting striking out less than 15% of batters and that’s where he’s headed if he doesn’t start missing more bats.
Jason Hammel – is maintaining both a K% and SwStr% well above his career levels. It was a little off last month, but right where it should be for the year. He has at least 5 K’s in every single start this year and at least 6 in each of his last 7.
Kyle Gibson – has us all waiting for the spike in K’s that we know is coming. His last start did him no favors though without a single strikeout and just a 1.9 SwStr%. That’s now 2 sub double digit SwStr’s after a string of 6 out of 7 above 10%.
Nathan Eovaldi – has seen his K% nearly cut in half with just a 2% point drop in SwStr, not that it should be much higher.
Zack Greinke – I’m not really concerned about. His SwStr% and K% were both up over the last 2 starts (18K’s) after a couple of games with a SwStr% below 7 and just 9 total K’s.
ERA Estimators Chart
How a pitcher’s ERA matches up against his defense independent estimators.
Alfredo Simon – so maybe the K’s even out (above) when the BABIP (.233) and LOB (84.1%) regress to keep him pitching well. It’s time to admit that even though he’s still pitching over his head, even his peripherals say he’s not a half bad pitcher recently. While we keep waiting for the ERA to go up, the estimators come down.
Brandon McCarthy – the ERA has come down a bit as he hasn’t allowed a HR in 3 games, though he still has a ways to go on that BABIP (.345). The estimators have gone up a bit too as the strikeouts have declined.
Bud Norris – has a 3 start sample with a .226 BABIP and 96.8 LOB% (just 1 HR) over the last 30 days.
C.J. Wilson – as we see SIERA & xFIP stay stable while ERA rises with FIP, we go straight to the HR’s. His 15.7 HR/FB for the year increases to 29.2% over his last 5 starts.
Dillon Gee – went on the DL sporting a .226 BABIP and 84.7 LOB%.
Doug Fister – has a career low .262 BABIP and career high 80.8 LOB% this year. Take that along with his SwStr info above and I’m selling. Did the Tigers know something?
Ervin Santana – has pitched well in 3 straight starts with decent results and now I see that it was really a single start in Colorado that messed him about a month ago. He’s otherwise fine.
Jason Hammel – also has 3 straight starts of at least 6 IP and 2 ER or less, which makes me not feel the need to analyze the 2 previous starts where he allowed 4 ER each.
Josh Tomlin – has allowed exactly 5 ER in 3 of his last 4 starts, but has 17 K’s and no BB’s over his last 2. His BABIP is .370 and LOB 55.6% over the last month.
Kyle Gibson – as we see above, has a slight increase in K% while cutting his BB% nearly in half, yet his ERA has climbed due mostly to a 56.7 LOB% over the last month.
Kyle Lohse – has a BABIP 26 points below his .294 career mark. His HR/FB over the last month is 2.6% (just 1).
Marcus Stroman – has a .214 BABIP and 85.3 LOB% over the last month.
Matt Cain – in the last month, Cain has seen a large adjustment in his LOB (63.5%) and BABIP (.319).
Max Scherzer – take out the 10 run game in KC and his other 4 starts over the last month add up to 30 IP – 4 ER – 7 BB – 36 K.
Roenis Elias – has allowed half his HR’s this year (7) in his last 6 starts.
Rubby de la Rosa – has a .216 BABIP in 3 starts over the last month.
Yordano Ventura – has stranded 83% of runners over the last month.
BABIP Chart
Last year, both Dan Rosencheck and Steve Staude separately found that high Infield Fly Ball (IFFB) rates and low Zone Contact (Z-Contact) rates correlated well with lower BABIP for pitchers. I won’t pretend to know how much of the variation in BABIP can be explained by these factors, but since they seem to have some effect, here they are. See if you can use it to your advantage.
It’s presented as the difference between team and pitcher BABIP allowed because team defense can explain a lot of the variance from league average on its own. For example, if you have a pitcher with a much lower BABIP than his team’s allowed (red), then you look for some factors that may support it (green). If you have a pitcher with a much higher BABIP (green), but decent IFFB and Z-Contact rates you may be onto something (check batted ball profile too).
Alfredo Simon – hasn’t had a BABIP above .217 in his last 3 games. There are no indicators that I can find that suggest his BABIP should be anything other than average. He could get credit for the excellent defense behind him, but .233 is still too low. Some of the best in the game have maintained this over a season, but he’s not 2011 Verlander (.236 BABIP).
Brandon Cumpton- kind of profiles as a guy who can be BABIP’ed. Aside from the numbers in the chart, he owns a 30% line drive rate.
Brandon McCarthy – moves a terrible BABIP defense to a bad BABIP defense. Let’s see what happens. It should come down some.
Bud Norris – actually has a high career BABIP at .305. Even more strange, the only change in his known indicators is a worse Z-Contact%.
Chris Sale – has a 17.2 LD% and .282 career BABIP along with those elite indicators in the chart above. If he’s going to keep doing all that, I don’t see any reason he can’t maintain that BABIP.
Dillon Gee – is simply unsustainable. His career mark is a decent .279.
Doug Fister – has a league average career BABIP. Once this magic disappears, he could have problems with the new lesser stuff in his arsenal.
Kyle Gibson – I have no problem with that BABIP if he maintains the elite pop up rate. His 16.6 LD% doesn’t hurt either, though those rates have a lot more variance.
Max Scherzer – has had some .300+ BABIP’s in the past and it was really the .259 last year that was the outlier. His Z-Contact is dead on the nose for his career too, while the IFFB is about half his normal career rate.
Rubby de la Rosa – only has 32 innings, not enough to really stress about a .262 BABIP.
Zack Greinke- last year was the 1st time he had a BABIP below .300 since 2004. It’s fairly strange with league average-ish IFFB, Z-Contact, and LD rates.
Pitcher Notes & Summary
Alex Cobb – this is actually a matchup that should get him going again. The Royals swing early and often, making a lot of weak contact, while Cobb has had some BABIP trouble recently despite a 62% ground ball rate in his last 3 starts leading to a .347 BABIP. Usually the Royals are a troublesome DF matchup due to the lack of strikeouts, but it should be the opposite today, especially with Cobb smack in the middle of most boards.
Brandon McCarthy is coming off 2 of his better starts of the season. I know I’ve mentioned the K’s being down lately, but they have ticked up again a bit over the last 2 games. The caveat being one of those was against SD. He’s got a decent park and price tag today.
Chris Sale – costs a fortune, but is worth it. I made the mistake of backing off him last time out and he dominated. Boston scares nobody this year. You will have to pay handsomely.
C.J. Wilson – costs about the same as Cobb and not much more than McCarthy today. If you think he can bounce back from his HR problems at home where he’s been solid in an Angels uniform, you could have a bargain.
Ervin Santana – is pitching well again (20 IP – 7 ER – 3BB – 20 K) and seems to be only about 2/3 the top prices today. The Mets keep blowing up all my pitching recommendations lately, but it’s hard to call them a scary lineup despite the emergence of Murphy, Granderson, and Duda.
Jason Hammel – has had a significant K floor this year as mentioned earlier. His first start for a better team occurs in a great spot in SF and he’s on been on a great run (19.1 IP – 6 ER – 3 BB – 19 K) over his last 3.
Josh Tomlin – the line drives are a bit scary, but the peripherals like him to straighten out. He’s a bit of a sleeper today with some potential value in his lowish price.
Kyle Lohse – because you have to like a decent pitcher facing the Phillies.
Marcus Stroman – has only really had 1 bad start. You’d be going against the grain here taking him in a tough matchup, but it didn’t seem to hurt him in Oakland.
Max Scherzer – should be matchup proof with all the K’s and has really been great outside of one terrible start lately. Even against the mighty Dodgers, he’s probably the top guy today.
Roenis Elias – could be a matchup play at home at a decent price, but might be too volatile to trust in anything other than a GPP.
Yordano Ventura – may be out-pitching his peripherals, but his SwStr% is still strong enough that the K’s have a decent chance of rebounding. He’s in a great park with a great defense behind him which has helped him to not allow more than 3 ER’s in any of his 6 starts. The Rays are more than competent at home though.
Yu Darvish – the Astros aren’t a terrible offense anymore and he costs a fortune today, but you’re paying for one thing that should come in an abundance today….K’s.
Zack Greinke – merits consideration because I see Miggy and V-Mart out of the lineup today.
You can find me on twitter @FreelanceBBall for any questions, comments, or insults.