Are You Streaming Your Pitchers Correctly?

As a general thought, we may believe the baseball season is all the same. Production is the same regardless of the year or the month of the season. Well, if you’ve listened to the Razzball Fantasy Baseball Podcast with Grey and I, you know about my even and odd year conspiracy theory. Quick summary, in odd years they put bouncy balls in play, and then they adjust and put dud balls in play on even years. Take a look at the numbers for yourself (except for the weird 2020 season), and tell me that’s not the case. Odd years have more home runs, more runs, better batting averages, better slugging percentages, the ERAs are worse (not pictured), et al.

The even and odd years conspiracy theory aside, what about within each season? Are there times you should look to do more streaming, or is there a time of the season that you should avoid streaming? That’s the question that led me down the rabbit hole that led to me actually writing an article. Maybe this is obvious, but here are the numbers to prove it.

For this (ummm…) investigation(research project, statistical dive, ?), I looked at the years of 2021-2025. 2020 was, of course, a shortened season, so the data wouldn’t make sense, and going back any further gets us to a point where the game was different than the current version. For ease of viewing, I used a color coded system to show how the stats looked in monthly splits. This isn’t a multiverse, you don’t go on red. So green is good, yellow is mid, orange is not good, and red is bad, and these are made from a streaming pitching point of view, so K rate and BB rate are done in that manner. Yes, it’s arbitrary, and I did it on my own, but it hopefully gives a visual of the numbers.

2023 stands out as an outlier, as it’s the only year in the sample that April did not have one of the best months of the year from an ERA standpoint. However, the FIP would indicate it was a bit of bad luck, and if you recall, 2023 was the start of the limited shifting rule, so that would be a pretty reasonable explanation (at least in my mind). July and August are always the worst for pitching, and sometimes June is good, sometimes bad. I pulled up average temperatures in June by year in Missouri (seemed fair as its in the middle of the country), and as expected, the years where June is good or okay, the temperature is down. The years that June is bad, the temperature is up.

Regardless of the month, WHIP remains fairly consistent, with some occasional cases where early and late in the season are slightly better than the middle months.  Coincidentally, when the ERA is bad, the HR/9 is higher. Yes, I would usually use HR rate, but the page I was using has HR/9 on the same page as all the other stats, and I didn’t want to move to another page just for one number. K rate is maybe the most random of the stats, but if it has any pattern, it also favors the beginning, and sometimes the end of the season. BB rate is the worst in the early part of the season. Pitchers getting settled into the season, and it generally gets better through the season.

There were some clear differences season to season. However, the general pattern stood, and the cumulative numbers show that out. The month (really the temperature) certainly seems to play a part in the success of pitchers and hitters in different months of the season. Below are the cumulative numbers from the 5 seasons. So, load up on those streaming pitchers here in the early part of the year and maximize those numbers. At home, if you can help it, as almost every pitcher is distinctly better at home. Even if you have IP limits, it’d be better to have more caution while streaming in the dog days of summer rather than in the spring. Then, use whatever innings you have left and load up again for a final push in September (all of these seasons fall under the more limited September roster expansion). Hope this helps you win the title this year! Unless, of course, you’re in a H2H league, in which case, I suppose this doesn’t help you at all, sorry.