Top 100 Starting Pitchers for 2021: Week 15

With the All-Star Game giving our fair baseballers a break, our esteemed leader — Greyson Ignatius R. Kelly Albright — is similarly living out his dreams at Batman Fantasy Camp. Grey called me and he kept cackling, “Dr. Freeze is here!” And I tried to tell him that it probably wasn’t James Andrews but a villain, but I just heard this pained shriek on the other end of the line. Maybe the mosquitoes are really bad out there? ENYWHEY. It’s an honor to bat lead-off while the fantasy equivalent of Rickey Henderson takes a day off. Let’s check in on some pitchers, think about spin, and have a grand ol’ time down in the comments.

Gerrit Cole: 

• [whispers] We’re not out of the woods yet. Last week, I told you to hold fast to hope, and maybe y’all thought he was done or addicted to tack or got a case of Barry Zito-itis. But after getting blown out two games in a row and getting booed off the field in the second game, Cole came back with a resounding complete game shutout with 12Ks and 3 hits. What’s more, is he did it against the Houston Astros, who are one of the best offensive teams in the league right now. But Cole’s redemption comes with a bigger question: what is the effect of the new stick-less regime? Cole was a well-known sticky substance user, and many thought that he was donezo with the new enforcement against sticky hands. Problem is, we’re just not seeing a ton of concrete evidence that the lack of stick is the cause for Cole’s mid-season struggles. When we look at the totality of Cole’s pitches, he’s been volatile for strikeouts throughout the season, with stick and without stick. Although Cole’s fastball did have a precipitous swinging strike decline recently, he was also changing his pitch mixture quite a bit, in a seeming effort to compensate for some weaknesses he saw. So even with the lower spin rate, some of his breaking pitches were compensating for his weak fastball. In the graphic below, I combined all of Cole’s pitches — and this makes sense because he throws about 50% fastballs and 50% offspeed/breaking balls — and we see a much less terrifying “decline.”

Courtesy of Alex Chamberlain

You can see that Cole was volatile well before the crackdown on stick. In fact, some of his worst performances — from a strikeout standpoint — were before all of this hand-wringing and hat checking. Additionally, Cole’s 3 inning performance last week where he got booed off the field was accompanied with a ridiculous .556 BABIP. You know that one time you went to the carnival and every shot you made on the ring toss game hit, and you thought “I’m so great at this, I must be the greatest ring toss player in the world!” And then you went back an hour later and spent $50 trying to reclaim your lost glory? That’s what a .556 BABIP is: every ball the bats touched turned to gold. But when we dig deeper into the stats, Cole’s simply “on track” with how we would expect him to play. His expected wOBA — that is, the expected quality of hits against him — has basically been flat through all of this mess.

Courtesy of Alex Chamberlain

The “average” of the long blue line (Cole’s 4-seam fastball) is about .330, and we can see it’s more or less around that number for most of the year. There was a peak around 6/27 (when he gave up 5 ER and had a 9.17 FIP), but his efficacy went back to its expected levels rather quickly. All of this is to say: don’t give up on Cole. We’re not looking at a broken pitcher. We’re just looking at an ace going through a standard slump, and the All-Star break is the perfect time to get back on track.

Robbie Ray:

• The male spokesmodel for Lululemon put up a 7-inning outing with 6Ks and 2ER and another home run allowed. You know who is blasting up the player rater and allowing 2 dongs per game? That’s Ray. I mean in the 90s we would make fun of 2 dong guys all the time, but this is a different world now. We’re more accepting of pitchers with no dongs, like Nathan Eovaldi, who has allowed 5 homers all year. It would take Robbie Ray about 3 starts to surpass Eovaldi at his current rate. Ray goes through intense spurts of excellence before repeating 2020 for a few innings. Don’t we all get caught up on past habits, though? As long as Ray keeps trucking with the Ks he’ll be fine to finish the year.

Clayton Kershaw: 

• On the IL with forearm inflammation. It’s times like this that I think Alaska should have a baseball team, and every sore pitcher can just run into the icy waters to preserve their arms. Get out the incense, wine, and candles to conjure healing spirits for Kershaw and hope that he doesn’t see the actual Dr. Freeze, like Grey did.

Jack Flaherty: 

• Pitching again, and likely back in mid-August. It’s mid-July right now. Oh crap, my taxes! ENYWHEY. If you’ve got extra IL spots, it’s time to add Flaherty. He’s top 10 in points per game on the Player Rater, and if somebody dropped him, send them a box of chocolates, because that player clearly didn’t know what they were going to get.

Huascar Ynoa: 

• Maybe you’re in one of those sharp leagues where the players don’t drop aces like Flaherty. Maybe your league mates hate fun and don’t read Razzball. Don’t read Razzball? Who does that? Maybe those duds — I’m sorry, I meant to write dudes — those duds don’t know the power of Huascar. Ynoa’s back on the mound very soon with a similar return time as Flaherty, so it’s time to stash if you’ve got the space. Ynoa dominated early in the year before punching a bench and breaking his wrist. Speaking of punching and breaking, did anybody see the McGregor match? Yeah, me neither, but y’all won’t stop sharing the video. Suppose I better go do a shot of whiskey to appease the fans now.

Max Scherzer: 

• Got chased off his last start by the hottest Padre hitter: Daniel Camarena. Camarena — who is actually a reliever making his second-ever MLB at-bat — was filling in for the ineffective Yu Darvish. What’s with all the aces getting crushed recently? Is it like a Tik Tok trend? Yet, we’re pretty sure Scherzer wasn’t using that sticky stuff — I mean he was checked like three times in one inning! Let’s check the scoreboard:

Oh, hi there 20% drop in spin rate! And Scherzer was doing just fine going into this game (1.44 ERA over 25IP, 11+ K/9, .255 BABIP). So maybe spin rate decline is just one of many factors playing a role in lesser performance. ENYWHEY. You should watch a rookie reliever crush a grand slam off of Scherzer:

Daniel Camarena – San Diego Padres (1) pic.twitter.com/gcIj9DsmZd

— MLB HR Videos (@MLBHRVideos) July 9, 2021

Yu Darvish: 

• Sent to the IL with hip tightness after the Nationals teed off on him in the same game as Camarena hit the granny. Without Darvish falling, we wouldn’t have Camarena, would we? There’s meaning in the stars for all of us. Darvish might have been sore — his fastball velocity was down just a tick in his last two starts — but the IL move was probably more procedural than anything. The Padres wanted to keep Darvish out of the All-Star game, and he’s already at 105 IP, meaning he’s due for a break. What about us fans, Darvish, do we ever take a break? No! I kid, Yu! Darvish should chillax with some chicken, and it looks like he won’t miss any starts.

Kenta Maeda: 

• It’s the Japanese power hour! Maeda’s been dominant over his last two games, K’ing 17 while giving up no runs. He’s also pitched against the Royals and the Tigers, which is basically like playing against Vanderbilt. Is Maeda the next Kumar Rocker? During his recent stint of success, he’s dominated against KC, DET, CLE, SEA, and TEX. [teeth sucking noises] When he faced off against the White Sox, he gave up 7 runs and got pulled in the third, which is now called the “Scharvish” in honor of the above players. Is Maeda back? Yeah, sort of. His slider was a disaster earlier this year, bottoming out at an 8% swinging-strike rate, and it’s back into the 20% range now. That’s fair. Maeda was never a power pitcher and I don’t really know why the herd mentality in spring 2021 agreed that the diminutive 33-year old pitcher who hadn’t been a full-time starter in a long time was going to be a top-15 pitcher. If I was the Terminator, I’d go back in time and slap all of us for thinking that. But Maeda was generally efficient, and the Twins were supposed to win a ton this year, and both of those things didn’t happen. Variance! This is why we play the game! Maeda looks like he’s trending in the right direction, but he’s much more likely to finish the year as a top 40-50 pitcher than as the sleeper SP1 that many people drafted him as.

Chris Flexen: 

• 4 out of his last 5 starts were quality starts, and he’s got a 1.44 ERA over that period. Hey, quality starts commenters, this is your guy! Wait, you’re afraid of Mariners pitchers? You mean like Marco Gonzales, who quietly quality started his way into the top 10 on the Player Rater last year? Sometimes you don’t play the game; the game plays you. Flexen is available in almost all leagues and it’s time to flex your waiver wire muscle.

Space:X Rankings

Can’t get Huascar Ynoa? Oh look, Zach Thompson is sitting right next to him. Can’t get Zhompson? Logan Webb is right below him. As I pointed out last week, you can either look at the rankings as saying there are 80 usable pitchers, or that there are 20 really good pitchers and 60 streamers. Honestly, I’m more inclined to say that there are 20 really good pitchers and a bunch of streamers. How do you know whether you should start one of those streamers? Rudy’s got a tool for that! I promise it’s not a selling point for the Streamonator, but it’s a really good tool. I check it every day, and my personal ranking system is based on a daily upload of the Streamonator to my magical Google Sheet.

The IP cutoff is 20IP, which is still very aggressive all things considered. If you want Kyle Muller, go grab Kyle Muller. Stream away! As always, there are injured players throughout to help show you their expected value when they play. Here’s the CSV if you would like to make your own home brew, and I’m happy to talk about how I homebrew my own daily rankings as well. Cheers all, and happy All-Star break!

Week 24 Pitcher Data.xls