The late rounds of most fantasy baseball drafts are typically filled with mediocre veterans and low percentage lottery tickets. “Maybe Jered Weaver has another sub-4.5 ERA season left in his arm. Is Max Kepler likely to be called up before the all-star break?” That’s you weighing your options in the last round of your draft. Pretty uninspiring, aren’t they? There is another group of players that is more likely to have an immediate impact on your fake team during the upcoming season – the post-hype players. These are the guys who showed promise at one point in their careers but lost some their shine due to underperformance or durability issues. Erasmo Ramirez is the type of player who falls into this group.
When trying to identify potentially undervalued starting pitchers, there are a few key things that I always look for. Notice that I specified undervalued players, since the hard-throwing, high strikeout artists (Syndergaard, Harvey, Sale, Strasburg, etc.) and the young “sleeper” types who are generally perceived to have high ceilings (Walker, McCullers, Rodon, Iglesias, etc.) don’t necessarily fit that description. So if velocity and K-rate are de-prioritized, what’s left to focus on?
There are a few other traits/skills that are worth emphasizing as far as starting pitchers are concerned. These include the abilities to:
• Keep the ball in the park (aka limit home runs)
• Limit walks allowed
• Generate swings and misses (SwStr)
• Induce pop-ups (IFFB)
I chose to highlight these categories because these are things that are generally within a pitcher’s control, meaning that they’re skill-based rather than luck-based, and they all significantly impact a pitcher’s production. Let’s start by focusing on the first three categories – BB/9, HR/9, and SwStr% – to identify the pitchers who excelled in these areas last season. The MLB averages for starting pitchers in these categories during the 2015 season were as follows:
2.72 BB/9
1.06 HR/9
9.3% SwStr%
Now that we have a reference point, here’s the criteria that I used for this exercise:
min 100 IP
BB/9 < 2.5
HR/9 < 1
SwStr% > 11%
As you can see, the BB/9 and HR/9 requirements are slightly superior to the MLB averages while the SwStr% requirement is significantly higher. I did this to isolate the players who generated swings and misses at elite rates, with the assumption that a high SwStr% could lead to an increased K-rate moving forward. These twelve starting pitchers met the search criteria in 2015:
Clayton Kershaw, Chris Sale, Madison Bumgarner, Stephen Strasburg, Corey Kluber, Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, Carlos Carrasco, Zack Greinke, Jake Arrieta, David Price, and… Erasmo Ramirez.
That’s a pretty strong group of players. All of these pitchers are considered to be fantasy aces or high end #2 starters with the exception of Erasmo. The difference between those first eleven aces and Erasmo is, of course, strikeout rate. Erasmo’s elite 11.2% SwStr% as a starting pitcher indicates that there is the potential for growth in his K-rate going forward.
What happens when an infield fly ball filter is included in the search? When an IFFB% > 10% (MLB avg for starting pitchers in 2015 was a 9.5% IFFB%) criterion is added into the mix, here is the new list of qualifiers:
Strasburg, Bumgarner, Price, and Erasmo
If you wanted to take it one step further and filter for the pitchers who produced an above average ground ball rate (GB% > 45.2%) last season, here is the new list of qualifiers:
Erasmo
That’s it. Just Erasmo. In terms of starting pitchers who were above average in walk rate, home run prevention, generating swings and misses, and inducing ground balls and infield fly balls, Erasmo stands alone. Or stood alone. But how did he do what no one else was able to do last year?
The biggest reason for this unexpected production was a vastly improved changeup. Here’s a chart that displays the percentage of whiffs per swing when he threw that pitch:
Not only was he able to keep that pitch down in the strike zone on a regular basis, but take a look at those whiff rates when hitters swung at the offerings that were out of the strike zone. That pitch was virtually unhittable. In fact, his .507 opponent OPS vs changeups last season was the lowest mark in the American League (min 100 batters faced) and the 4th lowest mark in MLB (behind K-Rod, deGrom, and Greinke). Don’t forget about this post-hype sleeper on draft day.
