This article is part of our The Saber's Edge series.
Well, it is time to go back and see how I did with my analysis before and during the season.
Chasing Saves: Setup Men Who Could Close
Considering I wrote this article before March, I definitely hit on the closing situations in peril. All of the top 10 closer roles changed by the end of the season. Additionally, 17 of the top 19 also changed. While, I got the closer roles which changed, I didn't always nail the exact replacement. Stepping through each bullpen before the season starts is a great way to find some possible cheap Saves.
How to Pick a Breakout Pitcher
In this article, I looked for pitchers who could possible breakout like Phil Hughes did in 2014. My major conclusion was:
The key point to take from this data is that only a few pitchers have a chance to improve and a greater number have a chance of decline.
I acknowledge it was tough to find breakouts, but I tried anyway. Here is my list of potential breakouts based on the article's information.
Rick Porcello
Jeff Locke
Hector Noesi
Brett Oberholtzer
Henderson Alvarez
Kyle Kendrick
John Danks
Josh Collmenter
Dillon Gee
Jordan Lyles
Tanner Roark
Nathan Eovaldi
Kyle Gibson
Shelby Miller
Jarred Cosart
Nick Tepesch
Nick Martinez
Justin Masterson
Brad Peacock
I should have taken my own advice and not looked for breakout among established pitchers.
For this article, I looked at several teams who may see their stolen base numbers change from
Well, it is time to go back and see how I did with my analysis before and during the season.
Chasing Saves: Setup Men Who Could Close
Considering I wrote this article before March, I definitely hit on the closing situations in peril. All of the top 10 closer roles changed by the end of the season. Additionally, 17 of the top 19 also changed. While, I got the closer roles which changed, I didn't always nail the exact replacement. Stepping through each bullpen before the season starts is a great way to find some possible cheap Saves.
How to Pick a Breakout Pitcher
In this article, I looked for pitchers who could possible breakout like Phil Hughes did in 2014. My major conclusion was:
The key point to take from this data is that only a few pitchers have a chance to improve and a greater number have a chance of decline.
I acknowledge it was tough to find breakouts, but I tried anyway. Here is my list of potential breakouts based on the article's information.
Rick Porcello
Jeff Locke
Hector Noesi
Brett Oberholtzer
Henderson Alvarez
Kyle Kendrick
John Danks
Josh Collmenter
Dillon Gee
Jordan Lyles
Tanner Roark
Nathan Eovaldi
Kyle Gibson
Shelby Miller
Jarred Cosart
Nick Tepesch
Nick Martinez
Justin Masterson
Brad Peacock
I should have taken my own advice and not looked for breakout among established pitchers.
For this article, I looked at several teams who may see their stolen base numbers change from 2014 to 2015 because of a significant change in their 2015 spring training stolen base numbers. Well, I estimated the teams changing correctly, but the changes mainly centered on players moving teams. The Dodgers saw a huge drop and the Marlins a huge gain because of the Dee Gordon trade. The Cardinals saw a boost with Jason Heyward, who St. Louis acquired in the trade with Atlanta, leading the team with 23 steals.
While I won't look at every team again, I will look at the trends with new managers. In the article, I noticed the Rays may run more and the Astros less. I correctly picked at jump in Keven Keirmaier's numbers to 20 SB (actual was 18) and a drop in Jose Altuve's stolen bases from 56 to 30 (actual was 38). I found concentrating on managers was also the key in 2014.
As I stated in the article, I believe how hitters perform against certain pitcher types is one of the most under-utilized stats used in fantasy baseball. I may be completely wrong in this assessment.
In the article, I identified 10 players on the extreme ends of the batted ball spectrum has players. Here are their 2015 preseason numbers.
Name, Career Pre-season value, 2015 value
(Values are the difference between High GB% OPS and Low GB% OPS)
Carlos Gomez +.224
Chris Carter +.218
Jayson Werth +.179
Mike Napoli +.177
Todd Frazier +.161
Pablo Sandoval +.152
Josh Reddick +.150
Justin Morneau +.145
Matt Wieters +.140
Darwin Barney +.137
The problem is that most of these hitters didn't maintain their split or anything close to it. Gomez went to -.099. Carter to +0.026. Werth to -.084. Napoli to -.177. It is almost like the hitter's previous numbers didn't mean anything.
After looking over this premise, one study which I need to run is to see if results against pitcher batted types is predictive and how quickly does it stabilize.
In this article, I found several pitcher who were seeing their pitch speed increase or drop quite a bit, here is how they did.
Early season gainers
Arquimedes Caminero (+3.6 mph): The jump in the 28-year-olds velocity got him roster sport on playoff team.
Jesse Chavez (+3.3 mph): The extra velocity helped him to a first half 3.40 ERA. The problem was that he couldn't keep the velocity up and his second half ERA jumped to 5.40.
Jesse Hahn (+1.6 mph): He was having a nice season (3.35 ERA, 1.17 WHIP) until he ran into forearm issues.
Jason Grilli (+1.2 mph): With the trade of Craig Kimbrel to the Padres, Grilli was dominating (12.0 K/9, 2.12 FIP) as the Braves closer until he ruptured his Achilles tendon.
Early season decliners
Greg Holland (-2.6 mph): Pitched almost the entire season with a torn UCL and eventually needed TJS.
Taijuan Walker( -2.6 mph): He gained some of the velocity back, but struggled with inconsistencies throughout the season.
Jered Weaver (-2.6 mph): He's done.
T.J. House (-2.7 mph): Struggled in a few starts and then spent the rest of the season on the DL
Ken Giles (-2.9 mph): It took over three months for his velocity to ramp up to even and then it fell off again. His stats were good compared to the league, but worse for him (K/9 from 12.6 to 11.2, BB/9 from 2.2 to 3.2, ERA from 1.18 to 1.80).
Derek Holland (-3.0 mph): He went on the DL. After not pitching for a few months, he came back fine.
Koji Uehara (-3.9 mph): He pitched with a production loss and eventually went on the DL with a wrist injury.
Aaron Sanchez (-4.2 mph): He had some improvement in his velocity, but not enough to keep his starting role. He was moved to the bullpen where he pitched better.
In this article I went and looked at players with inflated batting averages and ERAs and found the players who should have the biggest rebounds. Here are the players I highlighted who I expected to regress the most.
D.J. LeMahieu's .417 AVG dropped to.291 over the rest of the season.
Adam Jones's .442 AVG dropped to .251 over the rest of the season.
Jordan Zimmermann's 6.14 ERA dropped to 3.47 over the rest of the season.
Michael Pineda's 5.00 ERA only dropped to 4.29 over the rest of the season.
The batting average hits were insane compared to the ERA improvements. Early in the season, try to concentrate on those few stats which stabilize quickly and not ones with high variance (next article).
Patience has Virtues. And Limits.
I examined when stats stabilize and what to look for in those stats. May 7th is when the first stats begin to stabilize, so don't start sweating any stats before then.
I noticed Ben Revere was struggling with his strike outs and putting the ball in the air. Both of these two results take away from his best trait, his speed. He needs to put the ball in play and not in the air. He eventually turned the numbers around mid-season to see them drop off again at the season's end. His best batting average was in those two months (.346 in June and .344 in July) when he had is two lowest strike out rates and his highest groundball rates of the season.
Well, that is it for this week, next week I will write my last article for the year looking at the rest of my articles.
