Pitchers are waves, not straight lines. A step or two forward, a step or two back, or so the cliché goes.
This is part of what makes assessing pitchers so challenging. And pitching hinges so much on the vagaries of health and luck that it’s often a wonder that we try to predict pitcher performance at all.
But of course we do, because it might very well be the most fun, rewarding part of fantasy baseball. That said, it pays to be cautious, to try to anticipate when a given player’s performance has crested, so to speak.
Here are five pitchers whose performance appears due for some regression yet whose current Draft Day price appears a step or two behind the downward trend.
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You know that expectations are high when a pitcher submits a 3.10 ERA across nearly 200 innings and his season is still considered a letdown.
Indeed, after Cubs ace Jake Arrieta boasted a ridiculously stingy 1.77 ERA during his Cy Young campaign in 2015, his relatively mortal 2016 left many fantasy owners disappointed in the return on their second-round investment.
Yet Arrieta’s stock remains firmly in top-tier ace territory heading into 2017, with the right-hander being drafted as the seventh pitcher off the board overall per FantasyPros ADP data.
Fantasy owners who take the bait on Arrieta at this price better hope that his 3.68 Expected Fielding Independent Pitching (xFIP) from last year speaks more to a bout of second-half fatigue (he tallied a 4.20 ERA and 4.11 xFIP from July on) than to a depreciation in skills.
Unfortunately, some signs do point to the latter, especially with respect to Arrieta’s slider. That pitch was a major asset for Arrieta during his elite two-year run in 2014 and 2015, but it fell off the map for him in 2016, earning an 11-plus percent walk rate (after two straight years under six perfect) and a .147 isolated slugging (up from under .090 the previous two seasons).
It’s hard to tell if this dent in Arrieta’s arsenal is the hinge point for his moderate decrease in strikeouts and major increase in walks. Whatever the case may be, unless Arrieta can adjust to his compromised slider, further ERA regression could be in the cards for the once-mighty ace. You might require an appetite for risk to gamble on Arrieta at his current ADP.
On the surface, there is a remarkable consistency to Martinez’s first two seasons as a full-time starter for the Cardinals. After all, look at how closely his 2015 and 2016 ERA (3.01, 3.04), homers per 9 (0.65, 0.69), and walks per nine (3.16, 3.23) line up.
The young righty sure seems like a solid, low-variance asset, as is confirmed by his significant draft stock heading into 2017, where he is being snapped up as the 17th starter off the board on average per ADP data.
But if you dig deeper, it’s evident that some things did change between 2015 and 2016, even if those things weren’t exactly reflected in Martinez’s final stat line.
For one thing, CarMart lost over a strikeout per nine innings, likely the result of reducing his slider use in favor of an increased reliance on his curve and change-up. And despite the fact that his 2016 homer-to-fly ratio of 10.6 was identical to his mark in 2015, Martinez did see a notable uptick in hard-hit rate as well as a notable dip in batting average on balls in play (BABIP).
This is not to say that Martinez isn’t a tremendously skilled pitcher and strong fantasy asset. But owners who are drafting him as a stable low-3.00 ERA contributor might be underestimating the batted ball luck that Martinez benefited from last year. With other equally solid innings-eating types like Rick Porcello and Jose Quintana available several rounds later, drafting Martinez at his current top-70 ADP seems overly aggressive.
In a year that saw many high-profile pitching prospects flame out spectacularly (I’m looking at you, Jose Berrios), the success of Detroit’s Michael Fulmer stands out as a welcome exception.
The former Mets prospect was terrific in 2016, with 159 innings of 3.06 ERA work earning him AL Rookie of the Year honors and setting him up to be one of the most coveted young assets in fantasy, with a current ADP just outside the top 30 starters off the board.
Much of Fulmer’s success last year has been credited to his increased use of the change up, a pitch that surrendered a puny .167 batting average along with a near-70 percent ground ball rate and 19 percent swinging strike rate. This new and devastating change goes a long way to explaining how Fulmer could limit hitters to an overall .228 batting average while striking out fewer than 7.5 per nine.
Those strikeouts should come up a bit (he whiffed nearly 8.7 per nine during his last extended Double-A stint with the Mets), but so too should his ERA as hitters grow accustomed to his arsenal and his .268 BABIP normalizes over a larger sample. Resist the urge to overpay for last year’s performance from Fulmer — it’s not very likely to repeat this year.
In 2016 Happ maintained a career-low 3.18 ERA over 195 innings, resulting in a 20-win season that made for one of the unlikeliest Cy Young candidacies in recent memory.
But Happ’s 4.18 xFIP should tell us that the veteran lefty’s surprise resurgence was underwritten by quite a bit of batted ball luck.
Happ leaned heavily on his low-90s fastball, throwing it for 73.5 percent of his pitches compared to under 67 percent in 2015. That pitch surrendered a .263 batting average on balls in play (BABIP), a significant drop off from the .308 mark surrendered in 2015, yet, quite tellingly, that drop did not come with any significant decline in hard contact or line drive rate.
The veteran lefty was pretty clearly a couple of tough bounces away from a much poorer ERA contribution, and without the strikeouts to soften his dip in value (he perennially sits between 7 and 8 strikeouts per nine), he seems like a fairly uninspiring fantasy asset going forward.
None of this is news to the sharp fantasy drafters at the National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC), who are low on Happ even by industry standards, letting him fall outside the overall top 190. With younger and more potentially impactful arms like Carlos Rodon and Aaron Nola available in that same range, there doesn’t seem to be much sense to investing in Happ for 2017.
After a stint in the Reds’ rotation last year was cut short by injury, Iglesias returned to Cincinnati in a long-relief role and very much thrived, pitching to a sub-2.00 ERA from late June on while punching out 54 batters over 50 frames.
Is this the arrival of a dominant young reliever? Perhaps, though Iglesias’ 4.11 xFIP and 86-plus percent strand rate over that same span should give us some pause, indicating that the young hurler had his fair share of luck over that seemingly electric second half.
Granted, Iglesias does have the strikeout stuff to sustain a high strand rate, but his continued struggles with control (he threw under 54 percent first-pitch strikes last year) make it so that his margin for error is relatively slim.
For now, Iglesias is the presumed head of an unwieldy four-man closer committee in Cincinnati, so holding the reigns of the job on his own seems just as likely an outcome as his being resigned to middle relief work for the bulk of the season.
The haziness of the Reds closer hierarchy, combined with Iglesias’ ERA regression concerns, make him a very volatile asset heading into 2017. Off the board near the overall top 170 in NFBC leagues, Iglesias could very well prove to be one of the most over-drafted players in fantasy.
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Tom Whalen is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Tom, check out his archive or follow him @tomcwhalen.
