Now that we’ve got two months of MLB play under our proverbial belts, let’s check in on a few pitchers who we discussed in earlier editions of the Regression Report when samples were a bit smaller and rest-of-season prospects were a bit murkier. Sure, I could take a victory lap on my analysis of Amir Garrett and Julio Teheran, but instead, I’d rather unpack the more complicated cases, players I seem to have gotten wrong and players on whom I’ve changed my tune.
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Roughly one month into the season, I cried foul on Robbie Ray‘s walk rate and hard-contact trends, insisting that “this sub-3.50 ERA start is probably a high-water mark for Ray”.
I’ve been proven quite wrong, of course. Since then, Ray’s rung up a 2.78 ERA across 38-plus May innings, maintaining a 10.5 K/9 while limiting his free passes to 2.8 per nine (he averaged almost double that mark over the season’s first month).
It’s fair, though, to glance sideways at his recent hot streak given that his past four starts (where he’s tallied a truly phenomenal 7.2 strikeouts per walk and truly fortunate 100% strand rate) have come against the Pirates, Padres, and Brewers, three of baseball’s least-prolific offensive producers over the last month.
Keep in mind that we’re still at a point in the season where a run of four favorable starts can exact a strong pull on a pitcher’s overall numbers, and that seems to be what’s going on here for Ray, at least to my eye. The warning signs for regression are still there in the peripheral numbers: his fastball command remains shaky, his BB/9 sits still close to four, and his hard hit rate still settles in over 40 percent.
Perhaps a mild, qualified mea culpa is in order here. I’ll certainly concede that the possibility of Ray ending the season as a top-15 starter seems like much less of a pipe dream now than it did in late April, but I’m still treating this as a narrow sliver of the young lefty’s range of possible outcomes.
In this season’s very first Regression Report, I assured Masahiro Tanaka owners that the Yankee ace was one sinking-fastball adjustment away from rewarding their investment. This adjustment is easier said than done, it seems, as Tanaka’s sinker has continued to fail him, getting clobbered for a 1.204 OPS and 227 wRC+ across 263 offerings.
Naturally, there’s less and less statistical noise in the season-long sample than there was a mere two starts in, with the sinker’s BABIP seeming to normalize at .298. That’s right in line with the mark we’ve seen over the past two seasons, suggesting Tanaka is no longer the victim of bad batted-ball luck. No, as Travis Sawchik at Fangraphs has suggested, Tanaka’s taking lumps on his sinker (as well as his slider and splitter) because he’s hitting far too much of the plate, a trend which continued last night against the Red Sox, when he surrendered three more long balls, bringing his season total all the way up to 17.
At this point, it’s hard to sugarcoat Tanaka’s heinous 3.6 HR/9 over his last month of work, though there are some encouraging peripherals to suggest that Tanaka is in the midst of a real rough stretch of misfortune. Tanaka boasts the league’s second-highest BABIP over the last month (.375), with the league’s sixth-lowest strand rate to boot (61.8%). He’s also shown a 17 percent K-BB% over that span, a top 30 mark across the majors.
Perhaps the homer issue causes an overwhelming static that makes these peripherals hard to take solace in. Still, it seems like Tanaka remains one very specific adjustment away from breaking through, and if I needed a high-upside miracle to get back into contention in my league, I might be game to take a gamble on the Yankee ace pulling things together for a strong second half.
I recommended a flyer on the struggling Trevor Bauer in late April, and for a while that seemed like a downright terrible call. Indeed, Bauer’s performance and fantasy stock both hit rock bottom in the first half of May, with the post-hype righty pitching to a 7.88 ERA while surrendering 10 extra-base hits over 16 innings.
Yet just as we were all about to write Bauer off once and for all, he put together a stretch of very sharp work over his next four starts, boasting a near-30 percent K-BB rate and 3.66 ERA over just under 20 innings (keep in mind that the most recent start in that span saw Bauer get the hook without completing two innings thanks to a lengthy rain delay). Bauer’s success seems partially related to a refining of his arsenal, with the 26-year-old leaning heavily on a three-pitch fastball/curve/cutter mix rather than the five-pitch mix he used earlier in the season.
Oddly enough, I’m less inclined to buy in on Bauer now than I was in late April. Even amid this impressive recent run, he’s surrendering a ton of hard contact, with a 47.1-percent hard hit rate that’s the third highest in the majors over the past two weeks.
And while Bauer’s 2.19 xFIP over that span sure looks tantalizing, it seems like faulty process to inherently regress Bauer closer to his xFIP. After all, that mark assumes a league-average home run rate, while Bauer’s hard-hit metrics still seem to warn that, even with his control in better form, Bauer might be a 1.5 HR/9 guy in perpetuity.
This is a long way of saying that your opportunity to profit off of the resurgent Bauer has probably passed. He’s certainly worth a stab if he’s out there for the taking on your wire, but if your league mate wants you to pay for his xFIP, I’d say thanks but no thanks.
My April take that Dylan Bundy’s impending regression would, at worst, knock him down a peg from “awesome” to “excellent” has thus far been born out in Bundy’s surface results, with the Baltimore righty carrying a 2.93 ERA and 1.12 WHIP after just under 77 innings of work.
Meanwhile, the expected regression has come for his walk rate (approaching 2.5 per nine) and his homers per fly ball (now at nine percent ), while some unexpected trends have poked through, making Bundy’s rest-of-season prospects less rosy than I had forecast in April.
Most concerning is the fact that Bundy’s four-seam remains very hittable, while the results with respect to power suppression that I highlighted in the first month of the season are no longer so impressive. The young Orioles righty is now surrendering a .212 ISO and 142 wRC+ on that pitch, both slightly worse than his mixed-bag campaign last year.
With the .298 BABIP and sub-9-percent HR/FB both showing room to trend in the wrong direction for Bundy, it wouldn’t be surprising to see him pitch closer to a 4.00 ERA rest of way. It might be time to test the market for him while his ERA is still below 3.00.
I felt like a regular Nostradamus when I called for a Waino resurgence in early May only to have the St. Louis veteran run up a 1.42 ERA over his next five starts. Naturally, the baseball gods are very keen to keep you humble, so they threw in an apocalyptic outing for Wainwright on the night before this article is set to go live, with the 35-year-old righty surrendering nine earned runs in shy of three innings against the Reds.
Even with that major Cincinnati thumping on his ledger, Wainwright’s recent run doesn’t look like a case of smoke and mirrors. Sure, the veteran is walking a thin line with that paltry 6.8 K-BB% and a suspiciously low 3.3 HR/FB %. But his hard contact over that span is all the way down at 23.3 percent, and he’s inducing a ton of grounders, both of which make looming regression on that low homer-to-fly a little less menacing.
His big curveball’s been rocking too, surrendering a .057 ISO and mere 81 wRC+ on the season despite a sky-high .419 BABIP against. In short, I wouldn’t get too discouraged with Wainwright’s blow up against the Reds. This sort of thing is regression at work, after all. In the likely event that he was dropped out of sheer disgust in one of your leagues, take a flier on him if you have the roster spot–and if you can keep your expectations in check.
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Tom Whalen is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Tom, check out his archive or follow him @tomcwhalen.
