I’ve talked a lot about weather in this segment, so let’s stay on brand. For Mother’s Day, I thought it would be a great idea to treat my mom to the Cubs-Brewers Sunday Night Baseball game. Great son I am, right? I was so confident that the weather would be ideal that I bought the tickets in February. If you watched the game, you know I was wrong. We lasted five innings in the wind-tunnel, rainy confines of Wrigley. To put it bluntly, my wife had more fun scouring the stands for the hot dog guy.

Sooner or later, this weather will regress to the mean, and by mean, I mean 70 and sunny. While I impatiently wait for that, here are some aces who represent solid buys due to positive regression, as well as some hitters who have gotten lucky despite some messy underlying metrics.

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Ace Central

Looking to buy low on an ace? If so, these are your targets. These stallions are having their typical seasons (or close to it), but are having some bad luck poorly influencing their ERA. You may not have to give up as much as you think you do to acquire one of these aces. In my home league, I swapped Jameson Taillon (pre-injury) for Noah Syndergaard, who was drafted a couple of rounds before the first guy on this list.

Stephen Strasburg (SP – WAS)
If the season ended today (and thank goodness it doesn’t, baseball rocks), Strasburg would own his highest strikeout rate since his debut in 2010, nearly a full four percent uptick from 2018. He is doing it on the basis of throwing his four-seamer 15% less of the time and countering that with upping his curveball usage. His curveball is whiffing batters at a ridiculous 46.4 percent. Before all the underground people rise up and say, “But throwing his curveball could lead to a greater chance of injury!”, it’s important to note that the fastball has actually been proven to cause the most harm to an elbow.

So, why is his ERA sitting at 3.63? His whiffs are up, but his HR/FB ratio is above 14 percent. That should regress to the mean as the season progresses. Strasburg has typically had a higher-than-average HR/FB ratio, but with how good he is pitching, that number should fall to 10 percent. If he keeps allowing fly balls at a 30.8% clip (per FanGraphs), it may not even matter. Yes, the Nationals’ defense has been very poor this year, ranking 24th in errors and 27th in defense as a whole. They finished 18th in defensive WAR last year, so positive regression should be coming. I’m expecting Strasburg’s ERA to drop below 3.15 for the rest of the season, assuming he avoids the injury bug. If you own Jose Berrios or Syndergaard, I would swap one of them for Strasburg instantly. He’s on pace to exceed his 2017 numbers, especially if that HR/FB rate falls.

Aaron Nola (SP – PHI)
Much like his NL East partner, Nola has dealt with the home run bug, sporting an unsustainable 22.5% HR/FB rate. He has also gotten unlucky in the left-on-base department, as his 78.5% strand rate is much higher than the league average of 70 percent. To finish the unlucky parade, his .341 BABIP is also likely to regress. While his Statcast metrics (.270 xBA, .456 xSLG, 41.5% hard-hit rate) are not what we are used to seeing from him, Nola is still an ace.

Overall, Nola is having trouble finding his control. His walk rate is up 2.7 percent, and his swing rate is down a whopping 6.7 percent year-over-year. This isn’t a surprise given his even more ridiculous 14 percent drop in first-pitch strike rate and a 4.5 percent drop in zone rate. Nola seems to get better as the pressure rises, as his 2.78 xFIP with runners in scoring position suggests. With the bases empty, that number rises to 3.79. My guess is that Nola is thinking too much and trying to nibble on the corners. His stuff is too good to do that. As a result, I’m not buying that 4.13 xFIP, much less his 4.86 ERA, given that I expect him to get back to his strike-throwing ways eventually.

But right now is not that time. As I wrote this, Nola threw 84 pitches through three innings against the Brewers on national television. Maybe the owner in your league was also watching and is fed up. Now is the time to strike, betting on Nola to challenge, and beat, hitters.

Gerrit Cole (SP – HOU)
A lot of these stud pitchers are getting unlucky with the home run, as spotted by Matt Modica of The Athletic. Cole is yet another victim, as his 20% HR/FB rate is one of the reasons why his 3.88 ERA is nearly a full run above his 2.93 FIP (which measures homers) and a full run and a half above his 2.33 xFIP (which uses a league-average fly-ball rate). The issue may be the spin rate on the four-seamer. Baseball Savant has it down 150 RPMs from last year, and the pitch’s exit velocity is up two miles an hour. But it is also garnering eight percent more strikes. If his main entree keeps getting hammered, I’d expect the Astros and Cole to adjust and get him back to a Cy Young Award candidate.

Other out-of-whack stats include his unsustainable, unlucky 64.5% strand rate. Cole typically posts a strand rate between 71-78%, so we can expect him to trend to that mark going forward. Otherwise, his ground-ball rate and BABIP are similar to last year, and he has somehow increased his K rate to a preposterous 38.9 percent. His xBA (.198) and xSLG (.329) are nearly identical to last year as well.

Hitters Going Down, Down

Carlos Correa (SS – HOU)
This pains me to say, as he is one of the bright young stars in the game, but negative regression may fall upon Correa. Currently sitting in the top 20 in wRC+, we should expect that to steadily decrease throughout the summer. His strikeout percentage currently sits at 25.9%, more than two points higher than 2018 and well above his 19.1% mark in 2017. He is swinging four percent more than he did in 2018 and is making much less contact when he does swing (eight percent drop in O-Swing% from 2018 to 2019). Safe to say that he is no Javier Baez.

The good thing about Correa is that when he does make contact, he is hitting the ball hard (90.7 mph average exit velocity). Even still, there is a 104-point gap between his expected slugging percentage and actual slugging percentage on fastballs, which he sees nearly 60% of the time. If this trend keeps up, his nine percent increase on whiffs against fastballs will come back to bite him.

This may be the one thing that prevents Correa from having a true MVP-type season. My concern is that we have seen the best of Correa’s 2019, so selling high for someone like Manny Machado — who has yet to break out — may make sense.

Trey Mancini (1B/OF – BAL)
Mancini ranks in the top 25 in park-adjusted offense, but I’m not buying his power or his average. His four-degree increase in his launch angle is certainly attributable to his .547 slugging percentage. His .370 BABIP won’t be around for long with an average exit velocity of 88.6 mph (41st percentile). Unsurprisingly, his expected batting average of .290 is nearly 30 points below his .318 average, and there’s a 20-point gap in his expected versus actual slugging. Now, these numbers are still fantasy relevant, but we should expect even more regression than that. He is seeing fewer pitches in the zone and making less contact when he does swing at said pitches. As a result, he is barreling fewer pitches than last year.

Dan Richards of Pitcher List wrote an article introducing homer opportunity percentage (HrOpp%), which states the percentage of balls hit between 22-36 degrees (the best angles to hit homers). Last year, Mancini posted an average 14.7% HrOpp rate (ranking 365th out of 467, minimum of 50 batted balls). In 2017, he ranked 282 out of 464. Despite the increase in launch angle, Mancini is up to only 20%, which would barely crack the top 100 last year. Of course, a small sample could be at play here, but Mancini likely hasn’t raised that percentage enough to support the increase in production.

Brian Goodwin (OF – LAA)
Goodwin has made the most of the opening caused by Justin Upton’s toe injury. He is currently slashing .294/.366/.471 on the heels of a .383 BABIP. The former first-round draft pick has shown panned flashes, such as with the 2017 Nationals (13 homers in 278 plate appearances). However, there is enough here to predict short-term regression before being squeezed out of playing time once Upton returns in late May or June.

For starters, that BABIP. FanGraphs has him evenly spread across the board in terms of grounders, liners, and fly balls. However, with just a 29.1% hard-hit rate, it doesn’t matter if the ball is in the air or on the ground. That batting average will come down to the .240-.250 range when it’s all said and done. His average exit velocity sits in the ninth percentile. Is that someone you really want to roster?

When he’s not hitting the ball softly, he’s striking out 25.9% of the time, a drop from a limited 2018. He’s been swinging and missing at more strikes (despite swinging at fewer strikes overall), and actually has a higher swinging-strike rate this year. We can expect his strikeout rate to rise, giving even more support to that lower average.

Goodwin is owned in 93% of NFBC leagues and is being started in 75% of them. While riding the hot hand is fine for now, don’t expect it to last, especially when Upton comes back.

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