Monday's Forum: Stats to evaluate pitchers. Part 2 of 2

It takes time to be the best. It takes having a pitching staff of Matt Clement, Brad Penny, Sterling Hitchcock and Steve Sparks to realize that The Jon's way of approaching pitching wasn't cutting it. So this is how you pick pitchers: Get Johan Santana, Roy Halladay, Brandon Webb, John Lackey and Scott Kazmir as your staff.
Enjoy. My job is done.
Sorry, PoiDog moment.
Picking a staff is pretty easy. Target two bonafide aces. Guys that give you strikeouts, low ERA, WHIP and wins. After that, get a second-tier starter and then fill out the rest of your staff with workhorses. If you get weak and can't pass up offense in the early rounds, then there is one pitching stat that can give some semblance of a competitive staff. This is the part where I use a colon for added emphasis. Here it comes ... wait for it ... here it is: Innings pitched.
This is the part where I repeat a phrase to give it added emphasis (see, I am a good writer).
Innings pitched.
Pitching is thin in fantasy baseball. With the fall of Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling, Pedro Martinez, Jason Schmidt and the emasculation of Roger Clemens who can't even pitch a full season, there are only four aces that qualify to go in the first five rounds of a draft: Santana, Halladay, Roy Oswalt and Chris Carpenter.
There are plenty of young arms that turned in good seasons such as Jeremy Bonderman, Webb, Scott Kazmir, Lackey, but what you need is way to rate them.
The first way to evaluate a pitcher is your gut. If you have a feeling about a guy, then pick him high and early. If you lose by following your instincts it is better than losing by picking guys that a friend or fantasy source tells you.
The second is innings pitched. Start at pitchers that have thrown 200 innings and work your way up. 200 innings pitched is the same as looking at a .300 hitter, there is just less pitching to go around. Pitching is a war of attrition and you end up having to pick pitchers who won't hurt you while giving you stats.
Take a look at Bronson Arroyo. He pitched 240 innings, posted a 14-11 record, 3.29 ERA, 1.19 WHIP and 184 strikeouts. Now Arroyo isn't the second coming, he is an above-mediocre pitcher who got all of his stats because he was able stay in games. Even if Arroyo had a bad outing and gave up four to five runs, he was still able to pitch seven to eight innings. That is better than Cliff Lee who pitched 200 innings, had the same 14-11 record, but posted a 4.40 ERA, 129 Ks and 1.41 WHIP. Lee pitched past 7 innings 9 times out of 33 starts in 2006. Arroyo pitched past 7 innings in 21 out of 35 starts. Both guys have the prerequisite 200 innings, but Arroyo's ability to stay in games gave an owner a fighting chance in ERA, strikeouts from week to week. That is the pitcher you want: 200-inning workhorses with a sub-3 ERA will always give you a chance.
So keep it simple. Does a pitcher have 200 innings? Yes. Does he have a sub-3 ERA? Yes. A 1.50 or below WHIP? Yes. 150 or more Ks. Yes. Do you pick this pitcher in the later rounds? Yes. Can he have a bad outing here or there and give up 5 runs? Yes. When he gives up the five runs, will his manager allow him to pitch out at least 7 to 8 innings which in turn gives you steady stats and doesn't hurt your ERA or WHIP too badly? Yes.
Convinced? No? Then pick Get Johan Santana, Roy Halladay, Brandon Webb, John Lackey and Scott Kazmir in the first five rounds and nickel and dime your offense. And join my league where I will be happy to take your money.

When it comes to building a fantasy pitching staff, there are so many ways to go about selecting your pieces. However, there are many owners (like The Jon) who love going for the cream of the crop only pitchers who throw a lot of innings, strikeout a lot of hitters, and post great WHIPs and ERAs.
It’s a great strategy. But there is one problem: Great pitching is at a premium.
The fact off the matter is that your work on draft day (and throughout the season) really begins when those top guys are off the board.
You have to know when to avoid the “name game” — selecting a pitcher way too early based on their name value — and when to look for “hidden gems” or solid arms.
I can’t reiterate this enough: The point of the game is victory, not annihilation. You do not need to win EVERY category (assuming you’re in a head-to-head league) to be successful.
There are plenty of quality pitchers who can be had later in the draft, or be found on the waiver wire, if you know what to look for.
And what might that be, you ask? WHIP.
If by chance you are a stranger to the “WHIP” term, it’s basically the average number of walks and hits that a pitcher gives up per inning. Anything less than 1.30 is usually pretty good.
WHIP is not going to be a key to victory. It is just one stat.
But I am a firm believer WHIP will lead you to a pitcher who will not kill you. This is extremely important for owners who have decided to build their team around offense.
WHIP is so important because it judges how many runners a pitcher allows on base. If a pitcher gives up a solo homerun here and there it’s not going to kill you. But if the same pitcher gives a homerun after allowing a guy to single and then walk, suddenly he’s given up three earned runs on one swing of the bat.
This statistic is the first step to determining if a player is worthy of a roster position. It’s simple: If a guy can’t reach base (see), he can’t score (fight).
When you buy into this theory, you suddenly see realize guys such as Derek Lowe, Chris Capuano, Jose Contreras and Dan Haren can combine to make a competitive rotation. Notice none of those guys (except Haren in some leagues – see PoiDog) will likely be kept or selected in the first 10 rounds of any draft.
In addition, because the WHIP by definition is the average number of baserunners allowed per inning, the stat can help you determine if a particular pitcher is prone to troublesome innings. This is extremely helpful during the season while you’re scouring your league’s waiver wire, especially when dealing with young pitchers.
But while I find this stat to be a pretty good measurement of a pitcher’s success, it is by no means the end-all, be-all of statistics. In addition to WHIP, I like to look at ERA and innings pitched.

Great pitchers do three things: strike batters out, prevent them from getting on base and don’t allow them to hit homers.
It would make sense then that we would evaluate pitchers on this basis.
So, for the sake of your fantasy draft, give these three stats serious consideration: K/BB ratio, HRs allowed and opponents’ on-base percentage.
While your league most certainly does not expressly reward these categories, I can assure you it does implicitly.
The reason: Controlling the strike zone, keeping the ball in the park and leaving the bases empty are the most effective ways of limiting an opponent’s ability to score, which obviously translates into a multitude of other stats.
There’s no way around the fact that the pitchers with the lowest ERAs and Whips and having the highest strikeout totals are going to be baseball’s elite. Atop all three you find Johan Santana. Sprinkled amongst the leaders are names such as Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt and Chris Carpenter.
But you don’t need to know that to realize those are all pitchers worthy of high picks.
By looking outside this realm, though, you can find some hidden gems. Primarily using K/BB, HRs allowed and Opp. OBP, helped lead me to such names as Brandon Webb, Jeremy Bonderman and Scott Kazmir before each had breakout campaigns in 2006.
Using those same metric would point toward guys such as C.C. Sabathia, John Lackey and Erik Bedard as solid mid-round gambles this year.
The trick to using these stats is to not use them as your only evaluation components, but to use them along with other stats to figure out which pitchers are most likely to continue past success.
Look for stats that just don’t match up, like a low ERA with a high number of HRs allowed, unusually high OBP or low K/BB ratio. For the most part, pitchers must do two of those three things well to maintain their success. When they don’t draw a big red X through their name.
What constitutes “good” stats in those areas? Allowing fewer than 20 HRs in a full season, limiting opponents to an OBP under .300 and striking out more than three times as many they walked puts pitchers among the elite in those categories. Warning flags should go up anytime a pitcher has allowed more than 25 HRs, posts an OBP against above .330 and can’t strike out close to twice as many as he walks.
In other words, beware Barry Zito.

If you’ve been reading our forums from the jump, you know three out of four of us heavily stress pitching. While we have been pumping up its importance, but we haven’t yet told you how to go about evaluating it. The wait is over. How to look at pitchers is the topic of this week so break out the notepads.
Know this from the get go, pitchers only have control of certain things. Because this is so, you have to focus on era & strikeouts as the primary categories in your draft. Both of these stats are purely based on the talent of the pitcher you are getting. A pitcher can luck his way into a bunch of wins, Jason Marquis, but he can’t luck into a sub-3 era and 200k’s for a season. These two categories are the most consistent and easiest to predict. If you look at any fantasy magazine with a 3 year history, you have a good predictor of what will happen. The same handful of guys, assuming good health, get those numbers year in and year out. There are too many variables to have to rely on the other eight players surrounding your pitcher. You won’t miss if you take a Santana, Halladay, Oswalt type pitcher early regardless of the Twins, Jays, and ‘Stros.
On the other hand, you can see a guy’s wins and losses go up and down depending on his supporting cast. Looking at the offense, defense, & ballpark of a hurler are part of the equation too, but they should be secondary to a guy’s talent. If the player has all the above, so much the better. Roger Clemens is a great example. He posts and era in the low 2’s and gets at least 7 punch outs every outing. Sadly enough, he played for Houston who, like Newspaperman can’t score. The Rocket’s record was around .500 but this is not a true indicator of what he is. Bottom line, don’t look at the win loss record.
Health is major with pitchers as well. It is harder for them to play hurt than it is for hitters. In the early rounds, let Prior & Pedro be somebody else’s mistake until they prove to you that they can stay healthy.