New Resource & Analysis: The Pitcher Checklist
There are a handful of things I look for when evaluating a starting pitcher, so I automated a checklist. In this post, I explain the process and review the 2023 results.
Every analyst has their preferences of things they look for in a pitcher. And over my few years here, I’ve really nailed down a handful of things I look for. That gave me the idea of automating a checklist resource so I can quickly see which pitchers are checking the boxes.
Paid subs now have access to this resource, and it will be updated daily with 2024 data once that starts rolling in. But quite a bit of explanation is needed.
Check 1: Deep Arsenal
Definition: Does the pitcher have at least four pitches used above 5% of the time
This isn’t the most important check to me, but it is the first one on the sheet so that’s the order I’m going in.
It’s not that important to me because there are many examples of pitchers that success without it. Spencer Strider is a bit of an outlier, but he’s still a good example here. He throws his four-seamer 59% of the time and the slider 34% of the time, leaving less than 8% for his changeup. He only threw three different pitches last year. Do we want to fade him because of that? Of course not!
One thing that you can prove with the numbers is that deeper arsenal pitchers get deeper into games on average. Anecdotally, they feel (I know… feelings) a bit safer having different ways to tweak their game and pitches to fall back on if one isn’t working right on a given night.
Check 2: Fastball Variations
Definition: Does the pitcher have at least 2 of the 3 common fastball variations, throwing them at least 5% of the time?
There are three fastball classifications (for now… I have a feeling these classifications are going to expand in the coming years):
4-Seam Fastball
Sinker
Cutter
4-Seamers are more effective, generally. But sinkers can often generate high ground ball rates which works well. Cutters aren’t thrown nearly as often, and plenty of times they act much more like a slider than a fastball.
This one is possibly even less important than depth of arsenal, but personally I do like to see it. Some guys that have definitely benefited from mixing it up with the heater:
Aaron Civale, Aaron Nola, Chris Bassitt, Eduardo Rodriguez, Joe Musgrove, Marcus Stroman, Mitch Keller, Sonny Gray, Zach Eflin
This is a list of guys that were quite successful in recent years that are shy of dominant stuff wise. If you don’t have that overpowering elite four-seamer, you can catch up a bit by having a four-seamer and a sinker. Two (or three) fastballs that you can tunnel well and move in different directions. It seems logical to me that this would keep hitters a bit off balance. And more anecdotal evidence, every time I look at one of these pitchers that is putting up really good numbers without a super high K%, they seem to have this multi-fastball thing going on.
Check 3: Fastball Strikes?
Definition: Does the pitcher have a fastball thrown above 20% of the time that earns strikes at an above-average rate (1.5 points or higher)?
These next three are the most important to me, and this one might take the cake if we’re talking about starting pitchers. It seems darn near impossible to have sustained success in the rotation without a strong fastball.
And to me, the mark of a strong fastball is a high Strike%. That’s not the only metric that matters, but if we’re simplifying things, it’s my personal favorite right now for fastballs.
Again, I calculate it differently here. While a lot of sites will call do this:
Strike% = Total Pitches - Balls
Meaning that balls in play count. But why should you get credit for giving up a home run? So I do this:
Strike% = Whiffs + Called Strikes + Fouls
So anything that adds a strike to the count or maintains a two-strike count.
Check 4: SwStr+ Ball MFQ?
If you’re new here, you have no freakin’ clue what that means.
I explained it in full here. But to give you the short version, “MFQ” means “Magic Formula Qualifier”, meaning a pitcher meets the criteria defined by me. The criteria, for the checklist, is that they earned an overall SwStr% above 13% and a Ball% under 35%.
The league average SwStr% is 12% and the league average Ball% is 36%, so we’re at least one point better in each respect. This narrows the list down to pitchers who aren’t throwing a ton of pitches out of the zone and yet still generating whiffs. It’s a good sign that they have strikeout stuff, but it also trims off the fat of some of the high walk guys as well. I like it very much.
So that’s what that checkmark means. And when we look for full-season SPs that qualified there, it’s a very strong list of starters:
So it passes the back-test.
Check 5: Secondary Strike?
Definition: Does the pitcher have a NON fastball thrown above 10% of the time that earns strikes at an above-average rate (1.5 points or higher)?
Same thing as check 3, but with non-fastballs (anything but 4-seamers, sinkers, and cutters), and I drop the usage threshold down to 10%.
Those two work pretty well in tandem with each other. If you can earn high strike rates with both your high-usage fastball and a significant-usage secondary pitch, you’re probably going to end up doing pretty well. If we filter to those pitchers and requite at least 15 starts last year, it’s a longer list (30 SPs) that does have some duds on it:
Schmidt, Peterson, Wells, Severino, Bello, Matz
But the other 24 names are either studs or guys that were pretty strong last year.
Who Checks the Most Boxes?
I included the 2022 season in the Google sheet, I have been doing that a lot this off-season. But I think it’s good for back-testing. I encourage you to mess around there once you open up the data (paid subs only have access), but here’s some quick highlights.
2022: 20+ GS, 4+ Checkmarks
So if we were writing this a year ago, we would be hyping up Eovaldi, Skubal, Montgomery, Carrasco, Kelly, Suarez, Berrios, Lauer, Gonsolin, and Bieber as value draft picks. That would have worked a few times, but mostly would not have turned out well. There are plenty of guys who dominated in 2023 on this list, but it’s just that those names were already well known commodities, your fantasy team wouldn’t have benefited much from knowing this.
If we just check my favorite checkmarks:
17 names appears, and by count, nine of them were very good last season. Five of the others got hurt (Woody, Scherzer, McKenzie, Springs, and Verlander), and Manaea and Nola were pretty disappointing. But hey, I’ll take that.
2024 Picks
Favorite 3 Checks
Since that second one seemed to work better, let’s look at that ahead of 2024.
Well, shoot. No sneaky names here besides maybe Bailey Ober. The rest are either on the shelf (Alcantara, Scherzer) or being drafted in the top 15 SPs. But hey, more coal for the Bailey Ober hype train.
If we drop the MFQ requirement", a bunch more SPs show up:
From this, I take an interest in these names as later-round picks in standard league drafts:
Hunter Greene
Cristopher Sanchez
Luis Severino
And for deeper leagues or streamer consideration:
Clarke Schmidt
David Peterson
Tyler Wells
Aaron Civale
4+ Checks
We already know there will be a ton of busts, but let’s give the names just for fun.
Mostly this is just the names we already saw in the last two screenshots, but some add-ons:
Domingo German (goes very late, still unsigned)
Joe Musgrove (he’s a bit discounted this year)
Kutter Crawford (need to confirm he makes the rotation first)
Low-Checks
Maybe this data even works better in the inverse - for identifying pitchers to fade. If we look back to 2022 and see the pitchers with less than two checks:
Fades that wouldn’t have worked:
Justin Steele
Logan Gilbert
Nick Pivetta
Kyle Bradish
Fades that would have worked:
Lucas Giolito
Graham Ashcraft
Ranger Suarez
Josiah Gray
Roansy Contreras
I tried to restrict that to only pitchers that were drafted last year, and it’s still a mixed bag of results.
2024 Fades
We already know this isn’t nearly enough criteria to draft off of, but it’s a good launching paid for further research. I’ve already done all that research, so here are some pitchers I’m fading (meaning that they’re being drafted in the top 350, they have 2 or fewer checks here, and I already have some reason to fade them separate from this)
Marcus Stroman
Yusei Kikuchi
Blake Snell
Shane Bieber
Braxton Garrett
Reid Detmers
Cristian Javier
MacKenzie Gore
Dylan Cease
Well crap, MacKenzie Gore was one of my SP breakout picks and has zero checkmarks from last year. The zero check crew is Javier, Gore, Singer, Kopech, and Cease.
Take it And Run
What we’ve learned as we’ve gone through this is that the signal is very weak, if it’s there at all. If we picked breakouts and busts using this data a year ago, we would’ve gone about 50/50, which is just as good as flipping a coin, so that’s not a good record in the probabilistic world.
I think this will be useful in two ways
Watching 2024 pitchers earning checkmarks in those last three boxes (fastball strikes, MFQ, and secondary pitch strikes). The 2022 list was full of guys that did very well in 2023, it’s just that none of them were cheap in drafts. So if a few guys pop up with those checkmarks after a few starts in 2024, we can move quickly to add them - it would seem they’d be pretty great breakout candidates at that point
A launching pad for further research. Maybe I should re-evaluate my MacKenzie Gore love right now, maybe I was too low on Bradish (before the injury of course) after all, what’s going on with Cristopher Sanchez? Stuff like that, just prompts to look further at a guy.
The data is yours, use it well! The link below the paywall, but it should also be in your inbox.
Once we’re a few days into the 2024 season, a new tab will show up there, and we’ll reference it often in the daily notes.