Continuing on with the theme of aces pitching in new environments, let’s take a look at Zack Greinke, who will be taking his talents to Phoenix in 2016. Last season, Greinke really put everything together in Los Angeles, finishing with a silly 1.66 ERA and 200 strikeouts. Greinke was rewarded with $200 million from the Diamondbacks, but how will he reward his DFS owners in 2016?
First, the obvious – chances are very slim that Greinke will repeat his 2015 season. His xFIP was more than a full point higher than his ERA (3.22 to 1.66). Some pitchers have outperformed their xFIP for several seasons over their career, but historically, Greinke has not been one of them. In fact, he has five seasons over his career where his ERA exceeded his xFIP. In 2009 with the Royals, Zack posted a 2.16 ERA against a 3.09 xFIP, numbers somewhat similar to 2015, and he responded with a 4.17 ERA the next season.
Under the hood, his 7.3% HR/FB (career 9.1%) ratio and .229 BABIP allowed (career .298) suggest some regression in 2016. Extrapolating his ZiPS and Steamer projections and barring anything unforeseen, we can probably roughly peg Greinke’s ERA to jump by a run to run and a half, with five or six fewer wins.
After 2015, my reaction is to classify @ARZ as a good matchup for opposing hitters, but that probably has more to do with Arizona’s mediocre pitching staff in 2015 than any park factor. In 2015, 11 more homers were hit in Dodger Stadium than Chase Field and in 2014, there were six more in Dodger Stadium. That’s somewhat noisy because the performance of the home team plays a large role in that data, but looking at the parks themselves using ESPN’S Hitter Tracker, we can see that Chase Field is slightly larger to each field:
The most power against Greinke over the past two seasons has been to right-center field, as we can see, courtesy of FanGraphs below. Coincidentally, right-center field represents the largest difference between Chase and Dodger Stadium, as the wall is about 10 feet deeper in Zack’s new home park.
Using our Trends tool to look at past results, we can see that two of Zack’s best road starts over the past two seasons have occurred at Chase:
Greinke has been an excellent pitcher at home over the past two seasons. Applying the Home/Away filter for Zack shows that he scored over three more points per start when taking the hill at Dodger Stadium. It is a good sign for his fantasy value then that his home park in 2016 will once again be one where he has historically performed well.
While we’re already in Trends, we can see that Greinke AVERAGED 24.35 DraftKings points per start in 2015. Based on his 2015 production, $14,100 would have been a fair cost on DraftKings. In fact, Zack closed the season at $12,600 and peaked at $14,000 last September. My guess is that Zack will open 2016 in the mid to high $11,000 range on DK, a price point that should offer plenty of room for profit.
Before we conclude, let’s address Greinke’s win-loss record. Zack probably won’t go 19-3 in decisions again in 2016, but he’s still going to be in position to win a bunch of games. Although it seems like the Dodgers were a much better offensive team than Arizona in 2015, the Diamondbacks actually scored 53 more runs on the season and ranked within the top 10 in the category. The Dodgers offered Greinke 4.09 runs of support during his 32 starts last season, a number Arizona is capable of repeating, since they averaged 4.44 runs per game overall in 2015.
In closing, regression to the mean is likely going to be the bigger concern for Zack Greinke in 2016 than his new environment. If concerns about pitching for Arizona drives his price down to start the season at all, feel free to buy on Greinke. Even at his elevated 2015 price point, there was still plenty of upside.
