More to the Robustness of Strikeout Pitchers

If at any point in this article I seem to say something incoherent, just now that Im righting this peace eerily in the mourning. #NailedIt

This is the 51st installment of The Labyrinthian, a series dedicated to exploring random fields of knowledge in order to give you unordinary theoretical, philosophical, strategic, and/or often rambling guidance on daily fantasy sports. Consult the introductory piece to the series for further explanation.

“It’s a Chinese Crested, Of Course”

One of the most painful things I’ve ever had to do is pretend (multiple times) that How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days doesn’t suck, which goes to show the following:

1. I’ve had a pretty lucky life.
2. Guys will say or do pretty much anything if they’re motivated in a particular way.

If you’re a regular reader of The Labyrinthian — and it’s doubtful that anyone who reads this series on a regular basis is, per se, a “regular” person — the odds are that you know that I judge people based on the movies they like and I tend to see the benefits of focusing on the negative.

In college, I dated maybe twelve girls, and fifteen of them liked How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Of course, all of those numbers are exaggerated — I dated only a few girls seriously, about half of them liked that movie, and watching that movie felt like 15 days — but you get the idea. For a solid two years as an undergraduate, I felt like 75 percent of the girls I knew were trying to be Kate Hudson and the other 25 percent were talking about how much they hated her. (Most of the girls in the latter group were non blondes, perhaps coincidentally.)

Anyway, in college there were two main things I took away from that movie:

1. Anyone who actually thought that that movie was good probably wasn’t going to be the Arwen to my Aragorn.
2. There’s a type of small dog whose breed is called “Chinese Crested.”

That little piece of canine information found its way into my brain during perhaps the best scene of that abominable movie:

 

Anyway, all of this is a long way of saying that the cosmos has a sense of humor because eventually my wife bought a dog for us — and “it’s a Chinese Crested, of course” — and right now that eight-pound powderpuff is lying on a chair five feet away from me snoring like a f*cking Rottweiler and I don’t have the heart to wake her up just to tell her to shut up — because she won’t understand me and she’ll just go back to sleep and start snoring again. We’re just going to need to power through this situation together . . .

Now what was it that I was going to write about? (I did tell you at the top that this piece might be a little incoherent.)

More to the Robustness of Strikeout Pitchers

Recently, Brandon Hopper and Mitchell Block have written articles highlighting the robustness of strikeout pitchers. In his piece, Brandon (smartly) recommended James Shields as a contrarian play, noting that, “for a finesse pitcher with a good chance of getting strikeouts, losing a bit off a fastball isn’t as bad is it would be for a hard thrower.” And in Mitch’s Trend of the Day (published today), he shows that (per our Trends tool), “in the case of the high-strikeout pitchers, it seems as if a decline in velocity doesn’t negate their ability to rack up Ks.”

Brandon and Mitch’s articles are good. You should read them. In this piece, I want to build on their work.

To make sure that we’re all on the same page, I want to clarify something: When Brandon and Mitch highlight the fact that strikeout pitchers can lose velocity and still be productive, we need to understand what they are actually saying.

They’re not saying that, in actuality, a strikeout pitcher will be just as good as he usually is if he loses velocity on his pitches. For instance, if a guy normally strikes out 10 batters per nine innings, Brandon and Mitch aren’t saying that he will continue to have a 10 K/9 even if he loses two miles per hour from his fastball (per our advanced stats). The pitcher might be just as good (in reality) with decreased velocity, but that’s not what they’re saying.

Rather, what they’re saying is that, within the context of MLB DFS, strikeout pitchers who have lost velocity usually still provide value, as evidenced by our Plus/Minus metric.

This distinction is important to understand, and it’s what I’m going to explore for the rest of this article.

(In other news, my dog just stopped snoring — a fact that will probably effect this peace naught won I oughta.)

What’s Actually Going on With Strikeout Pitchers Who Have Lost Velocity?

I want some facts, and I’m going to get them. Here’s a trend that screens only for the pitchers in the top quartile of strikeout proficiency as measured by strikeouts per nine innings:

 

This trend will be the baseline. With 16.98 expected points, the cohort on average produces 18.63 actual points, good for +1.64 Plus/Minus and 57.6 percent Consistency.

And what do we see with high-strikeout pitchers who have (at best) -1 Velocity Differentials?

 

This is intriguing. And exciting. In fact, it’s so intriguing and exciting that I need to create a list just to keep myself focused:

1. The count is small, which isn’t unexpected. There aren’t all that many starting pitchers in MLB to begin with, and it doesn’t seem as if there would a compelling reason for many of them to lose velocity. But, as always, we should be cautious about reading too much into a trend based on a small sample.
2. Secondly, you might wonder why I chose a -1 Velocity Differential instead of -0.1 or -0.5. The reason is pretty simple. I remember hearing FantasyLabs Cofounder Jonathan Bales say at some point that a -1 Velocity Differential was significant. He might’ve said that on the introductory podcast to the 2016 season, although I’m not entirely sure. Anyway, the point is that -0.1 is almost surely not significant and -0.5 is borderline. By starting with -1, I know that I am screening for something that actually means something.
3. This trend is surprising (at least to me). This cohort has 17.66 expected points, which means that the high-K pitchers with significantly declining speed are actually more expensive than the average high-K throwers. Finishing with 18.60 actual points (a number that is almost identical to that of the first cohort), these pitchers have a lower Plus/Minus and decreased Consistency as a result of their increased expectations.

We should consider some of the implications of the trend.

My Dog is Snoring Again

By no means does this exercise provide us with information that is absolutely definitive — and there are a number of ways that one could be more scientific in exploring this issue — but there are a few patterns that jump out to me. It’s time for another list:

1. The DFS platforms (or at least DraftKings, in this instance) seem not to be taking pitching velocity into account. Based on actual points, I would expect the two cohorts to be priced similarly, but they’re not. For some reason the pitchers with declining velocity are priced higher. Maybe their elevated salaries are the result of hot streaks or elongated periods of time in which they are throwing a lot of innings and getting a lot of strikeouts — which in turn could result in arm fatigue and lower pitch velocity. In other words, it’s possible that DFS platforms are becoming more aggressive with salaries for high-K pitchers when perhaps they should actually become a little more cautious.
2. If it’s true that DFS pricing is going one way exactly as the advanced stats are pointing the other way — especially on popular pitchers likely to be heavily rostered, because that’s what high-K pitchers are — then that information could provide an edge. You shouldn’t entirely fade a stud pitcher because of declining velocity, but the data suggests that you should be cautiously underweight on him in tournaments, especially since if you rostered such a pitcher then he would by far be the most expensive player in your lineup. I’m not saying that the divergence between pricing and velocity is the key to taking down a tournament. I’m just saying that it’s something to be considered seriously.
3. But there’s something else that we should consider seriously, and it’s what Brandon and Mitch have already suggested: Even if fantasy production is correlated with pitching velocity, the ability to strike out batters might not be as dependent on velocity as we think. In order to strike out a batter, a pitcher needs to get the ball across the plate three times. To do that reliably, he almost certainly needs more than two pitches in his arsenal — and the more effective pitches he has the less important any given pitch actually is. It’s very possible that the fastball and thus velocity in general are less important to the high-K pitcher than to the average pitcher.
4. If it’s true that, in general, a high-K pitcher can be just as or almost as effective with reduced velocity as he is with his normal velocity, then I imagine a time will come — and we’re probably not there yet — when many DFSers will have access to advanced data and will fade high-K pitchers merely because they aren’t throwing as hard. And when that happens game theory will dictate that we should explicitly want to roster these pitchers in tournaments. And, to me, that will be exciting.

Here’s something else that’s exciting: My dog just stopped snoring — and by the time you read this my weekend will be started.

I hope that your weekend is as awesome as mine’s going to be: Last night my wife said to me, “You know what movie I haven’t seen in forever? How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. I wonder if it still sucks. Let’s watch it this weekend.”

I’m only about 49 percent hopeful that she said that just to give me material for this article.

———

The Labyrinthian: 2016, 51

Previous installments of The Labyrinthian can be accessed via my author page. If you have suggestions on material I should know about or even write about in a future Labyrinthian, please contact me via email, [email protected], or Twitter @MattFtheOracle.