Starting Pitcher Breakouts Who Will Keep Improving

January 25, 2021

Jon Anderson evaluates starting pitchers who have already experienced a breakout that could keep improving in 2021. These SP are worth their ADP in fantasy baseball drafts and could still be undervalued.

Playing only 60 games in 2020 was sure to result in some wacky outcomes. The league leaders in innings were barely cracking 80 innings, less than a third of the usual. This resulted in some final pitching lines that certainly would not have remained the same had there been 100 more innings added to the sample.

In this article, we are going to take a look at a few pitchers that had really awesome 2020 seasons and should be expected to more or less keep that up moving forward. This means finding guys that owe their improvements to skill rather than randomness and good fortune.

While I did not highlight any pitchers with low ADP for 2021, these are four starters I really believe in repeating their 2020 production to a large extent, making them still great draft targets even at the elevated price tag.

Corbin Burnes, Milwaukee Brewers

This is not the first time we have talked about the ridiculous season Burnes put up in 2020, and it will not be the last. The Brewers righty posted a 2.11 ERA with a 1.02 WHIP and a 36.7% strikeout rate. That was a far cry from the 8.83 ERA and 1.84 WHIP he posted in his 49 innings in 2019. Now I'm not going to be the guy here saying that Burnes will improve on his 2020 numbers, those are really tough numbers to improve on. The case I am making is that he will be much, much more like his 2020 self than 2019 going forward.

The main reason for this is that Burnes made a significant change to his pitch arsenal in 2020. I will always believe in a surprise breakout more when it comes alongside a significant change in what the player is doing on the field. In 2019, Burnes threw his four-seam fastball 52.5% of the time and gave up a ridiculous .823 slugging percentage and a .672 expected slugging percentage with the pitch. Over the offseason, he decided to scrap the pitch, throwing it just 25 times total in 2020. He replaced that usage with a sinker (33%) and cutter (32%) combination. The sinker was still hit hard (.585 expected slugging), but not nearly as badly as the four-seamer, and the cutter was awesome (.285 expected slugging). This led to decreased slider usage (from 31% to 13%), but it made the pitch even more devastating as hitters no longer knew when it was coming. The slider earned a 60% whiff rate and a .165 expected slugging percentage; one of the game's best individual pitches.

Burnes has a really impressive arm, he has strong velocity and fantastic movement. It was just a matter of figuring out how to use his pitch mix and locating better, and he made huge strides in those categories last season. Maybe he will not be a top-10 pitcher in the game like he was in 2020 ever again, but I feel very confident about the changes he made and think Burnes is an easy top-30 pitcher for 2021.

Kenta Maeda, Minnesota Twins

Maeda did not change things up as much as Burnes did, but there was an arsenal change contributing to his elite 2020 season where he posted a 2.70 ERA, a 0.75 WHIP, and a 32.2% strikeout rate. He also brought down the four-seam usage (from 34% to 19%), making the difference up with sliders (+7%) and changeups (+6%). Maeda's fastball has never been one to generate lots of swings and misses, so using off-speed and breaking stuff much more frequently created a believable rise in swinging-strike rate (from 14.6% to 17.2%). Another positive outcome of this was he generated more groundballs (+8%).

It is possible that the team change had just as much to do with his breakout 2020 season. When he was with the Dodgers, he constantly had his outings cut short and at times was sent back and forth between the rotation and the bullpen. In Minnesota, the Twins gave him the reigns to throw as many innings out of the starting rotation as he could. He averaged more than six innings per outing and won six games in his 11 starts. It is true that he ran a little hot with the .208 BABIP and 80.2% strand rate, so we shouldn't be expecting another WHIP near 0.75 (that is almost impossible to do over a full season), but Maeda should have no trouble posting another top 25 SP season now that he's settled in as a Twin.

Zac Gallen, Arizona Diamondbacks

Gallen was one of the least-surprising breakouts of 2020, but he certainly did not let anybody down who predicted his great 2020 season. The story with Gallen is his elite command. He threw four different pitches more than 15% of the time in 2020 and located them all beautifully. If you look at the heat maps, he almost never comes near the heart of the plate.

While he does not have the most electric "stuff", averaging just 93 MPH on the fastball without notable spin on any pitch, it is more than enough to give Gallen legitimate fantasy ace upside. He earned a 44% whiff rate on his changeup and a strong 38% mark on the curveball, all while generating lots of ground-balls (46%). This guy has posted nothing but elite ratios at every level of play so far. His ranking as a top-20 fantasy starter is here to stay.

Aaron Nola, Philadelphia Phillies

Nola was already considered an ace by many, but 2020 really solidified him as one of the best pitchers in the game in my mind. After throwing a four-seamer and curveball combination 70% of the time in 2019, he transformed his pitch mix and began throwing four pitches all almost evenly.

This pitch usage is almost unheard of. He was nearly impossible to predict in any count. Even in 0-2 counts, there was no pitch to sit on (40% fastball, 32% curve, 23% sinker, 12% changeup in those counts).

It's one thing to be unpredictable, and another thing to be unpredictable AND have elite stuff, which Nola does. His curveball has consistently graded out as one of the best breaking pitches in the game, and he has achieved better than average results with his four-seamer every year of his career as well. He posted expecting slugging percentages below .440 with all four pitches and got whiffs at a high rate with every pitch but the sinker.  He did all of this while maintaining the same high ground-ball rate he has always had (at 51% for his career).

It was not a "breakout" as much as "return to greatness" for Nola in 2020, but at the age of just 27, he looks like one of the safest bet aces in the league at this point.

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