Later-Round Category Targets - WHIP

March 19, 2021

Jon Anderson identifies pitchers who could be late-round value picks worth targeting in 2021 fantasy baseball drafts based on their ability to help with WHIP.

Welcome back to RotoBaller and my later-round category targets series, thanks for being here. In this article, we're going to talk about some middle and late-round starting pitchers that can help your team in the WHIP category.

It's important to note that there is a ton of overlap with WHIP and ERA, and I've already made my case for who I think are the best targets for ERA help late in the draft. This post will just piggy-back off of that one, so be sure to go check that one out before you proceed.

The question I've been asking as I've done this post series is this: what skills most correlate to the category in question? With ERA, we found that K-BB%, HR/9, and average exit velocity on fly-balls were categories to look at when trying to predict future ERA values. For WHIP, the most correlated category is once again strikeout-to-walk ratio.

K-BB%

This is a repeat from the ERA post, but it must be said since this category is the best predictor of WHIP. If you just look at the overall leaders in this category, you just have a list of pitchers with the highest ADP for 2021. When we filter out the most expensive pitchers, here is the leaderboard

One way that WHIP is a bit different than ERA is that walks factor a little more heavily into the equation. After all, walks is half of the numerator of WHIP (walks plus hits divided by innings pitched). Therefore it's worth taking a look at the pitchers who have posted the lowest walk rates over the last two seasons, forgetting about strikeouts for a minute. I left out intentional walks when calculating my walk rate, so that is why it might be a tad different than what you've seen elsewhere.

The guy from this list that I would actually recommend all things considered when thinking about strong WHIP value in the draft would be Greinke, Yarbrough, Pineda, Bumgarner, Paddack, Gonzales, and Means. All of these guys see their draft stock brought down a bit by their lack of strikeout ability and/or health concerns, but they all make up for the lower strikeouts with even lower walk rates, which will help keep their WHIPs down.

Batted Ball Types

The other part of the numerator in the calculation here is hits allowed. In the case of WHIP, giving up a single is just as harmful as giving up a home run.

The different batted ball types have wildly different batting averages. I broke them down here:

You can see that the sweet spot for base hits is line drives (between 10 and 25 degrees). Hitters hit .664 on line drives, so if we find the pitchers that give up the least line drives, we should be able to find some good WHIP candidates. I've taken the last seasons of data and made a "Non-LD Rate", which is just ground-ball rate plus fly-ball rate plus pop-up rate. Here are the leaders:

From this list, the standouts for me are Antone, Anderson, Martinez, Sanchez, Hernandez, Singer, Pearson, and Minor. All of these pitchers, save Singer, are guys I believe can generate enough strikeouts to keep a helpful WHIP going even if they start giving up more line drives. In the case of Singer, I just firmly believe he will continue to generate weak contact which will help him combat the low strikeout rate.

Putting It All Together

We're looking at three things here: strikeouts, walks, and avoiding line drives. I got this information for every pitcher that's faced at least 500 batters over the last two seasons and averaged out their ranks in each category to see who had the best overall numbers. Here are the overall top 10.

The only names that are consequential for our purposes here are Strasburg and Paddack, as they are the only healthy pitchers on the list with ADPs below 50. Strasburg obviously has major health issues of his own which makes his draft cost make sense, but Paddack may have fallen too far. There are fine questions about whether or not Paddack can really be an ace, but right now he's priced more like an SP3. He really has excelled in walk rate in his young career while posting an above-average strikeout rate and avoiding the line drive to boot. He's a great option to help you in WHIP after pick 100.

To give some more names, I've filtered out all SP that are either injured or in the top 50 in ADP, here's the result:

I really, really like this list of names for 2021. These are all very skilled pitchers going too late (maybe with the exception of Fried and Ryu who are priced right since they had awesome seasons last year), and they all give you a very good probability of lowering your team's WHIP with a cheap draft pick.

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