High-Upside Starting Pitchers for Fantasy Baseball: "Stuff" Edition

Jon Anderson's top SP studs and 2022 fantasy baseball breakout pitcher candidates. He analyzes starting pitchers based on pitcher's "stuff" to find studs.

In the first analysis of my "finding high-upside starting pitchers" series, I looked in depth at swinging-strike rate. You can read that here.

That analysis looked at overall SwStr% for every pitcher, taking into account all of their pitch types to one SwStr% number. In this article, I want to go a step further and look into individual pitch types for each pitcher. First, I want to point out the individual pitches in the game. One pitch does not make an ace, but having an elite pitch in your arsenal sure goes a long way to support the rest of your stuff.

Second, I want to highlight the pitchers that have the most pitches performing better than league average in SwStr% and CSW%. I would imagine that any pitcher having three or more pitches beating the league average in SwStr% is going to be a pretty sick pitcher, and any surprising names we find there might just be primed for a breakout in 2022. Let's go!

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The Big Picture

First things first, we have to define our terms. You should not be expecting the same average SwStr% or CSW% for each pitch type given the movement and purpose of these pitch types. I've put together a table showing the 2021 MLB league average SwStr% and CSW% for each pitch type (you will also see the total number of times each pitch was thrown league-wide). Here it is:

The sinker and the four-seam have the lowest swinging-strike rate, which makes sense as those are the pitches that typically move the least, and are also often quite predictable to see coming (most pitchers throw one of these pitches as their most commonly thrown pitch). The top pitch for getting whiffs is the splitter, although very few pitchers throw it so the sample is much smaller, followed by the slider.

It's so important to note these figures. It really gives much-needed context. Looking at that table, you find that an elite SwStr% on a sinker (say a 10% mark, well above the league average) would actually be a very poor mark on a slider (that would be six points below average).

The League's Best Pitches

We will take each pitch type and then look at the top-10 (or so) in SwStr% and CSW% here. The full data is just too large to show in this post, but if you are interested in getting the full data set, please reach out to me on Twitter.

I limited this to only pitchers that made 10 or more starts and threw at least 200 of the given pitch type.

4-Seam Fastballs
SwStr%: Joe Ross (17.6%), Alek Manoah (15.3%), Lance Lynn (14.9%), Jameson Taillon (14.7%), Brandon Woodruff (14.7%), Jacob deGrom (14.5%), Danny Duffy (14.4%), Eduardo Rodriguez (14.0%), Carlos Rodon (13.8%), Max Scherzer (13.4%), Yu Darvish (13.4%)

CSW%: Rich Hill (34.2%), Kyle Hendricks (33.1%), Pablo Lopez (33.0%), David Price (32.6%), Joe Musgrove (32.5%), Trevor Rogers (32.3%), Freddy Peralta (32.2%), Kohei Arihara (32.2%), Jacob deGrom (32.0%) Matt Shoemaker (31.9%), Zack Greinke (31.9%)

Sinkers
SwStr%: Sean Manaea (10.7%), Domingo German (10.7%), Max Fried (9.9%), Luis Garcia (9.6%), Josh Fleming (9.3%), Sonny Gray (9.2%), Sandy Alcantara (8.9%), Zack Wheeler (8.9%), Alek Manoah (8.5%), Corbin Burnes (8.5%)

CSW%: Alex Wood (35.5%), Brady Singer (34.4%), Logan Webb (33.1%), Jose Quintana (32.6%), Chris Bassitt (32.5%), Joe Ross (32.2%), Alex Cobb (32.2%), Taijuan Walker (31.8%), Sonny Gray (31.7%), Dane Dunning (31.6%)

Cutters
SwStr%: Luis Garcia (23.2%), Max Scherzer (16.3%), Corbin Burnes (15.0%), Marcus Stroman (14.4%), Trevor Bauer (14.2%), Walker Buehler (41.1%), Corey Kluber (13.7%), John Gant (13.4%), Tyler Anderson (13.2%)

CSW%: Trevor Bauer (36.0%), Corbin Burnes (35.0%), Yu Darvish (34.2%), Charlie Morton (31.4%), Joe Musgrove (31.0%), Luis Garcia (30.7%), Ryan Yarbrough (29.6%), Aaron Civale (28.8%), David Price (28.8%), Eduardo Rodriguez (28.8%)

Sliders
SwStr%: Jacob deGrom (34.0%), Clayton Kershaw (26.8%), Corbin Burnes (26.5%), Max Scherzer (26.3%), Shane Bieber (24.3%), Robbie Ray (23.6%), Josiah Gray (23.5%), Johan Oviedo (23.0%), Blake Snell (22.9%)

CSW%: Jacob deGrom (44.3%), Max Scherzer (39.8%), Dylan Cease (38.1%), Dylan Bundy (37.9%), Corbin Burnes (37.8%), Huascar Ynoa (27.8%), Luis Garcia (37.6%), Brandon Woodruff (37.6%), Clayton Kershaw (37.3%)

Curveballs
SwStr%: Jesus Luzardo (21.4%), Jordan Montgomery (20.7%), Josiah Gray (20.7%), German Marquez (20.5%), Corbin Burnes (19.4%), Domingo German (19.0%), Shane McClanahan (19.0%), Shane Bieber (18.7%), Framber Valdez (18.6%)

CSW%: Shane McClanahan (42.4%), Corbin Burnes (40.5%), Nathan Eovaldi (40.1%), Aaron Nola (39.7%), Domingo German (39.2%), Max Scherzer (38.6%), Josiah Gray (38.5%), Gerrit Cole (38.5%), Corey Kluber (38.2%), Shane Bieber (37.2%)

The League's Deepest Arsenals

Next, I checked every single qualified pitcher in the league to see which pitchers had the most individual pitches beating the league average SwStr% or CSW% by one or more percentage points. For both of those statistics, I found all the pitchers that had three or more pitches meeting that criteria. There were 21 pitchers accomplishing this last year for SwStr%, here they are:

Burnes tops the list with all five of his pitches (cutter, curveball, sinker, slider, changeup), beating the league's respective SwStr% by a percentage point or better. The more surprising names here are McClanahan (curveball, slider, changeup), Garcia (cutter, sinker, changeup), and Kluber (cutter, curveball, changeup). Kluber isn't very interesting for fantasy just because of the unlikelihood of him throwing enough innings to matter, but his stuff is still pretty good.

It's nice to see McClanahan and Garcia here as these are younger pitchers on very competitive teams that should be primed for a full season of action next year (although that might mean 150-160 innings for both of them).

Now, let's check out the CSW% leaderboard, which is much bigger:

Another huge plus for the Astros righty, as Garcia achieved strong CSW% marks on six (!!) different pitches. Those pitches were the cutter, slider, sinker, changeup, curveball, and splitter. He only threw the splitter 59 times total, so maybe we shouldn't mention that one here, but the only pitch he threw that didn't beat the league average CSW% for that pitch type was his four-seamer. That pitch came with a 26.4% CSW%, which was rated at the league average. This is really impressive stuff and should provide us with a boost in confidence for Garcia being able to repeat his strong 2021 season.

Sonny Gray also stands out here as a pitcher going pretty late in drafts. His cutter (33.6% CSW%), changeup (30.0%), four-seamer (30.6%), and sinker (31.7%) beat the league average by at least one point. He did not have a very good season in the box scores, but there's reason to think he could bounce back a bit closer to his 2019 self this coming season.

Other notable names on the list: Dylan Cease, Patrick Sandoval, Lance McCullers Jr., Shohei Ohtani, Tanner Houck, and Spencer Howard.

That's it for this edition of high-upside starting pitchers, I hope you find some gems here!

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