Are You For Real? Surprising Pitcher Starts from Week 18

Elliott Baas looks at starting pitchers who turned in surprising starts recently. These SP could emerge as waiver wire targets and sleepers, or simply mirages.

Welcome to Are You For Real?, a weekly column where we look at pitchers who turned in surprisingly good starts and try to determine whether they are the real deal. With the trade deadline behind us we're entering the home stretch in fantasy baseball. The leagues are shrinking down to the contenders, and we need to be extra careful about who we trust in our lineups over the last two months.

This week we're breaking down a starter in all three of MLB's regions. We're looking at the prize of the Blake Snell deal, Luis Patino and his eight strikeout effort against the Yankees on Thursday. We're also looking at a recent hot stretch for Cincinnati's Vladimir Gutierrez, who held the Mets to just one run on Sunday, and we're heading out west to see if Marco Gonzales can right the ship and become a dependable fantasy starter over the final two months.

Roster percentages quoted in this piece are based on Yahoo availability and are accurate as of 08/01/2021.

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Luis Patino, Tampa Bay Rays

21% Rostered

2021 Stats (prior to this start): 25.2 IP, 5.26 ERA, 4.17 FIP, 3.5 K/BB ratio

07/29 vs. NYY: 6 IP, 3 H, 0 ER, 2 BB, 8 K

One of the most revered pitching prospects in baseball, the 21-year-old righty finally showcased his talent over a longer start on Thursday. Patino fired six scoreless innings and fanning eight Yankees en route to his first career quality start. Given the pedigree of Patino, it’s easy for fantasy players to get excited about this performance. While the Rays are notorious for limiting innings of young pitchers, the recent news of Tyler Glasnow’s Tommy John surgery and the Rays’ failure to acquire another starter at the deadline, they might require more out of Patino down the stretch. Thought to be the prize of the Blake Snell haul for Tampa, Patino could prove to be even more valuable than Snell down the stretch in 2021.

Originally signed as an international free agent out of Colombia in 2016, Patino quickly made a name for himself by dominating rookie ball as a 17-year-old. The dominance continued throughout every level of the minors and Patino soon found himself as a consensus top-25 prospect in all of baseball, and tabbed as a future ace by scouts. He made his debut last season at just 20 years old, though he struggled out of the bullpen for San Diego, posting a 5.19 ERA in 11 appearances. Few were deterred by the bumpy start, and Patino was still a top prospect coming into 2021. Patino uses a four-pitch mix consisting of a four-seam fastball, sinker, slider, and changeup, though he leans heavily on the four-seamer and slider, using the two a combined 81% of the time.

There’s good reason Patino leans so heavily on his fastball and slider, and it’s because they are by far his best two offerings. His four-seamer sits between 95-96 MPH, and can touch 99 at its peak. Patino’s fastball isn’t just velocity, as his 2421 average RPM puts him in the 89^th percentile of fastball spin rate. This deadly combination of spin and velocity has allowed Patino to sustain a 10.6% swinging strike rate with his fastball, and the young righty racked up 12 whiffs with the pitch in this outing. From a pure measurables perspective, Patino’s fastball appears to be on par with the elite starting pitchers, but he does lack one key skill that will hinder his immediate performance, and that is command.

Patino’s fastball can look and perform great at times, but he often struggles with location. It’s not a matter of merely finding the zone, in fact his 64% zone rate with his fastball is rather high. Instead, it’s a matter of putting the pitch in an advantageous position for weak contact or whiffs with regularity. Here’s Patino’s fastball heat map for 2021.

That’s a whole lot of red in the zone, and he’s paid the price for it as opponents are hitting .283 with a .417 SLG against his fastball this season. He’s actually been on the lucky side in regards to power outcomes, as his fastball has a .503 xSLG and 91.9 MPH average exit velocity. It’s easy for batters to generate such powerful contact when Patino throws it in the zone so frequently. He appears to be trying to overpower hitters, which is a tactic that I’m certain he’s found success with at every level prior to reaching the majors, but he’s not going to be able to overpower major league hitters with regularity. Sure, he notched plenty of whiffs in this start, but he did so against a Yankees lineup that has a 25.3% strikeout rate against right-handed pitching. This approach may work on a single given day, especially against a lineup with hefty swing-and-miss like the Yankees, but he won’t be to sustain this every time out, as evidenced by his past struggles.

Patino has really struggled with walks as he’s progressed through the minor leagues, especially when reaching new levels. He had an 11.4% walk rate in his Double-A debut, and a 16.5% walk rate in his MLB debut last season. He even had a 9% walk rate at Triple-A prior to his promotion. It’s possible that he is attempting to overcome his walk issues by hammering the zone, and his fastball zone rate is 7% higher this season compared to 2020. Obviously, Patino is getting better results this season (it couldn’t be much worse that 2020), but there must be a happy medium between walking 16.5% of hitters and pounding the zone so much that batters tee off on a beastly fastball. He’ll likely wind up closer to the zone-pounding pitcher we’ve seen this season, which is better for him, but if he can fine-tune his command, he certainly has room to throw outside the zone more often. Patino does have an 85^th percentile chase rate this season, so batters will take hacks. He just needs to be confident and precise enough to make them chase.

The way Patino has earned most of those hacks is with his slider, a wavy 86 MPH offering that excels in spin rate and vertical drop. Trying to square this pitch up has been an exercise in futility for opposing hitters, as batters are hitting just .109 with a .261 SLG against Patino’s slider all season. The pitch has been a strikeout machine, as Patino has an 18.6% swinging strike rate and 30.2% chase rate against his slider this season. Even when hitters do make contact, it’s been low-probability balls-in-play, as opponents have an 86.2 MPH average exit velocity, 32-degree average launch angle, and 57.7% flyball rate off Patino’s slider this year. All of that weak contact has culminated in a .137 xBA and .208 xwOBA, suggesting that Patino has earned every bit of success he’s had with the slider. Here are two examples of sliders from this year.

These two examples show that Patino can be effective with the pitch by throwing it away from righties, which is how sliders are traditionally used, and also be effective going at hitters. The slider is good enough that Patino can throw it in the zone with confidence, at it’s late movement can be especially deceptive to hitters guessing (or hoping for a) fastball, which is something fastball-crushers like Franmil Reyes often do, even with two strikes. Patino’s slider is a legitimate strikeout pitch and between his slider and fastball should have no issue maintaining an above average strikeout rate in the majors.

We’ve gone over Patino’s fastball and slider at length, but the rest of his repertoire is something of a mixed bag. He does have a show-me changeup that he used effectively in 2020, but he’s hardly used it this season, throwing the pitch just 6.6% of the time. He’s also introduced a sinker this year, which has been pretty effective in generating weak contact with an 86.4 MPH average exit velocity against and a .141 xBA. However, it is a small sample size as he’s only thrown 41 pitches classified as a sinker. That’s hardly enough to draw conclusions from. He’s also thrown the rare curveball, which is something he introduced over his last four MLB starts, but he’s throwing it so infrequently that it’s inconsequential at this point. The changeup is Patino’s best of the bunch, and I’d like to see him throw it more to round out his arsenal and make him less reliant on two pitches. He has thrown it over 9% of the time over his last two starts, so perhaps he’s slowly making that shift.

The biggest limiting factor for Patino outside of repertoire is innings and efficiency. The Rays have allowed him to go over 90 pitches in each of his last three starts, but Patino has been able to complete six innings just once during that stretch. Furthermore, we’ve already highlighted his fastball command issues, but the walks have reared their ugly head ago for Patino. He has issued five free passes over his last two starts. His fastball, while good on paper, has proven more hittable than one would expect due to Patino’s control, so it’ll be extra hard to keep runs off the board if he’s giving up singles and walks. Altogether, we’re dealing with a raw talent who has aspects of his game that need to be ironed out and that probably won’t happen midseason.

Verdict:

There is clearly a lot of talent in this young arm and Patino has front line potential one day, but that day is likely a few years into the future. With every start becoming more and more crucial, it’d be hard to trust Patino as an every time starter for the rest of 2021. Rather, he is a situational streamer in standard leagues. He is in my favorite category of streamer for head-to-head leagues, which is a high-risk, high-reward option. It’s rare to find someone on the wire who could go out and get 8-10 strikeouts in a given start, but Patino has that potential. Of course, it comes with the downside of getting tagged for 4+ runs, which Patino had done in his three starts prior to Thursday. He’s the exact type of pitcher you use in H2H categories leagues when you’re willing to sacrifice ratios for volume, strikeouts, and upside. His next start comes tonight against Seattle, and he is streamable in that game.

Marco Gonzales, Seattle Mariners

38% Rostered

2021 Stats (prior to this start): 67.1 IP, 5.48 ERA, 6.02 FIP, 2.2 K/BB ratio

08/01 @ TEX: 6 IP, 5 H, 1 ER, 0 BB, 4 K

Prior to 2021, Gonzales was the epitome of boring reliability. If a Toyota Corolla were a baseball player, it would be Marco Gonzales between 2018-2020. No one was excited to draft him and he never ever made a breakout candidate list, but we expected him to just show up and produce solid results yet again in 2021. However, that has not been the case. Gonzales has been hammered for a 5.15 ERA and 5.68 FIP this season, along with a 2.09 HR/9. Gonzales has allowed at least one run in every start this season, and has allowed multiple runs in all but three starts. His poor performance has caused Gonzales to fall off the fantasy radar, and because he was already on the cusp of fantasy viability, few have noticed his recent strong performance. Is the real Marco Gonzales back, or was this just a good day against a bad team?

Gonzales uses a five-pitch mix on the mound consisting of a four-seam fastball, sinker, curveball, cutter, and changeup. Gonzales is something of a junk-baller, as he has an average fastball velocity of just 88.3 MPH, and throws four of his pitches at least 13% of the time. While he may toss a bunch of junk at the plate, his changeup has long being considered his best pitch. It’s a 79.4 MPH offering with an abnormally high spin rate of 2190 RPM, which is actually higher than his fastball spin rate.

When looking at why Gonzales has been so bad this season, we first need to look at what made him so good in the past. We know he’s not exactly a “stuff” guy, and he was never blowing pitches by anyone. He’s also been a high WHIP pitcher just about every season except 2020, and his career 1.31 WHIP is a little high compared to his ERA, especially since Gonzales wasn’t getting those strikeouts to overcome baserunners. Gonzales really thrived off one thing, which has been limiting hard contact. Prior to 2021, Gonzales consistently kept his average exit velocity against around 88 MPH and his hard hit rate around 35%. This year both numbers have ballooned to 90 MPH and 43.5%. Gonzales really needs to induce weak contact because he is not an exceptional ground ball pitcher. Because of the spike in hard contact, Gonzales’s barrel rate has also exploded to 14%, which ties him with Tarik Skubal for the most barreled up starting pitcher in the majors. He’s given up as many barrels this season (32) as he did in 2019 despite throwing over 2000 fewer pitches. Gonzales didn’t have much margin for error, and a hefty increase in hard hit rate took away his best skill as a starter.

So, what happened? Is he just a victim of the newer, lighter ball that has exit velocity up across the league? That is most likely a factor, but Gonzales is also throwing his fastball in the zone more than previous seasons. The zone rate on his fastball is up 6% this year, and he’s shown a noticeable increase in higher fastballs in 2021. Here is a heatmap comparison on his fastball prior to this season (top) and in 2021 (bottom).

He is clearly focused on elevation, and while that is the modern trend in baseball, Gonzales hardly fits the modern pitcher archetype. Not only is this high-fastball approach leading to more hits and harder hit balls against his fastball, it’s also causing his walk rate to soar. One of Gonzales best skills alongside inducing weak contact has been exceptional control, but his 8.2% walk rate is by far a career-high outside of his rookie year. The high fastball approach has worked for a lot of pitchers, including pitchers with weaker stuff, but it doesn’t seem to be the right method for Gonzales based on his 2021 performance.

Is there any sign for hope? He has done a much better job of limiting hard contact as of late Here is a game-by-game graph of his average exit velocity against for his sinker and changeup, his two most frequently used pitches.

He’s clearly trending in the right direction, but taking a game-by-game approach to exit velocity is tricky because something that appears to be an actual change could just be natural fluctuations. It is encouraging that he’s far from his peak and only allowed an 81.6 MPH average exit velocity in his most recent start, but it’s hard to buy back into him on this alone.

From a streaming perspective, Gonzales is about the exact opposite of Luis Patino. Where Patino could go out and dominate with a high-strikeout performance, Gonzales is someone you’re just hoping walks the tightrope for 6-7 innings and comes away with a win or quality start. There’s value in that, but Gonzales carries a lot of the same downside as Patino since both have massive blow up potential. One point in Gonzales’s favor is that a lot of damage came in two horrific seven-run outings this season. If we take out those two games his ERA would be 3.80, which is about in line with what we expected from him coming into the year. Obviously, we can’t take those starts out of his real ERA, and if you started Gonzales for one of those you can’t take it out of your ERA either, but it goes to show how much two bad days can influence ERA.

Verdict:

Gonzales was already putting up results that exceeded his underlying numbers prior to 2021, and he hasn’t made enough in season adjustments to suggest a turnaround is coming. He could be a low-end streamer depending on the matchup, but I would not be excited to use him nor would I expend any resources such as FAB or trade capital to acquire him. His next start is at the Yankees, which I’d avoid. After that he has two straight starts against these same Texas Rangers, a ballclub with an 85 wRC+ against left-handed pitching. That was before they lost Joey Gallo and Adolis Garica came crashing back to Earth. Texas is a very bad lineup, and Gonzales is a weak streamer in those matchups, but not much outside of that. For fantasy purposes, we're probably best off considering this a lost season for Gonzales.

Vladimir Gutierrez, Cincinnati Reds

8% Rostered

2021 Stats (prior to this start): 60.2 IP, 4.75 ERA, 5.88 FIP, 1.5 K/BB ratio

08/01 @ NYM: 7 IP, 3 H, 1 ER, 2 BB, 4 K

The other Vladdy G. hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as the one in Toronto, but he has quietly put together a nice little stretch over the last month. Over his last five starts, Gutierrez has a 3.68 ERA, and that includes a six-run outing back on July 19 against these same Mets. He has allowed two or fewer runs in four of his last five starts and notched a quality start in those four starts. Gutierrez has solidified his role in Cincinnati’s rotation and seems to have earned the trust of his manager to pitch deep into games. He might be an under-the-radar quality starts source down the stretch, but his ugly overall numbers and limited track record means he deserves extra scrutiny before we insert him into our lineup.

Gutierrez signed with the Reds back in 2016 after defecting from the Cuban national team a year prior, earning himself a hefty $4.75 million dollar signing bonus. Despite the hefty price tag, Gutierrez wasn’t a highly touted prospect coming up in Cincinnati’s system, profiling more as a fifth-starter/swingman type rather than a reliable innings eater. Part of that is because Gutierrez never pitched well in the minors, posting ERAs north of 4.30 at High-A and Double-A, and an hideous 6.04 ERA at Triple-A in 2019. Things did change for him this year, as he posted a 2.65 ERA at Triple-A, though he only made three starts. It was enough for the pitching-needy Reds to give him a chance.

Gutierrez uses a four-pitch mix consisting of a four-seam fastball, slider, curveball, and changeup. He averages 93.2 MPH on the gun with his fastball, which is right around league average. The same is true of his 2165 RPM on the fastball, making this pitch remarkably average. Opponents have performed well above average against Gutierrez’s fastball, with a .302 AVG and .563 SLG against. They’ve also hammered the pitch for a 90.1 MPH average exit velocity and 12-degree average launch angle, which basically means the average hit against this pitch is a screaming line drive. The fact of the matter is, an average fastball simply isn’t good enough for fantasy where our standards for starting pitchers are higher than MLB teams just trying to field a healthy squad in a deep 30-team league.

Gutierrez’s breaking balls have earned him more adoration than the heater, and he has gotten solid results with both the slider and curveball this season. As average as Gutierrez’s fastball may be, he does have above average break and spin with his curveball and slider, and those two pitches have been the key to his success.

No pitch has been a bigger strikeout weapon for Gutierrez than his slider. Now, you may be looking at his 6.12 K/9 and think “What strikeout weapon? This dude doesn’t get any strikeouts” but his slider has actually been an effective swing-and-miss pitch independent of Gutierrez’s overall strikeout rate. Batters have a 17.6% swinging strike rate against Gutierrez’s slider, along with a .210 AVG and .403 SLG against. This has helped boost Gutierrez’s overall swinging strike rate to 9.8%, which isn’t good by any means, but it would suggest he’s capable of better than his 15.8% overall strikeout rate. Gutierrez has a bottom-15 strikeout rate among starting pitchers (min. 60 IP), but his swinging strike rate is nowhere near the bottom. This isn’t to suggest there is great strikeout potential lurking in this arm, but he was able to maintain at strikeout rate of 19% or higher at every level of the minor leagues prior to his promotion, so it’s possible he could have room to grow.

Even if his strikeout rate improves, there are still some warts to Gutierrez’s game that concern me over the long term. He has struggled mightily with the long ball this season, serving up 13 bombs in 12 starts for a 1.73 HR/9. This is not an isolated issue either, as Gutierrez allowed 1.71 HR/9 in Triple-A in 2019. Gutierrez seems to have heavy fly ball tendencies, with a fly ball rate hovering around 40% at every level, including his 39.1% this season in the majors. Pitchers in certain ballparks or divisions might be able to get away with that, but not when you pitch in Great American Ballpark. In fact, Statcast’s expected home run total by park for Gutierrez is highest in Cincinnati, tied with Yankee Stadium and T-Mobile Park.

Gutierrez been absolutely crushed at home as well, posting a 7.17 ERA in Cincinnati, but a 3.11 ERA on the road. He’s also had just one home start all season where he didn’t allow a homer, and has allowed five home runs over his last three starts. When I look at this issue for Gutierrez, I can’t help but be reminded of Anthony DeSclafani, who is also a flyball-heavy pitcher that was just punished for having the misfortune of pitching in Cincinnati. Unfortunately, I don’t think Gutierrez is on the same skill level as DeSclafani, who was (sometimes) able to overcome his Gopheritis and put together some good seasons. It’s taken a .246 BABIP and 80.7% strand rate for Gutierrez to even have a 4.39 ERA. While his flyball tendencies and ability to limit hard contact (35.4% hard hit rate against) should help him maintain a better than average BABIP, .246 is beyond the threshold of sustainability outside of extreme luck and strong defense, the latter of which he simply won’t be afforded by the Reds. While his strikeout rate could improve over time, overall he has nowhere to go but down.

Verdict:

Good on Gutierrez for getting the most out his limited stuff, but at the end of the day it’s still limited stuff. He, like Marco Gonzales, doesn’t pack the big upside to warrant the blow-up downside he’s shown this season in most circumstances. In deep leagues I’d be willing to stream him in a pitcher-friendly park against a weak lineup because he has performed much better outside of Cincinnati. His next start is home against Pittsburgh, which is quite the conundrum as it’s the best team to face, but the worst ballpark for Gutierrez to take the hill. His recent hot streak has coincidentally come on the road, and his overall schedule has skewed so road-heavy that an already small split sample is even smaller, therefore I think I’d risk using him in deep leagues in this matchup. Still, the upside is a four-strikeout quality start with a couple walks thrown in for good measure.

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