Pitcher Statcast: Using Sabermetrics for 2023 Fantasy Baseball

Rick Lucks breaks down Statcast metrics for pitchers and evaluates what role they should play in fantasy baseball analysis as his series on making sabermetrics more accessible to fantasy managers continues.

Statcast metrics such as Barrels and Brls/BBE are great ways to evaluate a fantasy baseball batter's performance, so it is only natural to assume that the metrics would be predictive for pitchers as well. As much as batters want to hit a Barrel every time, pitchers want to avoid them at all costs. Yet, there is evidence that pitchers do not have the same influence over Barrels as a batter does.

Aaron Judge finished with a league-leading 106 Barrels hit in 2022. Jordan Lyles copped the league lead among pitchers by allowing 59, a significantly lower number than Judge's total. Judge's total was an outlier, but if we substitute Yordan Alvarez's 78 Barrels, it still seems to take fewer Barrels to lead pitchers than hitters. This fits well with DIPS theory, which states that batters can do more to influence batted balls than pitchers can.

It's also not fantasy-relevant, as Lyles isn't an appealing fantasy option for 2023. The next five names on the leaderboard include names that have reputations as contact managers: Patrick Corbin (58 Barrels allowed), Cole Irvin (55), Kyle Freeland (55), and a tie between Madison Bumgarner and Jose Berrios (52). Are these numbers indicative of anything?

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How to Interpret Statcast Contact Quality Allowed

Using the Brls/BBE leaderboard might seem like a better bet than raw Barrel totals, but that list consists exclusively of terrible arms: Rony Garcia (16.3%), Yusei Kikuchi (14.8%), Bruce Zimmermann (13.2%), Elieser Hernandez (13%), and Vince Velasquez (also 13%). Nobody was looking to draft these guys anyway, so we don't need Brls/BBE to tell us to avoid them.

None of the names above really warrant a deep dive for fantasy purposes, so let's look at a guy who had a reputation for being hit hard before winning the AL Cy Young award in 2021: Robbie Ray. Ray's Statcast contact quality metrics weren't good by any means, as his raw total of 46 Barrels allowed tied for the 10th-highest among qualified pitchers while his 9.8% rate of Brls/BBE ranked 15th that year. It also didn't seem to matter if his 2.84 ERA was any indication.

Lest you dismiss Ray's 2021 season as "lucky," it's worth pointing out that his reputation for allowing hard contact isn't reflected in his career Statcast numbers. The following chart lists Ray's Brls/BBE and ERA in each year of the Statcast Era, exempting 2020 for sample size purposes:

Year          Brls/BBE          ERA

2015          5.1%                   3.52

2016          6.9%                  4.90

2017          5.1%                   2.89

2018         8.7%                   3.93

2019         10.6%                 4.34

2021         9.8%                   2.84

2022         7.9%                   3.71

Ray's Barrels allowed fluctuate wildly, with his best ERA corresponding to his second-worst Brls/BBE mark. Last season, Ray's ERA ballooned by almost a full run despite dropping his rate of Brls/BBE by nearly two full percentage points. If there is anything predictive here, this author fails to see it.

Maybe we need to simplify this and just use average airborne exit velocity. The top five in FB/LD EV allowed last season were Kikuchi (96.1 mph), Josh Winckowski (95.3), Roansy Contreras (95.2), Velasquez (95), and Nathan Eovaldi (94.9). This might seem troubling considering the contract Eovaldi received from the Rangers, but the top five in the past has included names such as Justin Verlander and Luis Castillo. If you avoided the top five last season, you missed out on Shane McClanahan, Framber Valdez, and Jorge Lopez. Ouch.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Statcast metrics such as Barrels and average airborne exit velocity should probably just be ignored for pitcher analysis. These metrics are great for evaluating batters, but this author can't get anything out of them for pitchers even with the benefit of hindsight. That conclusion may make this seem like a worthless article, but it isn't.

Seemingly every fantasy analyst uses contact quality to credit pitchers, either through the Statcast numbers above or an approximation such as the Hard% posted on FanGraphs. This type of analysis may explain a pitcher's performance after the fact, but it seems to have zero predictive value. Therefore, there may be a competitive advantage to be gained by ignoring this type of analysis completely. Stay tuned to learn more about predictive metrics that could give you an edge all fantasy season.

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