Ted Lilly fantasy analysis

As part of my new format, I will look at what Ted Lilly can do for your fantasy team and why he seems to have turned it around.

Yesterday he had an amazing game. Here's his line:
Date Opp W L IP HA ER BB K

05/09

ARI

1

0

7.0

3

1

2

10

A pretty amazing line. In the past I have been sucked into this line to pick him up only for him to falter and kill my ERA and WHIP. Right now his season stat line looks like this:

SEASON

TEAM

G

GS

CG

SHO

IP

H

R

ER

HR

BB

SO

W

L

ERA

2008 Chc 8 8 0 0 44.2 42 26 26 7 16 39 3 4 5.24
When you look at his game log it's like a tale of two Ted's. The first month, I could walk up to the plate and get a hit off of him. The last 3-4 starts though he has been amazing. So let's look at his pitch F/X data to see if there is anything definitive in there to explain the turnaround. The graphs will go in order by date (5/9, 5/3, 4/17, 4/12). Each row represents one date. All the graphs are courtesy of Dan Brooks and his web based tool until I get my own database fully functional.

First the last two good starts.


Now two of his previous starts which did not go so well.



Looking at these I see two things. First his command has improved. While it is not necessarily a vast improvement, this is a game of inches or less and thus any slight improvement can produce vastly different results. If you look at his release point you will see a much tighter and higher release point than before. By releasing it higher and more concentrated between his different pitches, the hitters won't be able to see what he is throwing and he should have more movement on his pitches as well. Finally, the last graph charts the break of the pitches. In his good starts, his break in also more centralized and has more break as well on all of his pitches. Looking at the earlier starts, he didn't have control of the break of the pitch and therefore couldn't tell where the pitch was going to go when he released it. Combine that with a more open release point allowing batters to see the ball better and you end up with poor results. One final thing you can determine is that he is not injured as he has become more centralized with all of his charts.

Now let's look to see if he has been lucky or unlucky. Looking at his QuickERA and BABIP (I explained both in earlier posts) I think he can improve even more.

His season ERA currently stands at 5.24 even after his great start yesterday. His quickERA is 4.42 though. Almost a full run better. His BABIP though is now 0.271. This is on the low end of the normal range. This tells me that he has been both lucky in terms of BABIP and unlucky with his ERA. It's quite likely that the BABIP will stay that low but if it does his only has 4 more hits which would raise his overall WHIP to 1.37.

Ted has been an increadibly streaky player in the past and I expect him to do more of the same. He can easil rip off 4-5 more great starts and then amazingly and out of no where begin to have disastrous results.

I recommend him for larger mixed leagues and all NL-only leagues with the caveat that at the first sign of trouble, bench him. He is currently owned in about 50% of ESPN leagues and 84% of CBS leagues.

Tomorrow we will break down Mad Max Scherzer to see if he is worth a bench spot even if he gets sent back down.

Mark Buehrle

The inaugural pitcher for my new pitching feature will be Mark Buehrle.

First his true pitching line:

Year Team INN GS W L S K BBI HA ERA WHIP 2008 CHW 42.3 7 1 4 0 27 11 52 5.32 1.49 He has also given up 4 HR.

I know, not good at all. 1-4 is never good. Nor is the ERA or WHIP. In order to decide which pitchers are "unlucky" I've decided to use QuickERA and BABIP from Baseballprospectus.com

To sum up QuickERA uses BB rate, SO rate, and GB% as stats. These stabilize much faster than other statistics and thus are much better used for analysis when the IP isn't very high. BABIP measures how many batted balls fall in for hits. Voros McCracken and others have shown that the average is .290 and a range of .270-.310 is part of the "normal" distribution.

So applying those stats to the above line I get the following changes:

Hits allowed decreases from 52 to 44
QuickERA decreases to 4.27, a difference of 1.04
WHIP decreases to 1.30, a difference of .12

Are these earth shattering changes? No. They absolutely would help a fantasy team though. Especially considering the other options out there in most leagues, Mark clearly looks to have a disadvantage in the luck department so far.

I recommended picking up Buehrle immediately if he is on the wire. If he is on your team keep starting him. If he is on another team see if you can trade for him, as other people likely value him as a 5th or 6th starter.

Currently owned in 77% of CBS leagues and only 33.7% in ESPN leagues.

New Feature

Today I've decided to start a new feature on the blog. I've noticed around several fantasy baseball sites that daily suggestions regarding which players would improve and which ones would get worse is very much desired. So for the time being, I will be making one pitcher suggestion each day. If people want a hitter selection, I can begin to see which ones I like there too.

Dana Eveland Comparison

After that lengthy breakdown of his last start, I'd like to do a little comparison of his start last night (5-5-08) and his previous one of 4-30-08 that i broke down in my last post. I intend to see if there are any differences that made him more effective or if it was just luck. After all my hard work of breaking down innings, 2 days later Dan Brooks made it a lot easier by using an innings filter at his web based tool located here. Until I have my database fully loaded and get my graphing tools on-line, I will refer to Dan Brooks' graphs, since they are incredibly detailed and what my main goal was.

Last breakdown by inning from his start on 4-30-08 can be seen here.

Last night, Eveland was unbelievable. His release point was noticeably different, sitting at 2 feet horizontally. Comparison with the 4-30 game first.



If you go a little further, you will find that his trouble innings in his first start can with a release point closer to the 1' horizontal mark.

Second thing we looked at was pitch location. Again the 4-30 start is listed first.



He was also more effective in keeping his pitches lower in the zone and not as wild. He didn't have as many pitches that were a foot or outside of the zone, so he was able to keep the hitters off balance a little more so than previously. In particular he had much better command of his curveball keeping it out of the middle of the zone.

Here we looked at was the break of the pitches.



Looking at this it doesn't appear like there is much difference initially, but if you look closer you will see that he had more clustering of his pitches than before. Therefore he had a better idea/touch on the pitch about how far it would break or not break. This is incredibly important when trying to hit the corners or keep it low in the zone. If a pitcher is more comfortable just throwing the ball and knowing that it will stay down, he is less prone to be wild by trying to aim it.

Lastly, something that i didn't look at before that I thought of earlier today was the pitch speed.



While the axis aren't the same you can see roughly that his latest start he changed speed better. Changing speeds, hitting spots, releasing it more consistently and a better control of the break leads to very effective pitching.

So now onto the analysis of whether or not he is/was injured and the severity. The easy way would be to look at his stat line and clearly say that he's not, in this instance that's true. That's not always the case though and that's why I specifically chose the graphs above to determine whether or not he was still injured.

Usually the process will sort of entail the opposite of what we just did above. We'll usually be looking for whether a pitcher is injured and thus comparing his last start to previous "healthy" starts. Every once in a while though it's good to analyze a known bad game vs a known good game back to back to see if we can learn anything.

Fantasy wise, I like to make my decisions based on fact rather than assumptions or feelings. Looking at the graphs above, I can clearly see that he's not effected by the "injury" and is in fact healthy at this point. I will continue to monitor him and compare his next few starts to these starts and see where we stand.

Evidence based practice in medicine is basing your decisions on researched and proven data/scenarios. I feel that in terms of health, fantasy baseball players need to take the same approach. Look at the evidence we had and have now. Previously, he had good control, excellent break, etc and then he had a bad game possibly due to injury in which the wheels fell off. The next game he threw a great game and rebounded back to previous levels, showing none of the "signs and symptoms" of an injured player.

Therefore my recommendation is to continue pitching Dana Eveland in all formats especially when he is at home.

Dana Eveland's Breakdown of last start

Ok, almost everyone is at the point of the year where the second guessing of your fantasy teams start to come into play. Do I play him or sit him? Do I trade him, drop him, or sit him on the bench. These are very important decisions and the decisions made now can effect what you're going to do later on in the year, which brings me to my question of the night. Fantasy Championships are at stake and the following question will come up time and time again.

What do I do about Eveland?

The only thing that has me worried is that he complained of a "twinge" in his elbow warming up in his last start. So let's see if/how much it effected him in his last start. While I understand that this may not be the best method to determine if it effected him, I want to see if there are any glaring problems first from multiple viewpoints. Here is the comparison of his release point across each inning:

His release point at quick glance looks a little fishy. (click on the image for full size view). However if you look closer, his best inning in terms of matching his release point is clearly the first. In the second, his release point is all over the place and then begins to settle down over the next several innings until the 6th when it starts to vary again. I don't think it's a coincidence that the innings in which his release point varied, he happenned to struggle. Vertically he's very consistent where he was previously releasing the ball until the 6th inning when he starts to tire. Horizontally though, he was wavering a lot approaching 6" at a time.

Next, I want to look at his pitch location. Same thing, click on the image below for a full size view.

This clearly shows that his command struggles in those same innings, not only in or out of the zone but where in the zone he was wild. Putting fastballs and sliders into the middle of the plate is a recipe for disaster and Eveland is example #1.

Finally this last set measures the break of his pitches.

From here we can see that again, those trouble innings are when he had his problems with his movement or lack thereof at times. What I see is that in the 2nd and in the 6th when he really had problems, it was his lack of movement on his slider and fastball that did him in. Both of those pitches lacked the roughly 5" movement and break that appears to give him his success. Josh Kalk's player card shows that these are his overall averages::

Type	Movement in x (in.)	Movement in z (in.)	Initial Speed (MPH)	Number Thrown	Percent
Fastball	7.9	8.31	90.92	299	59.14
Curve	-5.95	-7.75	79.43	39	8.6
Slider	-7.02	-1	83.9	79	32.26
Change	12.12	7.92	83.6	53	0
Cutter	-2.96	3.66	84.62	2	0

You can see that he was all over the place compared to his averages after the 2nd inning. Any pitcher will tell you that how important it is to hit the spots where they want to and throw the pitch effectively.

Summary: If there wan an injury it really did not appear to effect him long term. He came back after the 2nd inning and settled down well until he was singled to death in the 6th. Whatever it was did not cause him to drop his shoulder or greatly effect his break on his pitches.

Also good news: We all know that pitchers who call Oakland home have that cavernous park as an advantage. According to Jane Lee at MLB.com "Eveland is 2-0 with a 1.42 ERA when pitching at home. His road numbers -- 1-2 with a 4.98 ERA in four starts -- got worse when the lefty surrendered six runs in 5 1/3 innings in his last start against the Angels after allowing just nine runs over 29 innings in his first five starts." Guess where he is pitching on Monday.

Conclusion: It does appear that he felt something in the second inning which caused him to really have trouble finding his command and break of his pitches. Whether that was due to a problem with his release point or an inability to "snap" off his pitches is a difficult one. I have him in my league and I will be starting him until he shows me that the injury is greater than what it seems or that his "stuff" has dropped off.


As usual, please let me know if you are interested in this type of statistical analysis and if you would like more. I'm always open to suggestions if anyone has anyone in particular in mind.