Stuff Model Pitcher Picks
Stuff+ can be pretty controversial. Some people dismiss it, some people make their whole personalities about it. The people who are most correct are somewhere in between those two.
The right answer, from what I can tell, is that Stuff+ is useful when you only have small pitching samples available to use in your effort to predict the future. We can know more quickly how good a pitcher will be in the future than we could before the advent of pitch modeling.
If you’re deciding who to draft between Logan Webb and Max Fried, Stuff+ isn’t going to help you. Those two are established veteran pitchers who have large sample sizes no matter what recent time frame you’re looking at.
But if you’re trying to pick between guys like Mick Abel and Slade Cecconi, it is wise to let Stuff+ influence your decision to some extent.
One major piece of evidence in the Stuff+ promoters favor is that OOPSY was the most accurate ERA projection system a year ago. OOSPY came online just last year, so it’s 1-for-1. That’s a small sample in and of itself, but it’s a good sign that intelligent integration of Stuff+ into pitcher projections does improve accuracy.
Now we have The Bat X pitcher projections, which include influence from pitch modeling stuff. It sounds like an even more complex model to boot. Derek Carty, the creator of these projections, came on the podcast to talk about it a couple of weeks ago. Check that out here:
His new BATCAST model even quantifies things like pitch sequencing and pitch tunneling. Which is pretty unique, advanced, and cool stuff. We’ll have to see if it’s enough to make The Bat X the new top dog for pitcher projections, but don’t be surprised if that happens!
So I wanted to look into which pitchers these two projection systems like more than the others. We’re comparing:
OOPSY
The Bat X
against
Steamer
ATC
The Bat
The Bat is just Carty’s pitcher projections that do not include the advanced data. So let’s do it!
Chase Burns
Bat X: 3.44
OOPSY: 2.96
ATC: 3.59
Steamer: 3.70
Bat: 3.85
This is one of those cases where the analytics have caught up to the eye test. That’s been happening for decades now. We might be reaching the final stages.
And it kinda sucks to have more of the answers, doesn’t it? I’ve talked about this before. Ten years ago, when the Pirates (my team) would have some prospect getting called up, I’d get excited because I thought like “hey maybe this guy will actually be good!”. And maybe I was just being stupid and should have known better, but obviously we have more information and predictive power on players now than ever before no matter who they are. So you can know which prospects can actually be good Major Leaguers and which cannot. We would have known that the Zach Duke 2005 rookie season was totally fake if it happened today. Back then, we thought we were cooking!
My point in that paragraph is to say that nobody who has watched Chase Burns would look at the Steamer projection and think that was credible. It’s a pretty unique situation where we have one of the nastiest pitchers in the game without a significant enough MLB sample coming into this year for the standard projection models to have picked up on the nastiness yet.
But OOPSY and The Bat X are all over it, giving Burns a much better ERA projection. In the case of OOPSY, it’s an elite ERA projection (#4 in the league behind the big three Skubal/Skenes/Crochet).
Unfortunately for those of us who had gotten a handful of Chase Burns shares early on in draft season (shout out to me), there are still reasons to not want to draft Burns for season-long fantasy this year. There are health concerns, no doubt about it. Even if some of the news on X recently about his range of motion and stuff is totally fake, this is a guy who had a flexor strain last summer. So there are legitimate injury concerns, and that makes him tough to rely on in a fantasy draft. But we’ll be all over him on DFS slates early on this year, hoping that some of the competition doesn’t quite understand how good he is.
Jacob Misiorowski
Bat X: 3.86
OOPSY: 3.41
ATC: 4.06
Steamer: 4.10
Bat: 4.09
This one is interesting. It’s a lot like Chase Burns in that this is a Stuff+ STUD with less than a half of a season of an MLB sample. But it’s different in that Misiorowski has a history of bad walk rates in the minor leagues.
His walk rates by level:
A (28 IP): 16.5% BB%
A+ (19 IP): 13.8% BB%
AA (101 IP): 14.5% BB%
AAA (81 IP): 12.7% BB%
MLB (66 IP): 11.4% BB%
If you’re a projection system looking at that but not giving him any sort of extra boost because of his elite stuff, you’re not going to come out with a very good projection.
And in this case, that might be mostly justified. The highest Stuff+ pitch in the world is no better than the worst Stuff+ pitch in the world if it’s thrown four inches off the plate. A ball is a ball, no matter how nasty.
My love for Misiorowski this year is about the Stuff+ in part. I don’t really need to go that far, though. It’s just about the fact that the dude throws a fastball that average 101.5mph in effective velo last year. That metric adjusts velo for extension. Misiorowski is a huge dude with huge velo. He’s releasing his 99mph way closer to the plate than the average pitcher, which makes the velo play up way above the elite mark he already has on it. He’s just not going to be a dude that gets hit very often.
But again, it only matters if he can throw strikes. So I give you one more number. A 33% Ball% on his 642 fastballs thrown last year. That’s really good. And to me, it means he can keep these walks in check. And with the strikeouts he’ll get, I think he can go for an 11% BB% and still be a dominant starter. Maybe he won’t be efficient, and maybe he won’t be clearing six innings very often, but I have a hard time believing the ERA will be anything but sparkling.
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