Oak's Corner: Dealing With Pitching in an Offensive Era

Now that we are into the second half of the season and the weather is really warming up, it's quite clear that the 2019 home run craze is just getting ramped up, and it seems to be getting more pronounced. Just in the last week since the All-Star Break, while watching games I have seen at least 10 homers that looked like line drive doubles in the gap or fly outs that left the park. Of course, there's nothing we can do about; it's the new reality right now, but how do we deal with it from a fantasy angle?

The first item of business is to change your mind set about what you need from your pitchers, as your goal ERA coming into the season may no longer be realistic or even what you need to compete in your league. Your actual team ERA isn't the number that's important, it's all about where that number puts you relative to the rest of your competition. In my NFBC leagues, more than half the teams have team ERAs over 4.00 on the season, and the all-time homerun record for an NFBC is going to be shattered this year. So, as you have pitchers who get hit a little bit, it's important to remember that we don't need quite the gems we used to need and when you do get one, they are even more golden than they used to be.

The other angle with the crazy offense (my goodness, Yandy Diaz just hit a pop up to left field in Yankee Stadium that went out as I'm writing this) is that your FAAB picking pickups have to be sharper than ever. The chances of grabbing a guy off the waiver wire just because he has a two-start week and having him not hurt you is much lower than it was three or four years ago when it seemed easy to find decent starts. Now you're liable to get seven earned runs in the first inning (thanks Jesse Chavez), or not even have a guy get through five in either start. Unless I'm in a league where I have really good ratios and need wins and strikeouts, I'm going to be less aggressive with two-start pitchers and really try and find fringe guys in great matchups or even suck it up and add and use a strong middle reliever for a week. We will still run into some blowups and bad outings, but every add should be considered even more deeply than usual and be made for a sound reason.

The Week That Was

I was really excited for the spectacle that was Shohei Ohtani coming to America last year, but more so out of curiosity of him as a two-way player and how the Angels would deal with it than the numbers he would actually post as a 24-year-old rookie. The arm injury gave him a late start this season, and he's just hitting, but I have been stunned by just how great a hitter he is already. After hitting 22 homers in 2018, in only 59 games this year, Ohtani already has 14 homers and has also tossed in six stolen bases to go with a .303 average.

After an impressive amount of hard contact in 2018 (43.1 percent hard hit rate), Ohtani has ramped that up to 49.4 percent, a rate that puts him 11th in all of baseball among players with at least 200 plate appearances. In addition to improving the hard hit rate, Ohtani has impressively dropped his strikeout rate four percent to 23.8 percent. The one thing keeping Ohtani from lighting it up even more for fantasy teams is his low 22.6 fly ball rate, as he has hit 51.2 percent ground balls so far this year. If he can ramp it up to even 2018's 32.9 fly ball rate, the homers will come even more regularly in the second half. Just to make his profile look even better, his average exit velocity of 93.1 mph puts him in the top 10 in MLB.

Moving toward 2020 for Ohtani, the real question from a fantasy angle will be how the Angels handle him in terms of his desire to pitch. If he comes back as a starting pitcher in 2020, it will be important to know if the Angels want him to take days off from hitting around the days he takes the mound as they did last year. If so, that would clearly impair his upside on the offensive side of the ball. He'd be tough to play in weekly leagues due to the missed time. With Ohtani's clear pitching skills we saw last year (3.31 ERA in 10 starts), if he was just an above average hitter, I would give him another shot at starting if I were the Angels, but at the level of offense he is currently providing, I'd take the pitching injury risk out of the mix and let him play every day in the outfield. It may come down to how strongly Ohtani wants to pitch as to how the Angels handle it, but that decision will greatly impact just how high Ohtani the hitter rises in drafts next year.

FAAB Feelings

As noted above in the discussion regarding the juiced balls and pitching environment, useable two-start pitchers are going to be really tough to find if you need wins and strikeouts, but each week the rest of the way, I'll try and find a couple who are available in free agency (even some in 15-teamers) to hopefully help avoid blowups (sometimes deciding not to pick up someone is just as important), but also find some decent ones.

Dario Agrazal. I looked at Agrazal a bit last week when I was making moves, and he went out and pitched well again this week, allowing one earned run in six innings against the Cardinals, albeit with zero strikeouts. He has now made four starts for the Pirates, posting an impressive 2.45 ERA and grabbing two wins. However, when you add a fringe two-start pitcher, you have to be able to count on some strikeouts, as the wins are tough to count on, and he has a ridiculous low 2.9 K/9 rate with only seven punch outs in his 22 major league innings. Of course, that's an incredibly small amount of innings, but a look at his minor league numbers doesn't offer a lot of room for strikeout optimism as he has never topped 7.1 K/9 in any minor league level.

Agrazal does have excellent command with a 1.8 BB/9 walk rate this year in 55 Triple-A innings to go with a history of low walk rates in the minors. Matchups are obviously important week to week, and his two starts this week are home against the Cardinals, which looks nice as the Cardinals rank 28th in slugging against righties and at the Mets who are also bottom half in that statistic. So the matchups are good, and, looking at his ERA, could be appealing. While I suppose he's an add in an NL-only leagues, the complete paucity of strikeouts and a strong feeling that he is due for some rough outings (his FIP is 5.71) is going to make him a pass for me, no matter how sexy the ERA looks in the free agent stats section.

Homer Bailey. Bailey was dealt to the A's last week in what figures to be one of the many trades this month as the deadline approaches. As an A's fan, I was lukewarm at best about the acquisition, as he brought with him a 4.80 ERA. Bailey is scheduled to start twice this week, one in Houston and other at home against the Rangers. He made his first start in the green and gold Wednesday against the Mariners and pitched very well, allowing only two early runs while striking out six and walking no one. The move to Oakland plus the successful first start with them figures to make Bailey a popular add this week, as he's only owned at 58 percent in NFBC Main Event leagues and 25 percent in the 12-team format.

Overall, Bailey's numbers look pretty pedestrian with a 4.69 ERA and a 1.40 Whip to go with a 8.2 K.9 strikeout rate in 96 innings. The scary part comes when you look at his last two seasons when he posted bloated ERAs of 6.09 and 6.43 with 196.1 innings with the Reds. However, on the positive side, his strikeout rate is up more than two strikeouts per nine from those two seasons, and his swinging strike rate is back over 10 percent for the first time since 2014.

The most interesting note when looking at Bailey is how effective he has been recently. After those rough first two months of the season, Bailey's year looked very much like the last two years with a 5.79 ERA in 51.1 innings. However, since June 1, Bailey has been very effective throwing 44.2 innings with a 3.43 ERA, including the one start with the A's. During that stretch the hard hit rate is still 39.4 percent, and his strikeouts have actually dipped a bit at 7.7 K/9, so I'm not seeing any significant change in his actual profile that explains the better numbers. He'll be pitching half his games in a good park in front of an excellent defense, but I see Bailey as strictly a matchup or streaming play as of now, which means I'm going to pass this week with that road game against the Astros on tap.

A Closer Look

The key with closers in the next couple of weeks will be trying to hit on the guys who end up with jobs when the closers in front of them are dealt to contending teams. I covered a couple of those two weeks ago and wanted to quickly hit on a few more worth your attention this weekend in trying to jump the masses before the trade deadline.

Joe Jimenez. Jimenez is likely the next guy up if Shane Greene gets dealt by the Tigers, and he has been someone fantasy owners were even grabbing last year when Green was struggling. The two issues with Jimenez are that there are rumors that he might also get dealt at the deadline, and he just hasn't been very good this year. Jimenez owns an ugly 5.66 ERA through 35 innings, and while the 13.1 K/9 strikeout rate is nice, he's struggling with walks at 4.1 BB/9. When he doesn't get a strikeout, he's allowing a lot of loud contact with a 43 percent hard hit rate, which has clearly caused him problems, as he's already allowed eight homers. He has also struggled big time recently with a 9.26 ERA in 11.2 innings since June 1. While anyone with a closer job is going to be bid on and worthy of being owned, I'm lower than most on Jimenez due to recent performance and the trade rumors involving his name, too.

Richard Rodriguez. The Pirates closer, Felipe Vazquez, is a stud and would cost a pretty penny for another team to acquire, but there's a lot of smoke around his name heading to the deadline. Rodriguez is not a popular closer-in-waiting name like Jimenez or Aaron Bummer, but I have to think his recent performance gets him first crack at that job if Vazquez is dealt or at least he'll get a good chunk if they go to a committee. Since a brutal outing on May 30 where he allowed four earned runs, Rodriguez has made 19 appearances and allowed exactly zero runs in that stretch.

At 42.9 percent, his hard rate in that 0.00 ERA stretch is not impressive, but he's getting a lot of ground calls and amazingly only conceding 8.9 percent line drives. He has also cut his walks in his recent outings, which was a big problem for him in the early season. I don't love Rodriguez as a pitcher, but his recent form likely will give him first shot if the job opens up and he's available everywhere (two percent in NFBC 15-teamers, zero percent in the 12-teamers). He'll be really cheap right now.

Hunter Strickland. Strickland is another guy I don't necessarily love as a pitcher, but Roenis Elias has been the subject of a lot of trade rumors for teams who may need a lefty in their bullpen for the stretch drive. Further, after a stretch where Elias converted six saves in a row, he has struggled recently, allowing runs in four of his last six outings, so this may be a job Strickland gets whether Elias is traded or not. Strickland is still coming back from his lat injury but has been throwing side sessions and live batting practice and should go on a rehab assignment here shortly. The Mariners penned Strickland as the closer coming into this year, and while he's not going to be lights out, there's a really good chance it ends up being his job down the stretch. He has been scooped up in most 15-team leagues, but now is the time to grab him in a 12-teamer where his is only owned at 57 percent in the NFBC 12-team leagues.

Series of the Weekend

A's at Twins. Before the season, if anyone had said this would be a huge four-game series in mid-July, they would have likely been laughed at, but here we are. The Twins lead the AL Central by four games and lead the Majors in homers with 177, more than 10 ahead of the next highest team. The A's, who started slow, had won six in a row heading into Thursday night's tilt and have also won an incredible 19 of their last 25 games. At the start of that run, the A's trailed the AL West, leading Astros by 12 games and seemed likely to compete for a wild card at absolute best, but a mere month later, they have cut that deficit to 5.5 games. The A's got to face the struggling Mariners and White Sox coming out of the break, but this road trip to face a very good team should be a really fun test.

With the power breakout for Max Kepler and the surprising seasons of Jorge Polanco and C.J. Cron, the consistent greatness of Nelson Cruz has flown under the radar again. Despite missing three weeks in the first half for a wrist injury, Cruz already has 18 homers in only 67 games. After a slow start to his career that didn't see him log a full season in the majors until he was 29, Cruz has amassed an impressed 378 home runs in his career including an incredible run of 37 or more in each of the past five seasons.

As for 2019, the downside is that his strikeout rate has jumped up a good amount to 28.3 percent (he was 20.6 percent last year), which would easily be a career high, and his swinging strike is up a touch to 14 percent. However, he's also hitting the ball as hard as ever with an absurd 56.1 percent hard hit rate, which puts him just ahead of Christian Yelich for the highest in baseball among anyone who has at least 200 plate appearances, and his 19.9 percent barrels also puts him in the top five. The increased strikeouts are a bit of a concern, but I would love to trade for Cruz for the final two and a half months in the season if anyone is willing to deal him off his good, but not dynamic, first half.

Everyone gets tired of me talking about Matt Chapman and Ramon Laureano, so on the A's side of this series, I want to talk about Marcus Semien, who has quietly become the rock of this A's team on both sides of the ball. While Chapman is clearly the best player and Laureano makes all the dazzling plays in center field, Semien, through a ton of hard work, has turned himself from a true disaster on defense at shortstop when he got to the A's to one of the better defensive shortstops in the league.

On the offensive side of the ball, Semien is having his best offensive season, hitting a career high .271 with 14 homers and five steals. While strikeouts were never a major issue (usually in the low 20 percent range), he has greatly improved his contact rate this year, as he currently sits at a 13.2 percent strikeout rate while also walking at a career high 10.7 percent. While he is making a lot more contact, it also is better contact, as his hard hit rate is at a career high 39.1 percent (previous high was 32.5 percent), and his average exit velocity has never been higher at 88.2 mph. Most importantly from a fantasy perspective, he's leading off every day for an A's lineup that is now in the top 10 in runs, and he has benefitted from that with 66 runs scored already. Semien is going to end up someone who had no hype in drafts (his NFBC Main Event ADP was 215) but is going to pay off in a big, but still quiet, way in every league.