Are You For Real? Surprising SP Starts (Week 9)

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

Welcome to our surprising starts series. Every week we’ll be going over a few surprising starting pitcher performances around the majors to determine whether these starts were smoke and mirrors or something more.

This week we saw two Oakland right-hander's shut down the scuffling Diamondbacks. We also saw one of the key pieces to the Rays pitching experiment turn in his best performance yet.

Daniel Mengden has had a dominant month, which was capped by a CGSO of the Diamondbacks on Saturday. Frankie Montas pitched well against those same Diamondbacks the next day in his first MLB start of 2018. Ryan Yarbrough continued to pitch well after following Sergio Romo and turned in eight strikeouts against the Orioles.

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Real Deal or Mirage?

Daniel Mengden, Oakland Athletics

2018 stats prior to this start: 57.1 IP, 3.30 ERA, 3.45 FIP, 6.3 K/BB ratio

05/26 vs. ARI: 9 IP, 2 H, 0 ER, 0 BB, 5 K

Daniel Mengden’s season long stats are sparkling. He has a 2.85 ERA and an elite 7.17 K/BB ratio, which is the fourth best in the majors. Despite these stats, there are a few factors that make him a surprising starter. One, nobody believed in him. He was only 10% owned in Yahoo leagues prior to this start. Two, he has fooled us (well, fooled this writer at least) in the past. During his rookie year Mengden went four straight starts allowing three runs or fewer only to get blasted for the rest of the season and ultimately wound up with a 6.50 ERA. In 2017 he only made a few forgettable spot starts before posting a 1.54 ERA in September in 35 innings. Those September stats were questionable as Mengden was riding a .221 BABIP and 5% HR/FB ratio to much of his success. Third, his 5.83 K/9 is the sixth lowest among qualified starters, and the names below him aren’t pretty. His ownership has shot up 43% since this start, but can we finally trust Daniel Mengden?

Something to look at when a pitcher is doing unexpectedly well or pitching better than he ever has before is pitch mix. Looking at Mengden’s pitch mix the only thing he is doing differently is incorporating a sinker into his repertoire. The sinker has served him well as batters are hitting just .192 against it. It has been much better than his four-seamer, which batters are hitting .291 against this season and .279 against it all time. The sinker’s success has come from a .163 BABIP, which seems unsustainably low considering it only has a 43% groundball rate against and a 25% line drive rate against. According to Baseball Prospectus the average MLB sinker has a 53.8% groundball rate, so his sinker is getting a below average amount of groundballs yet has an astonishingly low BABIP against. This questionable sinker performance is only the tip of a larger issue with Mengden’s performance going back to last season, which is an incredibly low BABIP and no underlying metrics supporting an ability to manage balls in play the way we've seen pitchers like Kyle Hendricks do in seasons past.

Mengden has a .246 BABIP against and a .228 batting average against this season, but according to Statcast he has a .286 xBA , giving him the second largest gap between BA and xBA among qualified starters after Sean Manaea. He also has the third highest gap between SLG and xSLG (.374 SLG, .507 xSLG) and second highest gap between wOBA and xWOBA (.261 wOBA, .344 xwOBA). Mengden had similar discrepancies between surface stats and expected stats in 2017. His 16.6% soft contact rate and 89.2 MPH average exit velocity against are both worse than league average and don't suggest that he is doing anything special with contact management. Between last season and this season Mengden has been quite fortunate, and since this is only a 109 inning sample size it is far too early to consider whether Mengden can consistently outperform these metrics.

There are some things to like with Mengden, chiefly his stunning 2.3% walk rate. Mengden has the lowest walk rate among qualified pitchers. Eat your heart out, Miles Mikolas. This will pretty much ensure a low WHIP for Mengden, which can be a hard category to make up ground in as we get deeper into the season. He has also done a good job of suppressing home runs with a 0.81 HR/9 this season. His HR/FB rate is only 7.9%, a slight drop from the 11% in years past and Mengden may be due for regression, though his home ballpark has a home run factor of just .497 this season, lowest in the majors.

Verdict:

The peripherals suggest that Mengden has been among the most fortunate pitchers in baseball this season, and his 4.18 SIERA could be a sign of things to come. Mengden should help with WHIP and ERA to an extent, but his 5.83 K/9 is so low that it is actively detrimental. Strikeouts are more than an indicator of pitcher skill, they are one of the five pitching categories and extremely low strikeout pitchers like Mengden require owning high strikeout pitchers to even out Mengden’s inadequacy. He pairs well with someone like Caleb Smith as two back of the rotation arms. They balance out each other’s flaws. Mengden is especially good at home where he has a 2.54 ERA. He is usable as a streamer or a back-end rotation piece, but expect regression.

 
Ryan Yarbrough, Tampa Bay Rays

2018 stats prior to this start: 43.2 IP, 3.30 ERA, 3.73 FIP, 3.6 K/BB ratio

05/25 vs. BAL: 7 IP,7 H, 1 ER, 0 BB, 8 K

This wasn’t technically a start because the Rays used Sergio Romo as an opener, but Yarbrough gave us the volume of a start and should be viewed as a starter from a fantasy perspective. Yarbrough has had a great May, delivering a 2.54 ERA, 3.11 FIP, and 6.8 K/BB ratio in 28.1 innings during the month. Some of those appearances were starts and some were in relief, but he went at least five innings in all of them. Yarbrough mostly uses three pitches, an 89.5 MPH four-seamer fastball, 87.4 MPH cutter, and 81.5 MPH changeup. He mixes in a slider occasionally, but he mostly uses a two-fastball combo with the changeup.

In this start he threw more changeups than four-seamers for the first time this season and got five of his 11 swinging strikes with the changeup. The changeup has been his most effective swing-and-miss pitch, but that’s not saying much as it only has a 13% swinging strike rate. Overall Yarbrough has an uninspiring 6.8% swinging strike rate this season, which is the eighth lowest among pitchers with at least 40 innings logged this season. Jake Arrieta is the only mixed-league relevant pitcher with a swinging strike rate lower than Yarbrough. The strikeout totals we’ve seen from Yarbrough are suspect, and he only had a strikeout rate greater than 21% at High-A ball and above once, though that was 2017 at Triple-A. Even if the strikeout totals drop there are other reasons to be encouraged by Yarbrough.

He makes up for his swing-and-miss deficiency by regularly inducing weak and favorable contact. He has an 85.7 MPH average exit velocity against, the 14th lowest among pitchers with at least 100 batted ball events. Yarbrough also has a 19% infield flyball rate, and this is something he has excelled at in the minors. He only had and infield flyball rate below 19% once at any level of the minors. His cutter, while not a pitch that will rack up whiffs, has a 46% infield flyball rate and 51% groundball rate. Batters are hitting just .146 against the pitch with zero extra-base hits. It cuts away from lefties and in on righties, making the cutter tough to handle regardless of handedness. Because Yarbrough limits quality contact the gaps between his actual stats and expected stats aren’t as pronounced compared to Daniel Mengden. Yarbrough has a .213 BA against and a .233 xBA, and a .275 wOBA against compared to a .300 xWOBA. Regression may be coming for Yarbrough, but he should be able to limit the damage even if the strikeout totals drop.

Verdict:

Because of his unique role, Yarbrough’s value depends heavily on league settings. In leagues with weekly or yearly start limits he is a must-own. In leagues that use quality starts instead of wins his value is diminished. His strikeout rate does not seem sustainable, but Yarbrough does not give up hard contact often nor does he surrender extra base hits often. Expect his ERA to rise, probably to somewhere around his 3.80 SIERA. Yarbrough is still in streamer territory in mixed leagues, but he has the potential to move beyond that. There is more to like with Yarbrough's performance compared to Mengden's.

 
Frankie Montas, Oakland Athletics

2018 stats prior to this start (Triple-A): 41 IP, 4.39 ERA, 4.83 FIP, 2.54 K/BB ratio

05/27 vs. ARI: 6 IP, 3 H, 1 ER, 2 BB, 7 K

Montas had some prospect pedigree once upon a time, but after three trades and slow development through the minors the 25-year-old has seen his star fade over the past few seasons. He was atrocious in 32 innings of relief last season for Oakland, posting a 7.03 ERA, 7.13 FIP, and 1.8 K/BB ratio. Sunday’s start marked the first encouraging sign for him at the major league level. He got it done primarily with his sinker, which he threw 57% of the time on Sunday. He also threw a four-seamer and slider about equally in this start, as well as two changeups.

Despite pitching off his sinker Montas only had a 30.8% groundball rate, which is significantly below average. A one game sample size is too small to draw conclusions on batted ball distribution, but this continues a trend for Montas. He routinely has groundball rates between 40-50% in the minors, but only has a 35.7% groundball rate across three seasons in the majors. He has only pitched 53 major league innings, but it’s concerning to see that one of his biggest strengths as a prospect has failed to translate to the big leagues up until this point. He has also posted above average infield flyball rates in the minors, usually above 15%, but has a career 6.5% infield flyball rate in the majors. He has been a disappointment in the majors because he doesn’t have strikeout stuff and has failed to excel with contact management the way he did in the minors. Again, one start and 53 innings total isn’t enough of a sample size to draw definitive answers from, but this is a bad trend.

Montas also only got eight swinging strikes in this game, meaning his whiff total was barely higher than his strikeout total. The Diamondbacks have a .266 wOBA against right-handed pitching, the lowest in the majors. They also strike out 26.2% of the time against righties, the third highest in the majors. Montas’ performance says more about the Diamondbacks’ lineup than it does about his talent level. He has been so unencouraging during his other big league stints that we need to see him do it more and we need to see him do it against better opponents.

Verdict:

Montas faced a bad opponent at the right time to put up a solid spot start. This will probably earn him a spot in the Oakland rotation for at least a few more turns, but he doesn’t deserve a spot in yours. We need to see him do it at least once more, if not twice, before considering him in mixed leagues. Montas is at least worth a flier in AL-Only or deep mixed leagues based on pedigree, but he’s hard to trust even in a good matchup at Kansas City next time out.

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