2023 Fantasy Baseball - Starting Pitchers With Bad Fastballs To Avoid

March 17, 2023

Eric takes a look at several fantasy baseball starting pitchers who could struggle in 2023 due to having a bad fastball. Could these pitchers still offer any fantasy value?

The fastball is the key to a fantasy baseball pitcher's success in my opinion, and it's hard to find a truly good pitcher with a bad one. Even as Major League Baseball gets to becoming more of a slider-focused league, good starting pitchers can't succeed regularly without a good fastball. A closer like Edwin Diaz can throw a slider 80% of the time because they only see a hitter one time, but a starting pitcher needs that foundation pitch to either set up his breaking ball or to use as an outpitch if they're using the breaking ball early to get strikes and get ahead.

As a result, I decided to look at some pitchers who had really poorly graded fastballs in 2022 to see if there were some players that we could add to our "Fade" or "Do Not Draft" lists.

As a point of clarification, a bad fastball doesn't have to mean low velocity. It can also mean poor command or movement. As a result, instead of focusing on velocity, I'm going to use FanGraph's Pitch Values, Statcast's Run Values, and Eno Sarris' Pitching+. I believe all three reveal the overall quality of the pitch, and I encourage you to visit the links above to see how those metrics are calculated.

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Pitcher Fastball Stats

The table below features the 20 pitchers whose fastballs ranked the lowest on those three metrics, with 0 being average for Fangraphs and Statcast and 100 being average for Pitching+. The worse the pitch was, the higher the Statcast number, the lower the Fangraphs number, and the lower the Pitching+.

I then dug into a few names in more detail below the chart, so I hope you find this useful.

I won't be able to go through all of these names, but it's wild to me that the Colorado Rockies' entire rotation is basically featured here with German Marquez, Antonio Senzatela, Ryan Feltner, and Austin Gomber. We know the thin air in Denver makes curveballs a little harder to control, so it's a bit weird that the Rockies haven't assembled a rotation of pitchers that can fall back on plus fastballs.

Madison Bumgarner, Patrick Corbin, Chris Archer, and Rich Hill are on the downside of their careers and are not likely to be drafted in many, if any, leagues. However, I will note that I like Hill the most and think he can remain useful in deeper leagues.

Josh Winder is also not currently in the Minnesota Twins rotation, but he was a bit of a fantasy darling last year, so his presence here was interesting to me.

I also wanted to briefly touch on Nick Martinez, who both had a poor fastball by Statcast and Fangraphs metrics, but had above-average fastballs by Eno Sarris' Pitching+, suggesting the pitch itself is not as much of a concern as the results would indicate; however, it should be noted for your drafts that it's not really a good pitch. We just don't have time to go in-depth on each pitcher listed above.

Jose Berrios - Toronto Blue Jays

2022 was a particularly brutal year for Berríos as the right-hander pitched to a 5.23 ERA in 172 innings with a career-low 19.8% strikeout rate and 13.8% K-BB rate. He also gave up a career-high 1.52 HR/9 and a 9.5% barrel rate as he seemed to fall apart completely.

However, his SIERA was 4.13 and his xFIP came in at 4.21, so how bad was his season truly?

He didn't throw with any less velocity or worse command or make any major change to his pitch mix. The biggest difference was just that his fastball and sinker got lit up last year in comparison to years past. Last year, Berríos allowed a .349 BA (.308 xBA) with a .618 SLG (.576 xSLG) on the four-seam and a .317 BA (.312 xBA) with a .452 SLG (.486 xSLG on the sinker). He also had just an 18.6% whiff rate on the four-seam and an 11.7% rate on the sinker after posting a 21.5% mark and 14.6% mark, respectively.

The four-seam also allowed a 55.3% hard-hit rate, so it was clearly his biggest issue. Since he throws the four-seam primarily to lefties and the sinker primarily to righties, it's no surprise that lefties tattooed him to a .298/.351/.514 triple-slash in 2022.

The problem for Berríos is that his four-seam has never been a swing-and-miss pitch and is mostly used to get a strike when he needs one. It has just a 95.3 Stuff+ score from Eno Sarris and is saved by the fact that the Location+ is 102.8, meaning that he has a bad fastball he can often locate well. Except, at the end of the day, it's a bad fastball that he is still locating in the strike zone and isn't getting whiffs, which means he's playing with fire and hoping the contact against it isn't damaging contact.

Last year it was.

While both his curve and change-up have 14% swinging strike rates (SwStr%) or higher, Berríos simply cannot set them up with a good enough fastball, and now that he pitches in a hitter haven in Toronto, I'm really not interested in him. A low 4's ERA seems like the new reality for Berríos.
 

Trevor Rogers - Miami Marlins

The big left-hander from the Marlins is the exact opposite of Berríos since Rogers boasts a 103.9 Stuff+ score for his fastball but just a 100.9 Location+. In fact, Eno's metrics are actually far more in favor of Rogers than the Fangraphs and Statcast run values, which means that the shape and velocity of Rogers' fastball were better than its performance last year.

That's at least encouraging.

Considering Rogers also produced a 15.2% SwStr% on his slider and 12.6% SwStr% on his change in a down year, he really doesn't need the fastball to be an elite swing-and-miss pitch. He needs to pound the zone with it and set up his other offers, but when the other offerings aren't producing, it's going to leave Rogers' fastball out to dry. In my opinion, that's what happened in 2022.

Rogers posted just a 38.5% zone rate with the change-up and a 40.9% mark with the slider, which caused hitters to lay off those pitches more than in 2021. As a result, they were able to sit back on a fastball that Rogers threw in the zone 59% of the time and 29% over the heart of the plate. With hitters also not having to look out for the change-up, Rogers' fastball, which is only 94.6 mph, lost a little bit of perceived juice.

Eno Sarris' metrics tell us that the fastball itself is a slightly above-average pitch, but it's not good enough to stand on its own. As a result, I don't really care that Rogers' fastball wasn't great last year because it's really just another way of saying that if Rogers doesn't have his change-up working, he's not going to be an effective pitcher.

With Rogers looking more in control this spring, I am willing to buy in on a return to 2021 form.

Josiah Gray - Washington Nationals

Any way you want to slice it, Josiah Gray had a terrible fastball last year.

It had a .304 BA (.264 xBA) and egregious .738 SLG allowed (.629 xSLG) while also giving up an absurd 16.1% barrel rate. He also had just a 7.8% SwStr% on the pitch. I mean, it was downright terrible. Perhaps one of the worst pitches in baseball.

The underlying metrics aren't much kinder as Eno Sarris' metrics give it an 83.9 Stuff+ and 92.7 Location+ to go along with that poor 92.6 Pitching+. Again, 100 is the major league average in those metrics. Normally, that would be enough to write Gray off entirely for me. Except, there are three things keeping me mildly interested.

For starters, he's a 25-year-old former top prospect, so there is time for him to improve. Secondly, he has a pretty elite slider that registered a 21% SwStr%, 36.2% CSW, and 1.78 dERA, which he pairs with an above-average curve that had a 13.6% SwStr%, 31.5% CSW, and 3.30 dERA. What that means is that Gray really only needs a fastball to set those pitches up.

This leads me to the third thing that intrigued me: Gray started to feature his breaking pitches more and his fastball less at the end of the year.

Now, the sinker he added wasn't particularly good and he had a 5.06 ERA in August and a 6.75 ERA in September, so the changes didn't lead to any success, but they at least show me a young pitcher who is beginning to learn that he needs to throw his best pitch more.

Considering where Gray is going in drafts right now, well outside the top 400, I think there is something worth watching here or taking a gamble on late in drafts. If he can even bring his fastball to become just an average pitch, then his slider and curve have the ability to carry him to fantasy relevance. He's not going to be an ace, but there is a profile here for an SP4-5 for your fantasy squad.

Framber Valdez - Houston Astros

Framber Valdez is another pitcher on here that I am not worried about because he throws his fastball just 3.6% of the time. So why did I include him in this article? Because Valdez introduced a cutter last year that was electric and he now has two elite pitches. I just wanted you to know that you should be drafting Framber Valdez.

Michael Wacha - San Diego Padres

Michael Wacha had a bit of a career resurgence at the end of the 2021 season in Tampa and then carried that over into a strong 2022 in Boston, where he pitched 127.1 innings with a 3.32 ERA and 1.12 WHIP. Yes, Michael Wacha was that good last year and a major reason for that is that he started throwing his fastball less.

That's pretty important in an article about pitchers with bad fastballs.

While Wacha has lost about two miles per hour on his four-seam from his best years, he's added some backspin on the pitch, which gives it a bit more perceived rise, and he can spot it well, as evidenced by his 103.9 Location+. That's important because the four-seam is really there to set up his best pitch, his change-up, which he now throws almost as much as his four-seam.

In 2022, the change-up allowed a .170 BA (.176 xBA) and .314 SLG (.294 xSLG) while producing a 19.2% SwStr% and 1.88 dERA. He also has a solid sinker and decent cutter, which held hitters to a .230 batting average and .392 SLG, but the xBA and xSLG suggest he got a bit lucky with that pitch, so at the end of the day, Wacha is a change-up pitcher who has a trio of different types of fastballs that he can use to set-up his change-up.

It's not a recipe for high strikeout totals but Wacha was never really that guy. He only has one season with a strikeout rate above 23% and that was in the COVID-shortened 2020 season. Now that he's pitching in a better pitcher's park, I think you can expect a low 4's ERA with a solid WHIP on a good team. That's not awful for deep leagues or NL-only leagues.

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