2020 Schedule Outliers - AL East Starting Pitchers

One of the major changes MLB teams faced during the 2020 season was the lack of a diverse set of competition. Instead of playing around 20 other teams as they would in a normal season, teams played only nine different opponents in 2020. Additionally, two-thirds of each team’s games came against opponents within their own division.

Those changes resulted in some pitchers having remarkably uniform schedules. In 2019, the average pitcher threw 18% of their pitches against their most-pitched-against team (min. 150 PA). In 2020, that number rose to 26%, with some pitchers recording nearly half of their pitches against just one team.

Such an unusual schedule might affect pitcher performances, especially for those pitchers with the most concentrated schedules. Still, fantasy managers should keep the tiny samples in mind when reading this article and any other 2020 schedule analysis. It’s easy to spin randomness into narratives with samples of 10-20 innings, and although that doesn’t invalidate anything learned from this analysis, it is important to consider.

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Methodology

Divisions as a whole produced roughly average numbers in 2020. For example, the AL East as a division was within one percentage point of an average team in key plate discipline metrics (o-swing %, z-swing, %, o-con %, z-con%, SwStr%), and there’s no reason to expect other metrics or divisions to be significantly different.

As a result, schedule impacts are likely to be most significant for pitchers who threw a high rate of their pitches against one or two teams rather than a high rate of pitches against their division as a whole. But it’s useful to go deeper than that, too.

Many pitchers threw comparable amounts of pitches against their first- and second- most-pitched-against teams, with a large drop-off for their third-most-pitched-against team. That’s not too surprising given the structure of the 2020 schedule, and it means that I’ll focus on the percentage of a pitcher’s total pitches against their top two most-pitched-against teams for this article.

With that in mind, below is a list of AL East pitchers (min. 150 PA, on one team all season) ranked by the percentage of their pitches coming against their two most-pitched-against teams. The pitcher’s overall rank is their ranking among all pitchers with at least 150 PA who stayed on one team for the entire 2020 season (125 pitchers), and their division rank is their ranking among all of those pitchers within their own division.

Trevor Richards clearly stands out and Hyun-Jin Ryu’s schedule could’ve come in 2019 without looking out of place, but most of these pitchers fall in a cluster of having thrown around half of their pitches against two teams. I’ve selected the three most interesting pitchers in that group to elaborate on below.

Trevor Richards, Tampa Bay Rays

Top teams faced: Yankees (38% of total pitches), Orioles (33% of total pitches).

Richards threw a whopping 70% of his pitches against only two teams in 2020, more than any other sampled pitcher and head and shoulders above the other sampled AL East pitchers. Even so, it’s not clear that Richards’s extraordinarily homogenous schedule had a meaningful effect on his overall performance. Indeed, the Yankees and Orioles played like two entirely different teams against Richards in 2020, as the chart below illustrates.

Importantly, it’s unlikely that those differences are the result of some kind of adjustment or strategy from Richards, and even assigning a large amount of blame on park factors would be a stretch based on the types of changes observed. Instead, the differences can likely be almost entirely attributed to small sample sizes. Richards barely qualified for the sample in this article by pitching exactly 150 plate appearances, and he threw fewer than 12 innings against each of the Orioles and Yankees. That’s not to say that fantasy managers can’t learn anything from Richards’s 2020 performance, but it’s hard to say that his opponents being almost exclusively on the Orioles and Yankees is relevant.

Nathan Eovaldi, Boston Red Sox

Top teams faced: Orioles (37% of total pitches), Rays (17% of total pitches).

Eovaldi enjoyed one of the best seasons of his career in 2020, posting a 3.71 ERA with a career-high 26.1% strikeout rate that was well-supported by a 13% swinging-strike rate. Those numbers have fueled some optimism around Eovaldi heading into the 2021 season, and he’s coming off of draft boards around 80 picks earlier on average this year compared to last season. At first glance, Eovaldi’s Oriole-heavy 2020 schedule indicates that fantasy managers should temper expectations for Eovaldi next season. After all, Eovaldi’s most important gains in 2020 came in his swinging-strike rate, and the Orioles were one of the most swing-and-miss happy teams in baseball last season.

But a closer look at the numbers provides more optimism. Although the Orioles posted an 11.9% swinging-strike rate against Eovaldi (slightly below their 12.3% mark for the season), Eovaldi got teams to swing and miss more than their relative averages on average in 2020. Eovaldi’s strikeout gains were likely mostly independent of his schedule as a result, and fantasy managers consider that before making a draft-day decision on Eovaldi this year.

Ryan Weber, Boston Red Sox

Top teams faced: Blue Jays (27% of total pitches), Yankees (21% of total pitches)

Weber’s status as a starting pitcher may be questionable, but the 30-year-old started five games for the Red Sox last season and is a strong example of a pitcher whose schedule likely had a significant impact on his overall performance. Although Weber’s 2020 schedule was reasonably balanced in terms of the number of teams he pitched against, his schedule was anything but balanced from a quality perspective.

The weighted average of Weber’s opponent’s xwOBAcon (.375) and hard-hit rate (40%) suggest that Weber’s average opponent was a top-10 offensive team and a relatively far cry from what a pitcher would typically face over a normal, 162-game season. It should be no surprise, then, that Weber’s hard-hit rate spiked in 2020.

There was probably more to Weber’s 2020 struggles than a brutal schedule, as he struggled in most categories and his opponents generally hit unusually well against him. Still, given the limited amount of control that pitchers have over exit velocities, Weber’s schedule should be kept in mind when evaluating his 2020 performance.

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