Robbie Ray: 2022 Fantasy Baseball Bust?

Robbie Ray had long been a polarizing figure in fantasy baseball circles. Last season, the Ray truthers were vindicated when he turned in a career year as a member of the Toronto Blue Jays and won the AL Cy Young award.

Ray posted a 13-7 record, 2.84 ERA, struck out a league-leading 248 hitters, and finally realized his potential by becoming the ace that many believed he could be. He cashed in on that success this offseason when he signed a five-year deal worth 115 million dollars with the Seattle Mariners.

Now, as we enter the 2022 season, we have to try to determine whether that was the peak of Ray's career or if his success in 2021 is sustainable. Is he worth a pick early in drafts or is he setting up to be an overdrafted bust?

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Cy Young 2021 Season

Let's take a look at what went right for Ray in 2021 and led to his dramatic improvement from his final two seasons in Arizona and his first handful of games once he arrived in Toronto.

One of the biggest things that had held back Ray over the years had been his control. He'd always posted really solid strikeout numbers, but his walk rate had ballooned to nearly 18% in 2020. He had the single biggest drop in walk rate of any pitcher in the majors last season when he trimmed it by 11% all the way down to 6.7%. At the same time, he increased his strikeout rate to 32.1%, the best of his career since his breakout seasons in 2017.

Ray's improved control stemmed from a drastically better first-pitch strike rate that was up 9.4% from 52% in 2020 to 61.6% in 2022. Getting ahead of hitters was something he had done successfully earlier in his career and then failed to do from 2018 to 2020. He threw over half his pitches in the zone for the first time since 2015 and had his best "out-of-zone swing percentage" of his career as hitters swung at 30% of his pitches outside the strike zone.

Robbie Ray, Dirty Slider. 😨 pic.twitter.com/gXkKnpbpVa

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) March 22, 2022

In terms of the quality of his stuff, he threw his fastball a full MPH harder (94.8) and his slider two MPH harder (87.6). The slider had an elite 45.8% whiff rate and a minuscule .162 xBA against. His fastball regained the type of effectiveness we saw in 2017 as it produced a -22 run value.

He threw his fastball and slider almost exclusively (a combined 90% of the time) and he completely dropped his sinker from his arsenal, which ended up being a good thing since he hadn't been able to throw it for strikes consistently. The changeup and curveball were below-average pitches in terms of run value even though he did have a 51% whiff rate on the curve. When batters hit the curve, however, they crushed it to the tune of a .577 SLG so you could see why he didn't rely on it much.

Heightened Expectations In 2022

With a Cy Young season under his belt, the real-life and fantasy expectations for Robbie Ray this season are as high as they've ever been. Last season, fantasy baseball managers took him late in drafts and were rewarded with an incredible return on their investment.

This year, the Mariners are counting on Ray to anchor their rotation and help lead the revival of their franchise to relevance. And fantasy managers are drafting Ray in round four or five expecting him to eat a ton of innings and pile up strikeouts. He's likely the SP2 on most teams at his current ADP (unless you are taking him earlier as your SP1 or just fading the top tier of pitchers).

Is it possible a move to the AL West could help Ray improve even more on his 2021 numbers? Avoiding the big bats of the Rays, Yankees, and Red Sox certainly doesn't hurt and T-Mobile Park is a slight ballpark upgrade in terms of being a top-five pitchers park. As a fly-ball pitcher who is vulnerable to home runs, the marine layer in Seattle might help keep some of those balls from traveling as far, but his xHR allowed was actually higher in T-Mobile than it was in the Rogers Centre (keep in mind that the Statcast data does not adjust for environmental effects like altitude, humidity, etc.).

Rewards Worth The Risk?

So why does Robbie Ray have more bust than boom potential this season? To me, it's because he's an unproven commodity that simply hasn't pitched an elite level often enough for us to know what we are getting in 2022. There are just too many questions left unanswered.

• Was Ray's success in Toronto a product of being mentored by Jays' pitching coach Pete Walker?
• Which version of Ray is the real Ray? The 2017-2018-2021 version or the one that labored through the 2019 and 2020 seasons? And if the answer is somewhere in the middle, is that level of production worth a top-50 pick?
• Was his ERA a mirage? His xERA was 3.60 and FIP was 3.69 - still good for sure but not elite. His BABIP was .268 and his strand rate was 90%, both of which suggest he was a bit lucky on batted balls and getting out of jams.
• He is who he is by this point in his career - a flyball pitcher with a penchant for giving up homers. He allowed a career-high 33 bombs last season and that's going to continue to be something he battles.
• Can he continue to be as effective as he was last year with only two pitches? What happens if he loses some fastball velocity? What happens if he struggles with control?

All I am saying is that it doesn't hurt to be a little skeptical. Plenty of pitchers have a resurgence later in their careers, so it's not like the new and improved Ray is an anomaly. He's only 30-years-old and he's remained relatively healthy for the majority of his career.

But we simply haven't seen him dominate as he did before and when you break down the numbers, it really appears like he's working with pretty thin margins in terms of his control and home runs issues.

Where to Draft

Full disclosure here, I was someone who really didn't think Ray had it in him to do what he did last year and I had to swallow my pride about halfway through the season and admit I was wrong. The regression never came and he just killed it all season. But does that mean that regression won't ever come?

It's awfully risky to invest this much draft capital in a guy with such a checkered past. His ADP is hovering around the 35-40 range and that's simply too rich for my blood. I'd let someone else take the risks associated with Ray at that range and target some arms with more reliable track records in that range. If the rest of your league is thinking the same thing and Ray slides into the 50-60 range, then I like taking him there a lot better.

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