2020 Fantasy Baseball Draft Prep: 10 ERA sleepers for Rotisserie and categories leagues
Need some late ERA help? Look to the ground-ball specialists.
By
Scott White
•
1 min read
The goal here is to identify players who could help in a particular Rotisserie category later in drafts.
But I struggle to think of starting pitchers in those terms. You kind of have to sell out for upside at the position as polarized as it is, and often when a pitcher breaks out, the effect is wholesale, with massive gains across the board. It's tempting then just to put all the upside players here, but that's of course not in the spirit of the exercise. It's a separate discussion for a separate column.
We analyzed this topic Monday on the Fantasy Baseball Today podcast. Subscribe to the podcast here.
The pitchers who already excel in ERA but are still available later in drafts generally fall short in some other way, so some of these pitchers are more like safety plays than upside plays. That's not altogether a bad thing, especially in an environment where starting pitchers can so easily descend into uselessness, but it's worth pointing out.
Only starting pitchers with an ADP of 160 or later, according to FantasyPros, were considered.
ERA sleepers
Sure, Carlos Martinez compiled last year's ERA entirely in relief, where a lower ERA is to be expected, but over the past five seasons, most of them spent as a starter, he has a combined 3.22 ERA, only once submitting an ERA higher than 3.50. His extreme ground-ball arsenal make him resistant to home runs, which is where all the offense comes from these days, and as groundballers go, he's not so bad with the strikeouts.
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Kenta Maeda's 4.04 ERA last year doesn't offer much promise, nor does his career 3.87 ERA, but his underlying numbers have always hinted of more potential -- the kind that he might have reached if the Dodgers weren't constantly messing with his role. His expected ERA last year, according to Statcast, was 3.26 and has never been higher than 3.43. He was in the top five percent for limiting hard contact and has an elite swinging-strike rate as well, so maybe a more consistent role with the Twins will unlock his full potential.
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Lance McCullers doesn't have as much history on his side. He's coming back from Tommy John surgery and hasn't been of much help in the ERA category since his first two seasons, 2015 and 2016, when he posted a 3.22 mark in each. But he has the right skill set for a low ERA, delivering a high strikeout rate and a low home run rate with all the ground balls. The only reason he goes so late is because he missed all of last year.
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Look, it's another ground-ball specialist -- and actually, Marcus Stroman is the most established of all of them mentioned here. A little consistency would help -- he had a 3.22 ERA last year and a 3.09 ERA in 2017, but with a 5.54 ERA in between -- though injuries tell much of that story. He's also more contact-prone than most of these pitchers and won't be of much help in WHIP as a result.
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Adrian Houser is mostly unproven as a starter, having pitched mostly four- and five-inning stints after transitioning from the bullpen last year, but he did put together a 3.28 ERA in his final 12 "starts" last year. He did it on the strength of -- surprise, surprise -- a Marcus Stroman-level ground-ball rate, though his strikeout ability is more on the level of Carlos Martinez than Stroman.
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Dustin May still has rookie eligibility, which underscores his lack of track record, but you know, he's another ground-ball guy. (You think we have a good grasp now on what contributes to ERA? There's a reason sleepers are getting harder to find.) Most scouts think he has unrealized strikeout potential, too, which is why he's considered an elite prospect, and with expanded rosters, he'll probably have a semi-starting role for the free-thinking Dodgers.
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Speaking of elite prospects, here's one who hasn't gotten a foothold yet in Fantasy because he looked like he didn't have a job before the coronavirus shutdown came. But Nate Pearson was the talk of the initial spring training, with Blue Jays beat writers already beginning the mental gymnastics over service time and innings limits. It should all be moot in a shortened season, giving him a rotation spot from the get-go, and I wouldn't want to put limits on this kind of upside, ERA or otherwise.
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Over the years, we've seen several versions of Alex Wood -- a guy with mostly favorable ratios despite unimpressive stuff -- and some of them have been outright dominant. The most dominant of all came in the first half of 2017, when he went 10-0 with a 1.67 ERA, 0.89 WHIP and 10.8 K/9 en route to his only All-Star appearance. He threw harder than ever during that stretch and was clocked at similar velocities this spring, after an offseason spent working with Driveline Baseball to improve his velocity.
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Garrett Richards gets a pass for his brief stint back from Tommy John surgery last year, but he's another one of those pitchers who generally keeps the ball on the ground while missing bats at a halfway decent rate. And it has led to consistent success, albeit often interrupted by injury. In 89 starts dating back to 2014, he has a 3.23 ERA, 1.18 WHIP and 8.6 K/9. Seems like no one knows what to expect from him now -- and that's fair -- but the cost is next to nothing, too.
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Will Rich Hill still be discounted so much when the Fantasy Baseball world gets back to drafting, recognizing that he'll now be ready for the start of the season? Maybe not, but then again, he's a 40-year-old coming back from a significant elbow injury -- one that might have resulted in Tommy John surgery if he could afford a longer rehabilitation. Still, with a 3.30 ERA, 1.11 WHIP and 10.7 K/9 over the past three years, he's well worth the gamble.
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