Fantasy Baseball: Buying Cole Hamels

Cole Hamels has been unlucky lately.

Well, he got about as unlucky as you can get on Tuesday. After giving up a three-run home run in the first to the streaking Troy Glaus, Hamels had to sit through a long rain delay only to find out he would not be going out to finish out the first. Hamels’s line:

.2 IP, 2 H, 3 ER, 2 BB, 1 K

Ouch.

But I’m here to tell you that things aren’t going to be this bad for Mr. Hamels. And they won’t be nearly this bad for all those Cole Hamels owners out there either. Beyond this one incredible outlier of an outing, Hamels has still been pretty unlucky in 2010, and nearly all the peripherals suggest things are on the up.

Let’s first take a quick look at Hamels’s HR/FB percentage, which currently sits at 16.4%. Now, I need to qualify this first, I’m not a huge fan of looking just at HR/FB ratio and simply checking whether it’s high or it’s low. But what we can do is compare this to Hamels’s career numbers, which say 12% of his fly balls go out for home runs. So while it could be that Hamels is just hanging a few more breaking balls, other numbers suggest he might just be getting unlucky.

His K/9 ratio is at its highest its been since 2006 and his xFIP sits at 3.71, about half a point lower than his ERA. Not a massive difference there, but one worth noting.

More interesting is the addition of Hamels’s new pitch: a cutter. According to FanGraphs, that cutter, which he throws roughly 16% of the time, is actually far and away his most effective pitch. It’s also worth noting here that his GB% this year has actually increased to 44.3% up from a career average of 40.6%, though there is no way of knowing whether those additional ground balls are a result of the cutter.

The only negative is the increase in walks for Hamels, about one additional walk per nine than normal. Not a good thing but something he can probably live with.

So putting together all these facts we can see that if Hamels can get career-average production from the rest of his pitches and has a few less balls fly out of the park, we very well should see the rejuvenated Cole Hamels many of us have been waiting for.

And if you don’t own Hamels, it’s a perfect time to try and trade for him. He hasn’t pitched so poorly that his owner will be skeptical of you trying to buy low. And even better, his numbers are similar enough to last season’s that people are starting to give up on Hamels having a bounce-back year at all. Don’t let that person be you: go get Cole Hamels.