Starting Pitcher Strategy: Target Ground Ball Pitchers

Yesterday, while I was waiting to leave for our Thanksgiving dinner at my wife's cousin's house, I was looking at starting pitcher rankings. I wanted to take a deeper look into the starting pitcher rankings and decided to see how pitchers have performed over the last three seasons (2011 - 2013). I started by looking at pitchers who have thrown at least a total of 400 innings over the last three seasons, and kept the ball on the ground at a 45% rate.

Here is the list of starters who met the the following requirements over the last three seasons (2011 - 2013), courtesy of FanGraphs::

• 400 innings pitched
• 45% ground ball rate

This group consists of 47 starters who had kept the ball on the ground at a 45% rate, and yielded an average ERA of 3.65. Not bad. A 3.65 ERA is probably middle of the pack in most leagues. It would have ranked 8th in the ERA category in the Tout Wars experts league that I participated in last season.

From this list, I then looked at starting pitchers who struck out an average of seven batters per nine innings. Below is the list that resulted:

Name	GB%	K/9	BB/9	IP	ERA	ER
Chris Sale	46.30%	9.37	2.34	477.1	3.02	160.0
Clayton Kershaw	45.40%	9.15	2.18	697.0	2.21	171.0
Jeff Samardzija	45.60%	9.09	3.48	476.1	3.89	206.0
Tim Lincecum	46.40%	9.03	3.78	600.2	4.03	269.0
Cliff Lee	45.20%	9.01	1.38	666.1	2.80	207.0
Gio Gonzalez	46.50%	8.98	3.66	597.0	3.12	207.0
Anibal Sanchez	45.40%	8.95	2.60	574.0	3.39	216.0
Felix Hernandez	50.10%	8.88	2.27	670.0	3.20	238.0
Francisco Liriano	47.60%	8.80	4.48	452.0	4.44	223.0
Zack Greinke	47.50%	8.80	2.32	561.2	3.32	207.0
A.J. Burnett	54.20%	8.67	3.27	583.2	3.98	258.0
Madison Bumgarner	46.90%	8.51	2.30	614.1	3.12	213.0
Cole Hamels	46.10%	8.46	2.02	651.1	3.15	228.0
Yovani Gallardo	47.80%	8.44	3.13	592.0	3.77	248.0
CC Sabathia	46.40%	8.36	2.36	648.1	3.69	266.0
David Price	47.40%	8.31	2.16	622.0	3.13	216.0
Adam Wainwright	49.90%	8.24	1.78	440.1	3.39	166.0
James Shields	46.70%	8.21	2.44	705.2	3.15	247.0
Edinson Volquez	49.80%	8.19	4.82	461.2	5.09	261.0
Roy Halladay	47.30%	8.02	2.13	452.0	3.70	186.0
C.J. Wilson	47.90%	8.00	3.53	638.0	3.37	239.0
Jon Lester	48.00%	7.74	3.10	610.1	4.03	273.0
Justin Masterson	56.10%	7.49	3.35	615.1	3.86	264.0
Jon Niese	50.30%	7.30	2.59	490.2	3.82	208.0
R.A. Dickey	45.70%	7.30	2.42	667.0	3.40	252.0
Edwin Jackson	47.40%	7.19	2.85	564.2	4.24	266.0
Luke Hochevar	45.30%	7.02	2.78	453.2	4.68	236.0

Filtering for only those starters that had a ground ball rate of 45% and struck out an average of seven batters per nine innings over the last three season, yielded 27 starters with an average ERA of 3.54. So, by filtering for starters with these requirements yielded a lower average ERA.

WIthin that new grouping, I looked at only those starters who limit the free pass at three walks per nine or less. Former Fake Teams writer, Bret Sayre, now over at Baseball Prospectus, coined this group as "The Holy Trinity" for starting pitchers, but he filtered the starters with a 50% ground ball rate, not 45% like I did here. Next, from the same list as above, I only looked at those starters who walked less than three batters per nine innings.

Here is a look at this group:

This resulted in just 17 starters who met the following requirements over the last three seasons (2011 - 2013):

• 400 innings pitched
• ground ball rate of 45% or higher
• strikeouts per nine of 7.0 or higher
• walks per nine of 3.00 or fewer

This group of starting pitchers yielded an average ERA of 3.33. That's pretty darn good.

This analysis, over the last three seasons, shows that pitchers who met these requirements above yielded an ERA that would probably rank in the top 3-4 of most leagues in 2013. Focusing your draft strategy of these types of pitchers, along with some closers and middle relievers could result in a league leading ERA in 2014.

Tomorrow I will look at the what pitchers met these requirements in 2013, and who you should target in fantasy drafts in 2014.

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