As I'm writing this, the top of the sixth inning just ended, and Brandon Beachy has held the Blue Jays in check today; 11 strikeouts, 4 hits, 2 walks, 1 earned run(solo HR by Jose Bautista).
At the beginning of the season, Beachy was an afterthought. He was supposed to be a quick band-aid while the highly touted Mike Minor got healthy, and came out of the gate firing on all cylinders. Before today's matchup with Toronto, Beachy has sported all-star caliber numbers, even with the oblique strain.
Beachy's 9.34 K/9 ranks 9th among players with at least 40 innings. His K/BB ratio of 3.83 ranks 12th. While only possessing a slightly favorable BABIP(.267) and HR/FB%(8.9%) for the current season , the rest of Beachy's warning indicator statistics (LOB%) look in line with league norms, which has kept his ERA and FIP within percentage points of each other. Pretty impressive over Beachy's 8th start, especially considering the brevity of the final one where he left injured. All in all, this is a very promising month and a half of work form Beachy, and something that savvy manager should have pounced on when rivals started to jettison him once he hit the disabled list.
One concern I tend to always have with any starting pitcher centers around their ground ball rates. For FIP and xFIP minded individuals like me, it's well been established that even though the opposing BABIP on ground balls trend higher than flyballs, the run expectancy for groundballs is more favorable. This is why with the exception of a few flyball outliers, pitchers who establish the Big 3 metrics in their favor (K/9, BB/9, GB%) have a better chance to succeed over their counterparts once statistical noise settles down. So naturally, I raised an eyebrow seeing Beachy's paltry 31% ground ball rate.
We've seen pitchers with poor groundball rates florish and be part of baseball's elite. Some of the more notable repeaters like Ted Lilly, Matt Cain, and Johan Santana have excelled in favorable parks. Others have had stellar outfield defense behind them to drag down those would be doubles in the gap (Jarrod Washburn, 2009). For the repeaters in this group though, they offset a lack of groundball rate with high strikeout totals, low walks, and in elite cases like Santana, Cain, Jered Weaver, and even 2011 Scott Baker(only owned in 62% of ESPN leagues, go get him), an extremely high infield fly ball rate* tends to help support lower BABIPs as well. Beachy satisfies the first two requirements, but his IFFB% isn't in the high 14s like Weaver or Santana. A slightly above average 10.9% can't be the entire reason his early success has blossomed.
Looking at Beachy's game log, April 30th jumped out at me: a home game against the, at the time, hot hitting Cardinals. If you discount Beachy's large 15/2 FB/GB split in this game, his GB% for the season rises to 36%. When looking at Beachy's other 7 starts, the April 30th split does look like an outlier. After Wednesday's game (Beachy was pulled after 6 and got the W) gets put in the books and we see his FB/GB split, we'll have one more data point to judge against, hopefully helping us uncover whether this dominating performance still has Beachy closer to the Lillys than the Halladays of starting pitchers.
Regardless of how curious I am to see Beachy's groundball rate shake out, you have to be happy with him to this point if you were lucky enough to spend that $1 at auction, draft him late, or snag him on the wire. Beachy is currently owned in only 29.6% of ESPN leagues. That's crazy. Go pick him up if you have the opportunity.
After a brief first half season sabbatical to attend to newest addition to my family's roster, I decided to settle back in with a player I was monitoring early in the offseason and was lucky enough to obtain in my competitive auction for only $1. I'm looking forward to sharing with you all again.
