I’ve been digging through the Statcast swing rates this offseason, looking for stats that should be a strong indicator of a pitcher’s true talent. Get the hitter to exit his game plan at the plate, or be good enough that the hitter can’t even touch what you throw. The goal of a pitcher is to fool or dominate the opposing hitter. Pitching is ultimately about decision making. You still want a pitcher who can strike out an above-average rate, walk a below-average amount, and reduce home runs allowed. Today, there are deeper stats which tell us about the battle between the pitcher and batter. Again, this was 2009, and I wanted to get an idea of which pitchers fared the best when it was just between them and the batter.
Those predictive methods were simple: I looked for pitchers who were better than average in all three of the K/9, BB/9, and HR/9 stats. His ERA and win total in 2009 weren’t great for fantasy, but the predictive method I used to isolate the best pitchers in the game led to him.
Over the years, Scherzer became an ace, both in fantasy and real life. In 2009, as I was starting this site, I had three sleeper aces leading my coverage at the time: Zack Greinke, Matt Cain, and a third guy I missed on that year - Max Scherzer. At the outset of my sports writing career, I was a fantasy sports writer.
