June 15, 2013

Fantasy Beat

Weekly #streameroftheday Update

by Bret Sayre

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For those of you unfamiliar with the #streameroftheday process, I recommend one starting pitcher per day who is owned in fewer than 10% of leagues (lower than your typical standards) and post it on Twitter at @dynastyguru. And this Friday post is where I stand in front of the firing squad, fully accountable for these recommendations. I ran a longer introduction in my first post of the season, explaining why my ownership limit is much lower than most others out there, but essentially it's to be helpful in deeper mixed leagues. If you want to read the whole thing, the link is here. With the pleasantries out of the way, let's jump into the action.

Here were the details for the last seven days:

Clearly, the star of this week for me was Jordan Lyles--so let's talk about what he's done recently. Over his last six starts (including the two this week), Lyles has a 1.99 ERA, 1.09 WHIP with 28 strikeouts in 37 2/3 innings. And even more impressively. considering he pitches for the lowly Astros, two wins. A prospect who was rushed into big league action, he's already thrown 287 career innings and won't turn 23 until after the season ends. He's increased his fastball velocity each of the past three seasons and has a ground ball rate of over 50% in 2012 and 2013. If he can limit hard contact, which was his issue prior to this year, he can still be a mid-rotation starter, worthy fantasy pitcher and even a potential Holy Trinity candidate.

After that, we have the standard Joe Saunders at Safeco play. I talked about him last week, but it's worth sharing again. Saunders has four wins, a 2.53 ERA, 1.08 WHIP and 31 strikeouts in 46 1/3 innings in his seven starts at home this season. Amazingly, Andrew Cashner made it back to me as far as eligibility goes, so I didn't hesitate to use him and he rewarded me with eight high quality innings against the Braves. The last day of the week proved to be a terrible day for streamers, so I could not recommend any of them in good conscience--instead choosing to roll David Robertson out there, who just happened to get three strikeouts in the 18-inning affair between the Yankees and Athletics.

And here are my overall numbers for both the week and the season:

It was a great week if you quickly scan over the fact that I only accumulated one win. In fact, it's been a very good month so far. Since June 1st, I've had nine quality starts in 11 "actual" attempts. This excludes the David Robertson day and the Shaun Marcum rainout from last week. No time to slow down, gotta keep rolling. The ratios are coming down and the strikeout rate is going up, and I'm getting a lot closer to my targets in each category.

See you again next week.

Bret Sayre is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @BretSayreBP
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