Fantasy Baseball: Buying strikeout breakouts?

Some numbers point to breakouts, others to early anomalies. Chris Towers looks at 10 strikeout surprises on the pitching side.

Towers: Analyzing 10 starters with declining K rates

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We looked Tuesday at some of the biggest strikeout declines in baseball, and there were some pretty big names on that list. Jacob deGrom and Chris Sale might be just as likely as anyone not named "Clayton Kershaw" to win a Cy Young in any given year, and a few other big names seemed to be running into trouble getting whiffs early in the season too.

The list of players on the opposite side of the table is not quite so illustrious. In fact, in many places, the names are downright bad. However, strikeouts are such a valuable part of pitching success, in some instances, we have to take a closer look at what might be driving these early changes. In same cases, it's just the random noise that inevitably comes with small sample sizes, but some of them are actually intriguing. Let's take a look:

There are going to be a few examples like this, so we might as well explain them right off the bat. Yes, Jorge De La Rosa's K/9 is way up. No, this is not an inherently good thing. The results -- 10.18 ERA in 20 1/3 innings -- speak to that louder than any argument I could make. However, it is also worth noting that De La Rosa is facing five-plus batters per inning, on average, up from 4.26 a year ago, because of how many hits, walks and runs he is allowing. In these kind of situations, you want to use K-percentage, or strikeouts, divided by batters faced. De La Rosa is still up significantly in this regard, from 21.1 percent last season to 26.7 percent this season. However, he isn't getting any more swinging strikes, so it's hard to argue he is somehow fooling more batters. Despite the increase in strikeout rate, his peripherals are all moving in the wrong direction, like a 6.88 FIP and 4.02 xFIP. Even on the road, De La Rosa is hardly a pitcher you need to have interest in.

Alfredo Simon is in very much the same boat as De La Rosa. He K rate is up slightly, but only in ways that highlight just how awful he's been. Considering he wasn't very good last season and is a 35-year-old without much of a track record besides, it seems fair to take him entirely off your Fantasy radar.

Ah, finally the part of the list we can kind of dig our teeth into. Chris Tillman's overall numbers last season were pretty putrid; he sported a 4.99 ERA that was backed up by bad peripherals. However, he does look like he might be a very different type of pitcher this season, and not just because of his results. Let's look at the results first: Tillman is striking out nearly one-fourth of opposing batters so far, with a pretty huge jump in swinging strike rate from 7.1 percent last season to a career-high 10.9 percent. His velocity is up a bit in the early going, and he is relying on his cutter more than any point in his career. The tradeoff here might be the increase in fly-ball rate to 42.3 percent, which will probably lead to some homer issues moving forward. However, after last season, it became clear what he was doing wasn't working, so it's nice to see him changing his approach, if nothing else.

Matt Moore gets a bit of a pass for his low strikeout rate last season, because he was working his way back from Tommy John surgery and was still in many ways re-learning how to pitch. Moore is having trouble keeping runners off the bases or homers out of the bleachers, but actually has the best K%-BB% of his career, and is throwing harder than he has since 2012, all great signs. The swinging strike rate is up, and even his ground-ball rate is the second-highest it has ever been. Moore may never be the ace many expected when he made his debut, but he's certainly better than a high-4.00's ERA guy, too. If you're looking for a buy-low candidate, this might be a good one.

Jon Gray's issues aren't hard to figure out so far. I; it doesn't matter how many strikeouts he gets, he can't pitch at Coors. His career splits so far highlight this to an almost comical degree:

Home: 7 starts, 29 1/3 IP, 52 H, 9 BB, 27 K, 30 ER; .394/.428/1.041 line against
Away: 6 starts, 33 IP, 21 H, 11 BB, 41 K, 8 ER; .184/.258/.263 line against

Away from Coors, Gray pitches like the big-time prospect many saw him as coming up through the minors. At home, he pitches like Alfredo Simon. That is someone who is worth holding on to for those matchups when he isn't home, but you can't start him at Coors Field.

Jaime Garcia is a tough nut to crack. He has a pretty consistent track record as an above-average pitcher, but has always been more of a pitch-to-contact, rack-up-groundballs kind of guy. He has never pitched a full season with a K/9 over 7.27, and was down to 6.73 last season despite posting a 2.43 ERA in 129 2/3 innings of work. This season, he has at least six strikeouts in four of six starts so far -- including one massive 13-strikeout complete game that skews the overall numbers a bit -- and has increased his swinging strike rate from 9.2 percent to 11.0 entering his seventh start. He hasn't changed much about his approach to pitching that would make you think a higher strikeout rate is sustainable; just the opposite, in fact, as he has become more reliant on his fastball than ever, while throwing his changeup and slider less often. I'm not buying the increase in strikeouts too much with Garcia, but maybe he can be a 7.0-plus type of pitcher moving forward. Either way, he is great at keeping runners and runs off the board, and has serious Fantasy value no matter what.

As with Garcia, Tanner Roark is sort of flipping the script on himself in the early going. Even when he was a solid starting option back in 2014, Roark struck out jut 17.3 percent of opposing hitters, a number he has raised to 22.4 percent to date. However, his increased strikeout rate is almost entirely the result of one big start, April 23, vs. the Twins. He sat down 15 in seven innings in that outing, and has a 16.5 percent K% and 6.3 K/9 otherwise. Roark looks largely like the same guy, which isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but it does put a bit of a damper on his apparent breakout. Roark can be a solid pitcher, as he showed in 2014, but he probably won't be much more than that moving forward.

David Price is racking up huge numbers of swinging strikes and strikeouts, but his Fantasy owners are hardly pleased with the results so far. I think this is a pretty simple case -- when Price has been good, hitting his spots and finishing his pitches, he's been pretty unhittable. However, he has been doing those things a bit less often than usual, which is why he is giving up so much hard contact. Given his track record, there doesn't seem to be much to worry about here long-term, but he hasn't been right so far.

As a converted reliever, Drew Pomeranz is in a really interesting place. We generally expected pitchers to struggle with the transition from the bullpen to the rotation, because they can't just go max effort all of the time, but that hasn't been the case for Pomeranz so far. However, it is worth noting that Pomeranz has managed to sustain a pretty strong strikeout rate as a starter over the past three seasons, fanning 8.7 per nine in his last 25 starts. The bigger problem has been another predictable one -- fatigue. He is averaging 5 2/3 innings per start so far this season, and just 5.2 overall since 2014. However, it isn't totally surprising that he's doing a good job racking up strikeouts, especially in the National League, and with a 3.16 ERA as a starter over the past three seasons, he seems like a pretty useful option.

If I could figure out what Rubby De La Rosa was likely to do on a start-by-start basis, I wouldn't be using those powers to analyze Fantasy baseball -- I'd be picking the winning lotto numbers out every week. If you squint, it's not hard to see a dominant starting pitcher when De La Rosa throws; he's got huge velocity and swing-and-miss stuff, so it isn't surprising he's racking up big strikeout numbers. What is surprising is that De La Rosa has so far managed to hold left-handed batters in check, allowing just a .197/.294/.317 line against them. He has always been able to more than hold his own against same-handed hitters, but lefties posted a .949 OPS and .255 ISO against him last season, and that was a big issue since more than half the batters he faced were lefties. If he can manage to even just be decent against lefties, De La Rosa has big-time upside.