Which pitchers are ready to conquer the competition in 2019?

With fantasy baseball season around the corner, I was messing around with some different ways to find sleeper pitchers for my various upcoming drafts. I stumbled into an interesting way of rating pitchers that I think applies to “real world” baseball in addition to the fantasy realm.

A quick breakdown of how I got the list, and then I’ll let you all pick it apart. I was looking at three areas of analysis while trying to figure out how to rate pitchers: weak contact, strikeouts versus walks, and guys who had considerably better FIP and xFIP numbers than ERA.

I first tackled contact type by taking figuring up the number of infield fly balls and ground balls per nine innings versus line drives per nine innings. Trying to keep this as easy as possible, I simply added the IFFB and GB per nine together and then subtracted the LD/9 from that for my contact number.

Next up, I took a similar approach, subtracting BB/9 from K/9 for my strikeout figure. That was easy enough! I then added the contact and strikeout numbers together for a subtotal.

The last component was to subtract each pitcher’s xFIP from the contact plus strikeout total. The idea is the higher the final score, the better, meaning that subtracting xFIP penalized pitchers with worse numbers in this category.

In the end, it’s a simple exercise to try and find pitchers who induce a combination of a high ground ball rate and weak contact (which is why the inclusion of IFFB) and who have good strikeout rates versus walk rates. Including the xFIP component was just an easy way for me to spot guys who really seemed unlucky last year.

The only thing left to do now was come up with a cool name for this system. With contact (CON) plus strikeouts (K) and using xFIP for expected runs against (R) I came up with CONKR, or CONQUER.

Disclaimer—I would not recommend using this as your number one way to assess pitchers, but it’s an easy way to spot guys who under performed and could be on their way to bigger and better things in 2019.

Without further ado—the rankings. These are broken down into two groups—the first being starting pitchers who tossed 120 or more innings in 2018 and the second being relievers with a minimum of 40 innings.

It’s a lot to take in, I know, so I’ll give you some names to watch out for. Among the starters, you’ll notice Nick Pivetta ranks seventh overall in CONKR. Pivetta posted a 4.80 ERA in 2018, but pitched to a 3.41 xFIP and had the third best CON score among the top 10 ranked starters.

Another notable starting pitcher is Jon Gray, who ranks at 17 overall, thanks in large part to a 3.47 xFIP versus his 5.12 ERA.

Of course, the top of the chart isn’t completely filled with surprises, as Chris Sale, Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, Trevor Bauer, Clayton Kershaw and Justin Verlander (among others) all appear in the top 20.

On the reliever side, it’s no surprise that Edwin Diaz sits atop the leader board. What might be surprising though, top 10 appearances by Matt Barnes, Tim Hill and Dan Otero—while the likes of Aroldis Chapman and Dellin Betances rank 13th and 15th, respectively. Super reliever Josh Hader ranks 27th, penalized by the third-worst CON score out of 191 relievers.

Again, I don’t endorse this as anything other than a way to easily spot some pitchers who could bounce back and outperform their 2018 numbers (and maybe as a way to find those late round sleepers in your fantasy drafts). Conversely, you might spot some guys in danger of regression—I’m looking at you and your 3.11 ERA, Trevor Williams. If nothing else, I found it to be an interesting and simple way to look at pitchers from another vantage point.