THE STARTING LINE 8/12 - Danks v. Floyd

The Starting Line
by Evan "the Censor" Dickens

One of my coworkers is a big White Sox fan who is playing fantasy baseball for the first time in his life (he's winning with my advice, by the way, but that's neither here nor there). On more than one occasion, he's stopped by my office to talk about how much he loves his young staff. John Danks, he says, is awesome, and Gavin Floyd is also really good.

Well, he's half right.

There have been times this year when looking at the simple, four-category fantasy starting line of both 25-year-old Gavin Floyd and 23-year-old John Danks would lead you to conclude that, while Danks has slightly better numbers, they're both solid fantasy pitchers. But you would only have concluded that if you reviewed the surface statistics and did not drill down deeper. So leave it to the Censor to point out the statistics that expose really how great the chasm is between these two pitchers.

1. Dominance & Control - Danks brings a solid 7.5 K/9 rate to the park; Floyd checks in at a much more pedestrian league-average 6.3, which means you can expect him to rely more on pitching to contact (more on that later). But the strikeouts stand out even more in relation to walks -- Floyd sports a below-average 1.74 K/BB; Danks a much stronger 3.18 K/BB. Danks is striking out more, while walking significantly less, and throwing 65.4% of his pitches for strikes while Floyd only throws a very mediocre 61% for strikes.

2. Batted Balls - Remember that expectation about Floyd pitching to contact? His GB/FB rate is in its fourth consecutive year of decline, now all the way down to 1.01. And a lot of those fly balls are leaving the park; Floyd's 1.34 HR/9 hovers near the bottom ten among ERA-qualifying starters. Danks, on the other hand, even with significantly more strikeouts, has improved his GB/FB rate to 1.27 and cut his HR/9 all the way down to 0.69. So let's review: Danks strikes out more, walks fewer, and still gets more ground balls with very few home runs. Floyd has performed mediocre-to-poor in all of these areas. So why have his surface fantasy statistics been almost as appealing as Danks at times?

3. Luck - The elusive BABIP (batting average on balls in play, in case you're new here), which is truly the best pure measurement of a pitcher's luck, tells us the story. Danks sports a BABIP of .297, right at league average, implying that what you see is very much what you get--and what you'd expect, given his solid strikeout and home run rates. Floyd, on the other hand, is sneaking by with a .250 BABIP--tied for fifth lowest in the majors and far, far below the league average. The smart fantasy player knows this statistic has every reason to start regressing towards a league average, and when that happens Floyd's 1.26 WHIP is going to get even uglier.

There's a very useful statistic called FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) that I often reference--it is a strict measure of a pitcher's controllable metrics, an equation that plugs HR, K, BB, and IP into a formula which functions as a reasonable ERA predictor. Danks has an FIP of 3.22 and an ERA of 3.18. Again, what you see is what you get. Floyd has an FIP of 4.99--and an ERA of 3.84, which is actually almost forty points higher than it was two weeks ago, and clearly still has plenty of reasonable expectation towards the upside.

It all boils down to this: a look at the peripherals and the important ratios shows that Danks is the real deal, a solid pitcher who is likely to be a strong fantasy frontliner for many years. He really is awesome. Floyd, on the other hand, is a mediocre, borderline rosterable starter whose pair of recent troubling starts was entirely predictable with a deeper look at the numbers, and who should have been traded from your team for whatever you could get. Not "really good"--just really lucky.

~Evan the Censor

(all comments, questions, and vulgar flames to evan@fantasybaseballsearch.com)