40-Man Roster Review: Collin McHugh

Collin McHugh quietly enjoyed a very strong campaign in 2015. On the heels of a breakout campaign in which he finished 4th in the American League Rookie of the Year voting, McHugh delivered. The grass certainly could have been greener. Sustaining good health in MLB is very difficult; a lingering blister plagued his pitching in the months of May and June.

image source

In those months, McHugh pitched to 5.08 and 4.97 ERAs, respectively. But despite those months, McHugh finished with 203 2/3 innings pitched, a 3.89 ERA and a 19-7 win-loss record. He even finished 8th in the American League Cy Young vote.

Jeff Luhnow punched a winning ticket with Collin McHugh, Selected off waivers in December 2013, McHugh had succeeded in the minor leagues, but that could not be sustained in MLB. The Astros convinced him to utilize his breaking pitches more. Note that after debuting with Houston, McHugh utilizes his curveball at least 20% of the time.

I am excited to see what the 2016 season has in store for McHugh. In two years with the Astros, he is 30-16 with a 3.39 ERA. 

If you are interested in learning more about Collin, please visit his personal blog http://www.adayolderadaywiser.com/. 

Follow him on Twitter @Collin_McHugh 

40-Man Roster Review: Lance McCullers

Lance McCullers is more than a pitcher on the Houston Astros 40-man roster. He is more than the number on his back and he is certainly a professional beyond his age. Lance McCullers is a true student of the game of baseball. 

image source

Ted Berg, a writer for FTW! MLB, wrote a brilliant piece discussing spin rates and the Houston Astros. Berg credits McCullers for being eager to learn, with respect to spin-rate data, "as soon as it was presented" to the young right-hander. 

Berg explains in his article that Lance has been working on replicating the change-up that Felix Hernandez deploys. This is pretty interesting. Take a look at whiffs per swing data for Hernandez, provided by Brooks-Baseball:

With McCullers tossing 125 2/3 innings last season, there is not a lot of data on his pitch usage. The data that Brooks-Baseball does have, however, is crazy. McCullers' worst month was June, where he only induced 26.92 whiffs per swing on his change-up.

Comparing Hernandez and McCullers' heat map with the change-up is pretty interesting as well:

It appears that McCullers is echoing Hernandez' pitch placement. McCullers  has a tendency to miss a little higher in the zone. With experience and more faith in his ability, I am confident that Lance will grow and locate his pitches better.

Overall, McCullers is a really good pitcher for the Houston Astros. In his rookie effort, he threw 125 2/3 innings, resulting in a 3.22 earned run average. Other numbers look quite nice. His strikeout-to-walk ratios are exceptional: 9.2 K/9; 3.1 BB/9; therefore, 3.0 strikeouts per walk issued. 

Once seen as a question mark with regards to a future in the bullpen or being a starting pitcher, this 22-year-old is silencing experts and internet bloggers. He is the real deal and should be in the mix for a Cy Young run as early as this season.

40-Man Roster Review: Dallas Keuchel

Dallas Keuchel. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a name can be worth a thousand words. Or many, many more. I am not going to spend all day writing this roster review. I assume that if you are here, you are already aware that Dallas Keuchel is a top-20 pitcher in all of Major League Baseball.

So let's just cover a few basics. Drafted and signed by the Astros in the 2009 MLB draft, Keuchel made his MLB debut just shy of three years after first signing a professional contract. He did not pitch poorly; 5 innings, 4 bases on balls, 4 hits, 2 strikeouts and 1 earned run.

Keuchel's mark in the earned run average department kind of fall in line with the Astros loss total during the 2012 and 2013 seasons(5.27. 5.15). They also help illustrate how the Astros went from a 55-win club in 2013 to an 86-win team in 2015 (2.93, 2.48).

Dallas Keuchel has a hell-of-a-story to tell regarding his 2015 season. The team itself was expected to be better than 70 wins; yet, not quite over the .500 mark. En route to a 20-8 record and a 2.48 ERA, Keuchel went 15-0 at home, started in the 2015 American League All-Star Game, and defeated the New York Yankees (on the road) in a win-or-go-home setting that was the American League Wild Card Game. 

Keuchel is the embodiment of the Houston Astros administrated by General Manager Jeff Luhnow. In the image below, observe how many pitches are in the outer third of the strike zone. Not only are they outside, but they are also heavily concentrated in the bottom portion of the zone. This helps to ensure both soft contact and downward force on the baseball. The result is a higher ground ball rate. 

Another graphic that I would like to direct attention to is with respect to his pitch usage. The main differences here are an increase in his sinker usage. In the first couple seasons, Keuchel used his sinker around 40% of the time. In the past two seasons, however, he is employing that pitch more and more. There is a slight dip in the mid-to-late portion of 2015. Overall, Keuchel uses his sinker more than half the time. His other pitches have essentially stayed the same in regards to usage. But it is very interesting that Keuchel is, for the most part, a two-pitch kind of guy. It works!

Most peripheral statistics suggest that Keuchel is not a fluke. The graphics selected show that he has developed an idea of where to attack batters in the strike zone as well as what pitches work well for him. In four seasons of data, only the 2013 season has an outlier in terms of BABIP. In order from 2012-present, Keuchel has posted: .277, .340, .295 and .269 marks in this statistic.

People may infer that Keuchel will not replicate his 2015 season in 2016. That is okay by me. Keuchel is not a fluke. He is a Cy Young Winner and a true major league pitcher. 

40-Man Roster Review: Will Harris

Jeff Luhnow has a pretty good history with the waiver wire. The next player covered in this series, Will Harris, is a perfect example of evidence supporting the introductory statement. 

Before the Astros selected Harris via waivers, he had pitched for the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks. His tenure with the Rockies was abysmal. A couple of seasons with the Diamondbacks saw a mixed bag of results. 

In 2015, Harris broke through and excelled with a 1.90 earned run average in 71 innings of work. 

Today I pose the question: is this result sustainable? 

There are a few red flags when looking at the 2015 stat line for Harris. The first issue that I would like to mention is the discrepancy between ERA and FIP. The latter is an acronym for Fielding Independent Pitching. Fangraphs defines FIP as a "measure to what a player’s ERA would look like over a given period of time if the pitcher were to have experienced league average results on balls in play and league average timing." 

Baseball-reference credits Harris with a 3.66 mark for FIP. His 1.90 earned run average results in a 1.76 difference - that's the equivalent of nearly 2 runs per nine innings! Part of this can be attributed to a stellar defense playing. *cough* shifts *cough*

Returning to the question of sustainability, I look at Harris and Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP). Here, the results are perhaps even scarier. Harris' .192 BABIP is exceedingly low in comparison to the Astros' pitching staff BABIP of .285.

I took a sample of fifteen Astros pitchers from the 2015 season. These fifteen pitchers threw at least 30 innings last season. Harris' .192 BABIP was -2.65 standard deviations away from the team BABIP of .285. On a standardized mean curve, being two standard deviations away from a mean suggests that statistic occurs less than 2.5% of all cases in the long run. Therefore, I think that the BABIP Harris benefited from in 2015 is very unlikely to occur again in 2016.

Will Harris had exceptional campaign in 2015. But, his BABIP will certainly regress to the mean in 2016. Keep him in a fairly short term role in the middle innings. Nothing more, and don't expect a repeat. 

40-Man Roster Review: Jandel Gustave

Jandel Gustave has been a Houston Astro for the majority of his professional career. Last season, however, he was briefly a Kansas City Royal. The Astros failed to add him to the 40-man roster and allowed him to be selected by the Boston Red Sox, who then traded him to the Royals. Eventually he was deemed not-quite-ready and offered back to the Astros, who happily accepted him back.

image source

But most people knew the Royals would not hang onto Gustave. JJ Cooper, a writer with Baseball America, contributed his thoughts last December: 

Gustave touched 100 mph as a starter. Moving to the ‘pen with the Royals (who acquired him for cash from the Red Sox), he could be the hardest-throwing pitcher in the game’s hardest-throwing pen, if he can stick.

For what it's worth, Cooper also said Delino DeShields had a low chance of sticking with the Texas Rangers. Oops.

Anyways, Gustave is back with the Astros and (thankfully) on the 40-man roster. But that is obvious...

Gustave, who will be 23 years old for the entirety of the 2016 season, pitched for the Corpus Christi Hooks in 2015. He was primarily the closer for the club. Gustave recorded 20 saves en route to a 2.15 earned run average in 58 2/3 innings pitched.

I believe that Gustave still has a lot to harness. Yes, he throws hard. But the strikeouts were not really present during his time with the Hooks (just 49). He also displayed signs of wildness, as he walked 25 batters. As rates, these figures come out to 7.5 K/9 and 3.8 BB/9. Together, this is a very abysmal rate, with 1.96 strikeouts coming per walk. Yikes.

If he can improve in those areas while keeping the ball in the park, Gustave will be a very responsible pitcher in the major leagues. Throughout 255 innings in the minor leagues, he has yielded just 9 home runs. Jandel is a young pitcher with a lot of potential and I see him further developing his skills as a member of the Fresno Grizzlies for the whole 2016 season.