Michael Simione | July 12th, 2019
Streaming pitchers can win you fantasy leagues every year. No matter what format you are in you can utilize streaming to your advantage. Whether you are looking for a two-start streamer or for a spot start, picking out a pitcher can be difficult. Although streaming can help you, it can also hurt you. Here is a little peek into my mindset and how I have come to a streaming record of 82-50 on my twitter account @SPStreamer.
Splits
Splits are extremely important when it comes to streaming. Not only are home/away splits important but so are left/right. Pitcher splits are easy to look up, and although I do think they are important and should be looked at. I find the offense they are facing is just as if not more important. When you stream you are grabbing pitchers nobody wants. Usually, their skill sets aren’t as good, but if they face an offense that matches their strength it can turn them from a mediocre pitcher into someone who goes six innings with zero earned runs and seven strikeouts. So, let’s look at the first split, let’s see how offenses are against right-handed pitchers and left-handed pitchers.
It looks like bottom five have been Pirates, Indians, Rangers, Marlins, Royals, and Giants. Nothing too shocking here although the Rangers seem a little low as well as the Yankees at 21. My thinking is if a decent left-handed pitcher is out there like a Martin Perez or CC Sabathia and they are facing the Marlins, Royals or Giants it would be a must-add for me.
The bottom five here are the Orioles, Giants, Blue Jays, Reds, Marlins, and Tigers. Looks like the Marlins and Giants are just bad no matter who they face. It looks like the Reds kill left-handed pitchers but struggle against right-handed pitchers. Yankees go toward the top of the list, while the Mets fall pretty far down. Both the Pirates and Rangers shot up to top 10 here. So, there is a lot of movement here compared to the last chart. This is always good to observe so you know if you are thinking of streaming a right-handed pitcher against the Pirates it isn’t a good idea, whereas you can exploit the Reds or even Cardinals.
I don’t want this article to go on too long so below are the home and away splits. Some people prefer left/right splits more but to each their own. But no one can deny the effect of Coors Field as you can see.
When I stream, I try to use a combination of all of these. For example, we should try to look for a pitcher who is at home facing the reds and is a right-handed pitcher. The Reds are ranked 28th on the road and 28th when facing a right-handed pitcher. Certain offenses are easier like the Giants and Marlins as they are bad no matter what and statistically speaking if you stream against them all the time you should come out on top. Now, these stats are for the entire first half. I do like to go further and see how offenses are doing in the past month because we all know teams can get hot. I also like to look for pitchers who have high strikeout upside by looking at their SwStr% and CSW. When I find those pitchers I keep them in mind for when they face strikeout prone offenses such as the Mariners.
Overall
To finish this off I did an overall for each offense as well as an overall for all streaming pitchers.
These were all done rotisserie-style with a points system using underlying stats. I have done this before and like the format just to give us an overall view as to who has the best sabermetrics. I always state with these that this is not all you should look at as there are a million other variables. I hope this helped and if anyone has any questions please let me know as you can always message me on twitter!
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