My Genius: Picking Perfect Pitchers

Galarraga stayed back even as his manager argued...respect.

So why should you listen to me as a fantasy expert?  There were 3 perfect games this month: Dallas Braden, Roy Halladay and Armando Galarraga (*).  I owned Braden and Galarraga during their perfect games.  I also owned Mat Latos for his one-hit gem.  Despite my hatred of the strategy, I have been streaming, sort of.  I stream one pitcher spot daily and have found success.

This is going to be a somewhat disjointed post shifting between my take on the Galarraga’s perfect game (*), my dominance at calling good performances and a surprise at the end (so follow the jump).

Galarraga was amazing in his perfect game (*) today.  He got more outs than any other pitcher in a perfect game in history: 28.  I give all the credit in the world to Joyce (if you don’t know what I’m talking about you live under a rock) for going into the Tigers dugout and apologizing to Galarraga.  I have even more respect for Galarraga himself who did not even speak to Joyce once.  Ridiculous…the good guy didn’t win here.

I also loved Miguel Cabrera arguing with Joyce—and Joyce was arguing back during the game. Joyce knew he couldn’t throw Cabrera out of the game after that call even though any other umpire would have thrown him out in any other situation.  Hilarious.

So how do I always end up with a dominant player in my streaming rotation?

Well, because many of my leaguemates also stream I can’t spill all my secrets here and now, but the primary factor I look for is the opponent of the pitcher.  I primarily pick pitchers facing poor offensive teams like Houston, Atlanta, Kansas City or Cleveland.  After that, I look at the WHIP of all the pitchers.  Part of this is laziness: ideally I’d look up more sabermetric stats to determine who the best pitcher will be in the best ballpark on a given day, but another part is cunning.  WHIP is the stat least likely to be influenced by luck of the 5 roto fantasy stats.  Wins are ridiculously arbitrary, Ks don’t show a pitcher’s actual effectiveness and ERA can be disproportionately affected by a single bad outing.  WHIP, on the other hand, correlates to the other stats and gives points on its own.

There are, of course, lots of other criteria that can be used to determine the best pitchers on a given day, but this method has netted me at least 3 of the top 10 pitching performances of the year.

The theme of the day is overshadowing.  Umpires are overshadowed until they blow a call (again Joyce is a very good umpire).  The blown call overshadows a gem of a game by Galarraga.  Galarraga’s game overshadows a brilliant game by Fausto Carmona (remember when I told you to pick him up? told you!)

And also, how fitting is it that Ken Griffey Jr., a player whose entire career was overshadowed by roided players jacking home runs retires on a night when the big news is incompetent umpiring.

Griffey’s greatness transcends just about everyone.  You might know he’s never won a championship, but has it ever seemed to blemish his career in any way?  Even Jordan was called “not a winner” before he won his championships in Chicago…

And, more randomness in honor of the Stanley Cup: