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Pirates +130, Watch this Mitch Keller kid!
Keeping with trying to find the talented young guys that had very bad starts to their big careers and hoping to find guys that show reason to believe they will return to their billed potential from the their amateur and farm numbers.
for this year with high variance and more epistemic uncertainty I tweaked my approach to finding players and teams that the market will under or over estimate. This idea came from watching a lot of horse handicappers use the technique of "finding excuses" for a horse with pedigree or good past performances/workouts. To find a reason to discount data that has reason to be an aberation is where we can find edge, whether its a horse that ran a bad race due to bad track conditions, getting bumped out of the gate, or heels clicked in the turn or a pitcher with a shitty pitching coach or injury. We have to find quick potential market inefficiencies because we don't have a 162 game grind.
Today's young pitcher with horrible surface stats, but good pedigree and pitch metrics is
Mitch Keller for the Pirates.
The Pirates pitching coach and team were known to get the very least out of their pitchers the last few years. We saw it with Morton, Cole, Glasnow ect. a big part of the problem was pitching coach Ray Searage's insistence on using 2 seamers and trying to pitch down in the strike zone, and not adapting as launch angles started to make that strategy extremely hittable.
Keller is another guy that has high velocity and high spin rate, that can benefit from new pitching coach Oscar Marin's emphasis on higher strikes when situations dictate.
keller showed promise through his minor league career and maybe got rushed to the big leagues due in injury and a shallow starting rotation.
last year in 48 innings his Babip was an astronomical .475. this was literally the worst BABIP going back to 1900 for anyone pitching more than 40 innings. (Corbin Burnes from yesterday's write was the closet to him last year with .414)
But Keller actually had above average Exit velocity against and hard hit %. So he for sure was getting a little bloops and seeing eye singles ect. His strand rate was near 60% meanwhile he had a 12.2 K per 9 inning rate. So when he wasn't being dinked and dunked he was getting a lot of swings and misses. He can throw 98 so this off season his work on adding a new change up to his nasty slider and decent curveball could be a game changer as his luck regresses and his BABIP goes down.
A big unknown for these weird off seasons is knowing what players did with the down time. Keller invested in a high tech Rapsodo Baseball anaylsis equipment to work on his spin efficiency and spin axis to optimal performance. The word is that he has his spin efficiency up to the 95th percentile vs last year's major league pitchers data.
I'm willing to take a shot that Keller is serviciable this year and shows glimpses of greatness and will win more than he loses as a dog. Taking the first five a bit heavier here, since it's the Pirates and their bullpen. But also taking full game action and going big on various overs on Keller strike outs. going to pay more juice today for lower #'s as I got burned with a big push yesterday due to an early exit, which i'm sure we will see a lot of these next few weeks.
KVB gave Chi_archie 5 Betpoint(s) for this post.
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Originally Posted by lakerboy
