If you like what you’re reading then you will like my 2015 Fantasy Baseball Guide! Last year’s fantasy guide was more than 150,000 words and had 440 player profiles (of hitters and pitchers). My approach to player evaluation is to ask questions about what the player has done in the past and what he may do in the future. I certainly provide a narrative on how I feel a player will perform, but I also ask a lot of open ended questions that I hope will get you thinking about the information I’ve provided.
Before I started doing any research on Anibal Sanchez the first thing I thought of was he’s always hurt. If you look at his injury history you’ll see the primary cause of his injuries have been due to his right shoulder, which is something you never want to see with a pitcher. Last year he went on the DL twice; once for a blister on his throwing hand and a pectoral strain. Despite the long injury history he has made at least 29 starts in each year from 2010-13.
A big reason why the strikeout rate dropped (from 27.1% to 19.8%) so much last year was due to due to the slider. The table below shows the performance of slider since 2010.
What’s funny is even though the strikeout rate dropped significantly hitters were not making more or harder contact against the pitch. What the data is indicating is he became a pitch to contact pitcher when he threw the slider. This could be more beneficial from a real standpoint, but if he’s not going to miss bats his fantasy viability decreases substantially. The big question is will he revert back to his old slider usage or not. It’s possible the blister he sustained early in the season caused the different usage of the slider, but he sustained that injury in late April. Lastly, his slider usage has not changed in the last five years.
| Splits | SLUG | BABIP | K% | BB% |
| 2010 | .308 | .266 | 30.4% | 5.3% |
| 2011 | .393 | .340 | 29.7% | 7.7% |
| 2012 | .361 | .307 | 29.3% | 1.9% |
| 2013 | .277 | .268 | 33.2% | 4.3% |
| 2014 | .300 | .263 | 17.8% | 7.4% |
It’s important to remember when he’s healthy he can be one of the most dominating pitchers in baseball. His lengthy injury history concerns me enough that I cannot project more than 170 innings next year. If he’s healthy, and that’s a big if, I believe the strikeout can be in the 20-24% range next year.
My 2015 projection for Sanchez is 160 IP, 3.40 ERA, 1.14 WHIP, 140 Ks and 10 wins.
