Chris Tillman has struggled this year. Entering Tuesday he had a 6.10 ERA and 1.62 WHIP. His biggest problem has been command; he has 22 walks in 41.1 innings or another way to put it is he’s walked 12 percent of the batters he’s faced. Among pitchers with at least six starts he has the fourth highest walk rate.
Odds are if you drafted Tillman (53rd on average in ESPN) you may be encouraged to believe he may be turning a corner when you look at his box score against the Astros. The major positive was he threw more strikes. This year he’s only throwing strikes 60.2 percent of the time. Last night the strike percentage was62.8 percent, which is on par to the strike percentage he’s had from 2012-14 (63.3 percent).
Even though the strike percentage was up a lot of the strikes he threw were not quality strikes. He left a lot of fastballs in the middle of the zone and he couldn’t throw his curveball for strikes. In fact I don’t think any of the curveballs would have been strikes if the batters never swung.
The Astros have the second highest strikeout rate and third lowest batting in the majors. As I was watching I couldn’t help but think how a better offense would have performed against him (by better, I mean a team that makes more contact) because he threw a lot of bad strikes but got away with it.
The question for fantasy owners is what to do with Tillman moving forward. What’s interesting about Tillman is from 2012-14 his ERAs were all below his FIP and xFIP. Tillman wasn’t the only pitcher who outperformed his FIP and xFIP. Three other starting pitchers had similar results with the outlier being Ubaldo Jimenz. Usually when a pitcher outperforms his FIP and xFIP odds are he’s been a little lucky, but the fact he’s done it for three straight seasons and the Orioles pitching staff have seen similar results make it seem like its not luck.
Other than 15-team mixed or AL-only leagues I would not have him in my starting lineup for the simple reason he’s not throwing strikes consistently and the quality of strikes he is throwing are not good, which is part of the reason why his BABIP (.312) is the highest its been since 2011. If I were in a 12 or 10-team mixed league I would drop him for either good streaming options (Roenis Elias and Brett Anderson) or pitchers with higher ceilings (Drew Hutchison and Jesse Hahn).
