Jesús Luzardo, Randy Vasquez and more fantasy baseball pitchers riding good (and bad) luck

Let’s look at expected stats — where only contact quality allowed, batted-ball trajectory, and strikeouts and walks matter — to isolate some lucky and unlucky pitchers.These are not predictions any more or less than the actual stats would be. They’re just an alternate universe where we base our future expectations on past performance, which has been earned and not actualized. To be fair, I think these expected radar-based stats via Statcast/Baseball Savant are better, meaning more predictive, than actual stats. For example, actual ERA is the worst pitching stat in baseball to assess how well someone is pitching. It’s at least half noise. But expected ERA is perfectly descriptive in weighing everything pitchers control over and how they have actually performed individually versus batters — all in one number. But I can’t oversell this. Being perfectly descriptive does not mean something is predictive.Advertisement