Kodai Senga and other MLB pitchers who made intriguing changes to their arsenals this season

Rankings are a living document. They are also stuck in a moment, trying to predict the future, but in practice, they breathe. The day after they’re published, there are new injuries to parse, and more information coming from each game.When trying to make sense of data from the start of a season, the most important and predictive tools in samples this small are the simplest, in essence. Strikeout-minus-walk rate is incredibly powerful early on because it gets at the two things that pitchers have the most control over. SIERA (on FanGraphs) and DRA (on Baseball Prospectus) are more complex but still powerful because they place more weight on skills that have signal early and regress the ones that don’t. Stuff+ works because pitchers generally can repeat the shapes and velocities of their pitches much more than they can control what happens after the batter makes contact.Advertisement