Merry Christmas to you and yours! And, perhaps, a Christmas gift from Posey and gang!
A Substack newsletter I subscribe to, MLB Data Warehouse, publishes data analytics to help fantasy baseball team owners find players who can help them win their league championship. A recent one was about High Efficiency Starting Pitchers.
Of course, I looked for Giants pitchers. Logan Webb and Robbie Ray were on it. I also scanned to see if there are any SP without a QO on the list, and, to my pleasant surprise, the only one to pop was Adrian Houser, who recently signed with the Giants this offseason. There are also other pitchers who are free agents or possible trade targets, I will keep an eye out in case.
ogc thoughts
He was one of the high efficiency pitchers, which was in the last section of the newsletter, in terms of pitches per out. He was 22nd on the list, and tied with many at 5.2 pitches per out. So that means he can get you a lot of innings when he’s starting for your team.
He didn’t end up on any of the other lists in the sections above, but still was close to being on the other lists too, I believe. His Quality Start percentage (which was defined as starts of at least 6 innings and 3 or less earned runs) was 52%, just short of the 55% for the ones at the end of that list. His Money Starts percentage (which was defined as starts of at least 7 innings and 2 or less earned runs) was 14%, very short of the 20% cutoff for that list, but just one more Money Start would have put him at 19%, so he wasn’t that FA off there either, ultimately.
So per this data (a link is in the article for the data table), he could be one of the top 25-30 starting pitchers in terms of efficiency and quality, if he can duplicate what he did last season over a full season.
Repeating 2025
Ay, dar be the rub, matey! He’s never done this well before, so why isn’t 2025 an anomaly? Because he added a couple of MPH to his pitch in 2025, which appears repeatable, per reports. After some changes to his mechanics, he noted:
"I just felt freed up, It was coming out a lot easier."
Unfortunately, advanced stats and projections do not support a repeat, StatCast has his xERA at 4.05, when the NL average ERA is 4.22, and that’s an above average pitching performance. And that’s roughly his career 4.06 ERA and Baseball Reference projects his ERA at 4.13 for 2026 season. Fangraphs Steamer project 4.34 ERA, however. All quite far from his 3.31 ERA for 2025.
In any case, at $11M AAV, that’s for roughly 1.5 WAR per season, and if he’s around average ERA in 2026, he should be in that WAR range, even with that higher ERA by Steamer. If he has improved his velocity by 2 MPH, however, perhaps the Giants pitching gurus (Posey, Lopez, Andersen, Meccage, and others) can work with him to repeat more of what he accomplished with the White Sox, and not what he did the Rays. Even if we can get a mix like 2025 with the two extremes he had with the two teams, that was still worth 3.3 bWAR, which would be a great performance, and a great addition to the starting rotation.
With an upper possibility of 3 WAR and probable production of roughly 1.5-2.0 WAR, Houser appears to be a good gamble to take in signing. Based on prior performances (with recency bias towards what he did in 2025), expecting, say, two 1.5 WAR seasons, for 3.0 total WAR production is roughly what the Giants are paying with $22M over the two seasons (if $/WAR is around $7.5M currently; if higher, the bar is lower than 3.0 WAR). If he can repeat his 2025 season, then he’s a great bargain.
No comments:
Post a Comment