Fantasy Baseball Quiz: Blind Resumes

Player A: Zack Wheeler

Player B: Ervin Santana

This is going to be our only pitching comparison since pitchers are even more susceptible to the follies of small sample sizes at this point of the season, having only made four or five starts in 2017. That’s why we had to go big with the Wheeler-Santana comp just to give all of our readers with Santana on their roster that stomach-drop feeling.

Santana has clearly been excellent this season with his sub-1.00 ERA and sub-0.70 WHIP. However, he has gotten about as lucky as is humanly possible. The two numbers that stand out most are his opponent BABIP and left on base rate. For some perspective, the league-wide BABIP allowed last season was .298 (.129 for Santana this year) and the league-wide left on base rate was 72.9 percent. Having a left on base rate of 99 (99!) percent through five starts for Santana is the moral equivalent of attempting real-life Frogger across the Lower Manhattan Expressway and living to tell the tale. For those who are thinking, “Well, maybe Santana is different, maybe he is just able to step up his level of pitching when there are runners on base, and that makes him able to sustain a higher left on base rate,” guess what his career left on base rate is: 72.9. Sound familiar?

Wheeler, on the other hand, has had fewer strands than a bald man this year (57.7 percent left on base), and he has paid the price with a 5.40 ERA. Wheeler is actually striking out batters at a better clip than he has throughout his solid career, and he’s walking significantly fewer hitters. However, hitters have been finding the gaps on Wheeler, and when combined with Wheeler coming off TJ surgery, it’s fair that prospective owners have been scared off a bit.

Going forward, it’s fair that Santana has higher ownership than Wheeler. He has certainly performed better in 2017, and although Wheeler has the edge in xFIP so far this season, Santana has a safer track record and should be ranked higher. That being said, there’s no way the gap should be this vast. Santana is a perfect sell-high candidate, while Wheeler is the ideal buy-low (or put on your watch list) candidate. This will be a common theme throughout the article.