Starting Pitcher Targets using zone rates: Why Kyle Harrison, Braxton Ashcraft, more are surging

At this point in the season, a lot of "hot starts" are beginning to stabilize, and we're getting a sense of which players have really made meaningful changes or not. On the pitching side, we're also seeing the pitchers who are going to be most or least impacted by ABS. We know that, across the league, the zone rate is down considerably as pitchers either struggle with the new strike zone or battle the mental hurdle of worrying about an automated strike zone.

That has caused some guys who succeed on the fringes of the zone (like Logan Webb) to really struggle to begin the year. That, and a conversation between Nick Pollack and Eno Sarris on an episode of "The Craft" podcast, gave me the idea for this article. I made a leaderboard of all starting pitchers who have a better than league average zone rate, a better than league average swinging strike rate (SwStr%), and a lower than average rate of pitches in the heart of the zone.

In short, this leaderboard should tell us which pitchers are throwing strikes, but keeping those strikes out of the heart of the zone, and are also missing bats at a good clip. Those should absolutely be pitchers we want on our rosters. I'll start with the players who qualified for the leaderboard, and then, underneath that, I'll add a second leaderboard of players who just missed in one category, which could give us another segment of pitchers to choose from on the waiver wire or in trades.

For bookkeeping purposes, the league average zone rate for starting pitchers is 41. 6%, the league-average for starters Heart-Zone Rate (H-Zone%) is 25. 4%, and the league-average SwStr% for starters is 10.