For the second week in a row, Tomoyuki Sugano looks like one of the biggest standouts among pitchers in the entire league. He hasn’t allowed more than three runs in a start since April 12, and has now tossed quality starts in four of the past five – with the lone exception being five shutout innings with a career-high eight strikeouts on April 28.
Sugano has been awesome. And I don’t buy it at all.
Sugano has excellent command of a six-pitch arsenal, but the overall profile remains extremely uninspiring. For the season, however, he still has just a 14.2% strikeout rate, and while strikeouts aren’t everything, it’s extremely unusual for a pitcher to succeed with a strikeout rate below 15% – there have been just two pitchers who qualified for the ERA title with a strikeout rate below 15% from 2021 through 2024, and they had a 5.28 and 4.13 ERA.
Expand the threshold to anyone below a 17% strikeout rate and you have 12 pitchers who had a collective ERA of 4.71 between them, with just two (Chris Flexen in 2021 and Cal Quantrill in 2022; get excited, folks!) with an ERA below 4.00. You can succeed without a ton of strikeouts even in the modern MLB, but Sugano is on the extreme end of viability here. If you are going to be this poor of a strikeout pitcher, you need to do everything else extraordinarily well. Sugano has the elite command and control going for him, but I don’t see much reason to believe he’s going to be a standout when it comes to limiting hard contact – his 38.1% hard-hit rate allowed is good, but not elite, and his expected wOBA on contact is .394, which is really bad.
For some context, Kyle Hendricks, who is probably the king of this kind of profile (and a consistently underrated Fantasy option for a span of about six years in a row at one point) was typically in the 20% range for strikeouts, while allowing a .353 expected wOBA on contact, significantly better than Sugano’s mark.
Sugano is finding success right now, and I understand you are enjoying the fruits of that. Right now. But the goal is to find players who will help you moving forward, and I just don’t see much reason Sugano will be one. Pick an ERA estimator, and they all suggest he’s been one of the luckiest pitchers in baseball so far – 4.90 xERA, 4.61 FIP, 4.47 SIERA, and the list goes on and on.
And the thing is, we do this every year. There is always an outlier or four who outrun their peripherals for a few months to open the season, and people always want to make an argument for why this one will be different. It almost never works out – the biggest exception in recent years was probably Martin Perez, who somehow outran regression long enough to put up a 2.89 ERA in 2022 despite a 3.59 xERA; he has an ERA over 4.45 in each of his following two seasons.
This isn’t just a knock on Sugano, of course. It also very clearly applies to Tyler Anderson, Tyler Mahle, Randy Vasquez, Casey Mize, Ben Lively, Michael Lorenzen, and more right now. Some of those guys might improve their underlying skill sets moving forward, but for the most part, if you’re looking for a list of sell-high starting pitchers, that’s a very good place to start.
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