(*) MASTER NOTES: Lance Lynn and the nature of conflicting analysis

One of the great things about BaseballHQ.com is the tight feedback loop we have with our readers. Our subscriber forums are, in my view, the best resource of its kind in the fantasy baseball universe. Between those forums and the more recent addition of the comments area on our articles, we have a couple of channels for open dialog between our subscriber base and our staff. That's a very good thing.

Through those channels, I've learned a lot about what our subscribers like and don't like about our coverage. One of my earliest lessons was that readers hate conflicting analysis. If one analyst writes something positive about a player one week, and another writes something negative the next week, you can bet that we're going to get called on it.

There's nothing wrong with that, of course. One benefit of that tight subscriber/staff feedback loop is that it keeps us on our toes. We had another instance of this phenomenon this week, and I thought it made for an interesting case study.

The subject is Lance Lynn. This week, our ace Buyers Guide analyst, Stephen Nickrand, wrote this about Lynn:

Lance Lynn (RHP, STL) has enjoyed a huge skills surge so far in 2015: 10.2 Dom, 2.8 Ctl, 40% GB%, 126 BPV. His current 11% SwK% is a career-best mark. His ERA and WHIP would be better if not for an elevated 36% H%. Stick with him.

Less than two weeks earlier, Facts/Flukes analyst Greg Pyron had a somewhat different take:

Lynn has shown better skills than ever thus far in 2015, but FpK% and SwK% hint at forthcoming worsening Cmd. If the 28-year-old could restore his FpK% and get a better handle on left-handed batters, he could exceed expectations. However, it’s more likely that he is headed toward an ERA in the neighborhood of 3.50.

When the inevitable reader comment pointed out this conflict, my first reaction was to deploy my pat answer to this question: BaseballHQ.com is a collection of individual writers whose opinions will sometimes vary; it's possible to interpret the same data set in different ways. In these cases, we recommend that the reader take a deeper look at both arguments and see which one resonates with them, etc.

Luckily, before I got around to giving that answer, Stephen Nickrand gave a better one:

Keep in mind that small sample sizes at this point in the season can change the degree of our optimism/pessimism on a player. In the case of Lynn, his SwK% has spiked to 12% in May and his first-pitch strike rate is around league average this month after a rough April. Hit rate has come down a bit too. Now his ERA for May is right at 3.30 xERA.

Sure enough, in between the two articles, Lynn had made two starts: on the 17th, he threw a gem at home vs. the Tigers, allowing 1 ER in 7.1 IP, with 7 K and an impressive 17 swinging strikes. In his next start (the last before Stephen's writeup), he got touched by the Royals for 5 ER in 6 IP, with only 4 K (the Royals don't strike out much at all) and a still-solid 9 swinging strikes in 6 IP.

So, in between the two analyses, Lynn hung up 26 swinging strikes in 13 IP. In essence, both analyses were sound at the time they were written. But that begs the question: should Lynn's work in two mid-May outings be enough to influence our opinion of him?

And of course, our sharp-eyed reader had the spot-on follow-up question:

I understand but how do you know if a certain change is the result of a small sample size or an actual step forward skill-wise? That's the information I would like to know. Is that information just a scouting thing, that you'd have to visibly see?

And Stephen nailed the response again:

It's more art than science. Follow the skills but put them into the bigger picture by also looking at the player's age, scouting reports, skill trends, etc.

Stephen makes the key point, that it's about looking at the big picture rather than any one metric. In cases like this, I always like to go back and review the commentary from the Baseball Forecaster, as those quick commentaries formed our baseline expectation entering the season, and often end up pointing back at the key metric(s) that can be used to evaluate a change in performance. Sure enough, that's the case with Lynn:

ERA and R$ portray a breakout, but xERA and BPV are flat. In fact, Dom, SwK say he wasn't quite as imposing, with ERA gains primarily a function of S%. BPX even says his skills dipped below average in today's pitching-rich game. Stability and durability have value, but don't pay for another sub-3.00 ERA.

So, tying that off-season take back to what we've seen so far:

• Lynn's current 3.32 xERA/126 BPV is a nice step forward from last year's 3.81 xERA/80 BPV. But as noted in the Forecaster, he's still not displaying skills worthy of a sub-3.00 ERA.

• His Ctl/Dom/Cmd are all improved so far this year, thanks to a hard correction in May that followed a shaky April, especially in terms of first-pitch strikes and swinging strikes. With two months of opposing data, though, the only real conclusion to be drawn is that we need to see more evidence. Is that great night vs. Detroit propping up his SwK numbers, or was that a sign of him reaching a new level of effectiveness? You can take a deeper dive into pitch-type data to see if he's showing a change to his velocity, pitch mix, etc. There's nothing striking in Lynn's case: he's throwing hard stuff a bit more and his curveball a bit less this year, but nothing looks significantly different.

So, the only real answer is that we need more evidence. Lynn had just over 600 big-league innings to his credit entering this season. That's a great spot to see some real skills gains. But we're talking about a 50+ IP sample size so far this year. There may be some real growth going on here, but it's also easy to over-interpret some random noise and call it growth.

Will Lynn's performance going forward align more with Nickrand's take, or Pyron's? Unsatisfying as it is, the only real answer to that question is "let's wait and see."

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