3 days ago
Fantasy baseball starting pitching ranks for the final stretch of the season
It's time for change.
One of the toughest things about doing these rankings is that every fantasy baseball league has different settings, particularly when it comes to injury. There are just too many different sets of rules a league can have to make one set of rankings that includes healthy and injured pitches make sense for everyone. Does your league have injured list slots at all? Do you have just one or two? Do you have unlimited injury slots? That changes so much about your risk tolerance generally but also about how you handle an injured starter in season.
So it's time to take injured pitchers out of the rankings. Instead, let's have a little table with the 15 most relevant starting pitchers, where they would rank if they were fully healthy, and what their most recent injury note has been. A table like this:
Now you can assess for yourself how long it's worth holding onto these guys, or when it might be time to pounce.
In terms of notes, it's probably a positive sign if they've had a rehab start. They may still need a week or two, but they've been deemed healthy enough to get on the mound competitively, and that means they are relatively close to returning. If they are currently shut down, or even just playing catch, the timeline back is pretty nebulous, even for the team and player involved.
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Another difficulty with the rankings has been how to represent minor leaguers that are interesting. Obviously in many leagues you can benefit from stashing young players before they get to the big leagues, but there's also a short shelf life for them. Many fantasy players have been waiting for the Pirates' Bubba Chandler to come up forever, and it just hasn't happened. To help with the decision on whether to stash a prospect, we'll include the top 10 minor leaguers, with minor league Stuff+ where it's available, and a guess at when they might be up. That list is below:
What that leaves is a ranking of 150 pitchers who are in the big leagues and in big-league rotations right now. Rotations are always a living organism, so maybe some of these guys — particularly at the bottom of the list — are on their way in or out of their current roles. But, for the most part, these are pitchers who are going to pitch this week.
That makes them a whole lot easier to rank, using our usual array of predictive metrics like projected ERA and K% (using OOPSY projections from FanGraphs, which include stuff metrics), Stuff+ and Location+, and strikeouts minus walks. And we'll put my working document into the Google doc, where I'll also update the minor league Stuff+ numbers this week.
Good luck down the stretch!
(Top Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Luke Hales / Getty Images, Harry How / Getty Images, Yuki Iwamura / Associated Press)
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