Breaking National League SPs into tiers

Conventional wisdom suggests that it's a mistake to go after pitching early in a draft.

Generally, this is good rule of thumb, but there are a few starting pitchers who are so far ahead of the pack that they are worth targeting in the first two rounds, even in a mixed league. American League hitters cannot be happy to see the return of CC Sabathia, who resumes his role as the league's preeminent hurler. Sabathia does have rivals in the National League, and we'll use our two-pronged approach of sorting pitchers by projected K/9 rate and ERA to determine tiers, from the elites on down, for your pitching draft list.

Using a 8.5 K/9 rate and a 3.80 ERA as our cutoff for the first tier, we arrive at the list of seven starters below for the senior circuit. We can see that Tim Lincecum, Johan Santana and Jake Peavy are true National League elites, and each rivals Sabathia for major league pitching supremacy. The remaining four, despite their lofty ratios, don't really belong in the same class. Rich Harden has perpetual health issues, Edinson Volquez and Chad Billingsley project to post mediocre WHIPs, and Max Scherzer has made only seven major league starts..

We uncover a few more gems if we ratchet our standards down to include pitchers who strike out fewer than 8.5 batters per nine innings, starting with Dan Haren. He projects to compile the same ERA as Harden and the same WHIP as Peavy, though he could lag 15 to 20 whiffs behind Peavy. Roy Oswalt, Brandon Webb and Cole Hamels are also strong bets to post excellent ERAs and WHIPs, but each presents an even greater sacrifice in the strikeout category. As with Volquez and Billingsley in the previous group, Josh Johnson, Yovani Gallardo and Matt Cain destroy an otherwise sparkling set of projections with WHIPs likely to rise above 1.30. Still, only two pitchers in this group are projected to post any ratio worse than the expected league average. Ruining the perfect picture are Adam Wainwright and Derek Lowe, whose below-average K/9 rates render them slightly less valuable than their cohorts on this list.

The next four pitchers will all be close to striking out a batter an inning, but their collective firepower won't help them in the other categories. Jonathan Sanchez and Oliver Perez have too many control issues, and Brett Myers has gopheritis. Javier Vazquez has neither, but he is the rare starting pitcher who has a chronically high BABIP.

This next tier represents the final helping of starting pitchers for mixed league drafts. For the most part, these pitchers are close to league average, and none are likely to meet either the 8.5 K/9 or 3.80 ERA threshold. Ricky Nolasco and Aaron Harang come close to these standards, and since both are very stingy with walks, they can be a big help with WHIP, too. Though their projected ratios place them in this group, both pitchers really belong with Myers and Vazquez in the previous tier. Nolasco and Harang are even better picks than Sanchez and Perez, despite their slight disadvantage in strikeouts.

Nearly all of the pitchers below should be avoided in mixed leagues, especially the ones who aren't expected to reach five strikeouts per nine innings. Chien-Ming Wang is an exception to this rule in the American League, but the NL lacks a finesse pitcher who is as skilled as Wang at inducing groundball outs. Honorable mentions go to Mike Pelfrey and Chris Volstad, who should compile sub-4.00 ERAs and near-average WHIPs despite subpar K/9 rates. Pelfrey and Volstad join Carlos Villanueva, Scott Olsen and Collin Balester as the best pitchers in this tier, and the ones who are the best choices for a late round mixed league pick. Balester, in particular, is an intriguing pitcher. Despite the modest projections, the 22 year-old has shown in his minor league career the promise of posting above-average ratios. The question is whether he can make good on that promise this season or somewhere further down the road.

Al Melchior was recently a Fantasy columnist and data analyst for Baseball HQ and will be providing advice columns for CBSSports.com. Click here to send him a question. Please put "Melchior" in the subject field.