2010 Draft Prep: Titles come to those who wait

Pitching wins championships.

You sure about that?

You've heard the adage before, and you've seen major league teams live by it, giving multimillion-dollar deals to whatever innings eaters happen to smile at them in the offseason.

So naturally, you might try to do the same in Fantasy, building a stable core of pitching before turning your attention to hitting.

But that approach has one glaring flaw: It assumes there's such thing as a stable pitcher.

The bad news

Pitchers are inherently fickle. They do unnatural things with their arms -- and not just every once in a while, but over 100 times every five days. Fitting with the laws of nature, those arms often break -- usually in the elbow or the shoulder or the forearm -- and force the pitcher to miss months at a time, sometimes never pitching the same way again.

Consider the way Tommy John surgery has become almost a rite of passage for pitchers. When an organization has a potential ace rising through the system, it coddles him, limiting his innings in the hope of staving off the inevitable. Only after his elbow finally gives, subjecting him to the procedure and the 18 months of rehabilitation that follow, can the organization finally turn him loose.

As a closer for the Athletics in 2005, Octavio Dotel actually chose to have Tommy John surgery, going against doctors' advice, just so he could avoid having it later. Can you think of an injury for hitters -- to the arm or leg or anywhere else -- that has even close to the same mythology? I can't.

And injuries aren't the only concern for pitchers. Try to wrap your head around the improbability of what they have to accomplish. To routinely hit 90 miles per hour with controlled but significant movement requires a precise delivery finely tuned through years of repetition. If anything -- be it a lack of concentration, a loss of muscle memory or general soreness -- interferes with that perfect harmony, accuracy will suffer, velocity will drop, breaking pitches will flatten, balls will fly out of the park and ERAs will rise. It happens to a high number of pitchers every year simply because too much can go too wrong too easily.

Zack Greinke was the 33rd pitcher drafted in '09 but finished second to King Felix. (US Presswire)

Last year, something went wrong for nine of the first 20 pitchers drafted in standard Head-to-Head leagues. Johan Santana, Brandon Webb, Jake Peavy, Cole Hamels, Edinson Volquez, Roy Oswalt, Scott Kazmir, Carlos Zambrano and Francisco Liriano all performed significantly below expectations, ranking no higher than 40th, and a 10th pitcher, A.J. Burnett, didn't exactly leave his owners feeling satisfied with their investment.

By comparison, only six of the top 20 hitters -- David Wright, Jose B. Reyes, Grady Sizemore, Josh Hamilton, Justin Morneau and Carlos Beltran -- disappointed to the same extent, and the snake-bitten Mets, who had no reason to rush anyone back after they threw in the towel in August, accounted for three of them.

In Fantasy, where the limited number of teams creates a surplus of middle-range talent that leaves the high-end players to make all the difference in the standings, the one thing you want more than anything else is certainty. If even one of your early-round picks doesn't perform like an early-round pick and you have to replace him with one of those dime-a-dozen middle-range types, you've already lost ground on your competition. Knowing all the obstacles a pitcher has to overcome just to meet expectations, much less exceed them, how can you ever have the certainty you need to draft one in the early rounds?

It's simple, really: Don't bother. Leave the early-round pitchers to disappoint your opponents and instead invest your early-round picks in the known quality, the one less likely to put you in that early hole. Invest them in hitters.

Because even though luck will always have a say in Fantasy, the responsibility still falls on you to give yourself the best chance of winning. If you put your faith in unknowns (pitchers) rather than knowns (hitters), you forfeit control of your team and put yourself at the mercy of luck.

An investment in pitching is an investment in luck, and investing in luck is a sloppy way to build a Fantasy team.

The good news

Wait, wait, wait -- that can't be right. You mean to tell me I don't need good pitching to win?

No, you do need good pitching. You need good everything. The problem is you won't necessarily get good pitching when you invest your early-round picks in it, and even worse, you'll deprive yourself of good hitting. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

But the good news is every coin has two sides to it. You know that measure of uncertainty that made pitchers so risky in the early rounds? It actually works to their advantage in the middle rounds.

Call it boom-or-bust potential. Pitchers have more of it than hitters. By those middle rounds, the certainty hitters offer isn't necessarily a certainty you'd want. It's guys like Alex Rios, Jose Lopez and Carlos Pena dangling their usual so-so numbers for anyone who didn't jump on the big numbers available earlier in the draft.

But pitchers still have some mystery at that point, which isn't such a bad thing when mediocrity abounds. The same factors that lead them to so many breakdowns lead them to just as many breakthroughs, which opens the door for you to draft an ace even though you didn't invest in one.

Just look at the evidence. Of the top 15 hitters in standard Head-to-Head scoring, only five -- Adrian Gonzalez, Jacoby Ellsbury, Aaron Hill, Derek Jeter and Ryan Zimmerman -- significantly improved their value from Draft Day, meaning they moved up at least 15 spots in the rankings.

As for the pitchers who did the same ... well, it's too many to list. You can see the list in the table to the right.

Count 'em up. That's nine of the top 15, including four of the top five. Nearly two-thirds of last year's elite class of starting pitchers came from the middle rounds, and only after a full 17 starting pitchers had gone off the board.

Keep in mind also that of all the players drafted in a significant number of CBSSports.com leagues, 116 were starting pitchers and 207 were hitters. The pitchers had twice as much success as the hitters even though they had half as many opportunities.

And best of all, you could see these pitchers coming. Most of them were former top prospects who, either by increasing their strikeouts or decreasing their walks -- often both -- showed signs of breaking out. Verlander, Carpenter and Vazquez didn't quite fit that mold, but Verlander and Carpenter were former aces due for a rebound, and Vazquez always had a good strikeout-to-walk ratio. Perhaps his move to a more favorable situation in Atlanta finally allowed him to make the most of it.

So who fits the profile this year? Yovani Gallardo and Chad Billingsley both deserve second chances after some control problems bumped them out of the top 15 late last year. John Lackey could re-enter elite territory with his move to the Red Sox. Tommy Hanson looked like a legitimate ace during his 21-start debut, and Ubaldo Jimenez reached the same heights after finally taking command of his 98-mile-per-hour heat. John Danks and Gavin Floyd continue to make strides for the White Sox, and Matt Garza might have already passed them if the Rays had delivered him more than eight victories last year. Brett Anderson appeared to turn the corner as a 21-year-old rookie when he posted a 3.03 ERA and averaged a strikeout per inning over his final 16 starts.

Chances are at least half of those pitchers will end up in the top 15 this year, and in most drafts, you can wait until the seventh round to pursue them. Some might even last until the 14th or 15th round, when everyone else is drafting has-been hitters like David Ortiz and Vladimir Guerrero.

The value doesn't even compare. Bargain pitchers dominate the middle rounds of every Fantasy draft, but if you already filled your pitcher slots in the early rounds, you can't take advantage.

The follow-up

Of course, the story doesn't end there. Draft Day only signals the starting point for building your pitching staff -- or really, your entire team. You'll still want to keep an eye out for the players nobody saw coming.

Because every year, they emerge, and true to boom-or-bust philosophy, they more often emerge among pitchers than hitters. Five of the top 30 pitchers in standard Head-to-Head scoring last year -- Randy Wolf, Wandy Rodriguez, Edwin Jackson, Joel Pineiro and Joe Blanton -- went undrafted in at least 40 percent of leagues. Only two of the top 30 hitters -- Aaron Hill and Adam Lind -- did the same.

From the first day of the season, you'll want to monitor every box score for every game. When you see an unowned pitcher have a good start -- meaning a healthy number of innings, a low number of walks and preferably a high number of strikeouts -- make note of it. If it continues for three or four starts, pick him up and see how long it lasts.

As long as you keep a couple of roster spots flexible and don't get too attached to a lost cause, you will land one or two of the out-of-nowhere top-30 pitchers, guaranteed.

And if you have two top-30 pitchers in a standard 12-team league, you're on par with everyone else.

But wait -- you also have those five or six breakthrough candidates you drafted in the middle rounds. Let's say only two of them take that next step forward and become top-15 guys; that still leaves you with four of the top 30 starting pitchers in Fantasy, putting you well ahead of the curve in a 12-team league. And -- oh, that's right -- you also have all those elite hitters from the early rounds, when you weren't drafting pitchers. Equipped with a dominant starting lineup and what has suddenly become one of the best pitching staffs in the league, how can you lose?

I don't understand how. I also don't understand why, in light of all this evidence, some Fantasy owners continue to invest in early-round pitchers, banking on a coin flip's chance of getting full value for their picks. Perhaps they'd argue -- at least in Head-to-Head leagues -- that a lack of frontline pitching will bury a team faster than a lack of high-end hitting, but if so, they've missed the point entirely. This strategy isn't about them weakening themselves at the starting pitcher position, but using the position's weaknesses -- the injury risk, the boom-or-bust potential, the players nobody saw coming -- to their advantage.

But I guess when their early-round pitchers fail them and they have no breakthrough candidates to fall back on because they had to spend their middle-round picks on hitters like Dan Uggla and Vernon Wells, they'll see exactly what wins the championships in Fantasyland.

Way to take all the competition out of it.

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