2011 Draft Prep: Breaking SPs into tiers
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In the aftermath of the "Year of the Pitcher," it would be tempting to think that the notion of a Fantasy pitching elite is a quaint one. A year ago, few would have questioned the assumption that Roy Halladay, Felix Hernandez, Zack Greinke and Tim Lincecum were in a class by themselves, but now that sounds so "old school."
While Greinke and Lincecum fell back towards the pack in 2010, plenty of new names made their way into the pitching leaderboards. Adam Wainwright, Jered Weaver and David Price each took a step forward, while Roy Oswalt, Tim Hudson and Francisco Liriano all saw their fortunes rebound, just to name a handful of pitchers who crowded Fantasy's upper echelons.
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Yet, in projecting the performances of starting pitchers for the coming season, it appears that what was old may be new again. To be sure, there is a large cluster of pitchers who have a good chance to be legitimate No. 1 or No. 2 starters in Fantasy, but four pitchers stand out among the crowd. Halladay, Hernandez, Lincecum and Josh Johnson have clearly distinguished themselves as the pitchers most likely to dominate in Fantasy in 2011. So had Adam Wainwright, though the recent discovery of elbow ligament damage and the prospect for Tommy John surgery make him a huge risk to be drafted among the elite. With Wainwright apparently out of the picture, our projections, which are based on pitchers' three-year trends, put the top four starters above the rank-and-file for the year ahead.
As our pitching tiers visualization below shows, though, the starting pitching landscape gets pretty muddy once you get past the elite. Displaying pitchers according to the projected ERAs and strikeout rate per nine innings, there are still a considerable number of pitchers who project to put up an ERA close to 3.00 while compiling an above average strikeout rate. On Draft Day, by the time your league gets through all of the pitchers who are projected to post an ERA in the mid-3.00s, you might as well forget about starting pitching for awhile. There is a notable dropoff and then an enormous huddle of pitchers who are largely interchangeable.
The visualization shows all starting pitchers who are projected to give owners at least 162 innings this season. The pitchers represented by dark red and light red marks can all help with ERA, and with the exception of Tim Hudson and Chris Carpenter, all will be above the median in strikeout rate. These are your bona fide No. 1 and No. 2 Fantasy starters. The grey tier represents the remainder of starters who will get drafted in most standard mixed leagues, while the blue tiers consist of pitchers who are generally better suited for deeper leagues.
While plotting pitchers according to their projected ERA and strikeout rates reveals the tiers that can guide your drafting strategy, the pecking order is not always clearly drawn. For example, Jon Lester and Clayton Kershaw both fall short of the first tier, even though they project to post a higher strikeout rate than any other starter aside from Lincecum. However, neither is a strong bet to finish with a sub-3.00 ERA this season. Lester's three-year trend, which can be viewed by clicking on his mark in the graph, shows that he is firmly in an ERA groove north of 3.00. Kershaw has been on the right side of the 3.00 threshold the last two years, but he has been helped by some unusually-low home run per flyball rates that are due to rise.
Lester and Kershaw have histories that imply that they are not quite as draftable as their K-rates would suggest, but Yovani Gallardo, Jonathan Sanchez and Brandon Morrow look even more like outliers. Along with Lincecum, Lester and Kershaw, they project to be the only starting pitchers to whiff at least a batter per inning, yet their projected ERAs show that they have their risks, even as No. 2 starters. Like Kershaw, Gallardo projects to give up more homers this season, while Sanchez is unlikely to strand nearly four out of five baserunners again this year. Morrow is poised to make significant improvements in his ERA and WHIP, but having pitched just 146 1/3 innings last year, he probably won't increase his workload quite enough to be trusted as a No. 2 starter.
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Pitchers like Lester and Morrow show that strikeouts can be overrated when the bigger picture is evaluated, and successful contact pitchers like Tim Hudson further reinforce that lesson. Despite a projected strikeout rate that is barely half that of Morrow's, Hudson should compile a lower ERA and a similar Fantasy points total to Morrow, as well as several other higher-octane pitchers. As the game's premier ground ball pitcher, Hudson not only induces plenty of outs through contact, but he is very good at limiting extra bases when opposing hitters do manage to record a hit. The same is true for Trevor Cahill and Dallas Braden. If you set the minimum on the Fantasy points filter in the upper right corner of the visualization for 420 points, you will see that Hudson, Cahill and Braden project to be comparable Fantasy producers to numerous pitchers with much higher strikeout rates. The same is true for Bronson Arroyo, who has a special talent for getting batters to pop up.
These cases show that neither strikeouts nor ERA tell the whole story behind a pitcher's value on Draft Day. Explore the visualization, not only to see where dropoffs are likely to occur as pitchers come off the board on Draft Day, but also to spot potentially overvalued players like Gallardo and Sanchez and underappreciated ones like Hudson and Arroyo.
Have a question or a comment? Send them to DMFantasyBaseball@cbs.com . Be sure to put SP tiers in the subject field.
