Pitching pitfalls:
As a fantasy player, you especially can’t afford blowups by pitchers. Here are baseball’s biggest risk/reward starters.
We don’t know yet what the 2020 Major League Baseball season, if one is held, will look like. But if we get a season it will certainly be a sprint, and the severely shortened schedule will create interesting strategic implications.
One important implication is how big a factor normal variability would be. And nowhere is volatility more of a risk than with starting pitching. For example, Mike Minor had a 2.40 ERA in the first half in 2019 but finished with a 3.58 ERA for the year, which was much more in line with expectations. Assuming teams don’t radically change how they manage their rotations, even the best pitchers will make only 10-15 starts. One or two bad outings can wreck a season.
In fact, one disaster can move the needle on your fantasy team’s overall ERA. Start with a pitching staff in a full 162-game season with 1,200 innings and a 4.00 ERA. Those stats loosely translate to fourth place in ERA in a 12-team NL-only league in 2019. Now, add in one disaster outing (for our purposes, let’s define “disaster” as eight earned runs in two innings). This would move the needle on your ERA (to 4.05), but it’s a small change, and probably not enough to move the standings for most teams. However, in a half-season (81 games, 600 IP), factoring in that one disaster results in a 4.11 ERA; in a 50-game season, it’s a 4.17 ERA. In the same 12team NL-only league, that would be an average drop from fourth place to seventh place in the standings.
OK, but volatility cuts both ways, right? You can have an unexpected disaster, but you can also have a surprise gem. If we go the other way, adding an eight-inning, one-run outing to our hypothetical season, we do see our team ERA drop: to 3.98 in a full season, 3.96 in a halfseason, and 3.94 in a 50-game season. That’s the problem with starting pitchers: the disasters hurt more than the gems help. In fact, based on how we’ve defined them, you’d need three stellar outings to offset the effects of one disaster.
Seeking out extremes
The next step, obviously, is to figure out which pitchers to target and which to avoid in this new reality. Also obvious (hopefully) is that we should consider volatility in addition to other factors, such as skills, track record and health. In other words, we shouldn’t prefer a low-volatility starter with an expected 4.50 ERA over a high-volatility starter with a projected 3.00 ERA.
Here, we’ll look at the population of starting pitchers. We are only looking at pitchers with 15 or more starts in 2019 (with one or two exceptions) who are expected to be primarily starters in 2020 and are generally projected with positive value in a 15-team mixed league. These will be curated lists, not exhaustive lists, so if you spot someone you feel should have been included, feel free to add them to your personal list of targets or avoids.
We will define a “good” start as a minimum of five innings, with a 3.50 ERA or lower and a 1.25 WHIP or lower. About 32% of 2019 outings counted as a “good” start. We will further define “bad” starts as any start with a 6.00 ERA or higher OR a 2.00 WHIP or higher. About 37% of 2019 outings qualified as a “bad” start.
Let’s start with the eligible starters with the highest risk of a bad start in 2019, grouped by risk level. Each starter also has his 2019 ERA and Good % listed.
Extreme risk (48% Bad%): Kyle Gibson (4.88, 21%), Pablo Lopez (5.09, 29%), Mike Foltynewicz (4.53, 48%).
High risk (41%-44 Bad%): Andrew Heaney (4.91, 17%), Dylan Bundy (4.78, 30%), German Marquez (4.76, 32%), Adam Wainwright (4.20, 32%), Masahiro Tanaka (4.47, 45%), Sandy Alcantara (3.87, 25%).
Also risky (38%-40% Bad%): J.A. Happ (5.01, 33%), Max Fried (4.16, 37%), Zach Eflin (4.22, 32%), Blake Snell (4.29, 48%), Adrian Houser (4.58, 22%), Jon Lester (4.46, 19%), Trevor Bauer (4.48, 44%), Zach Plesac (3.81, 48%), Mike Leake (4.29, 34%), Mike Minor (3.58, 44%).
There are pitchers on this list who some fantasy GMs won’t touch, but there are several who have gone in the top half of drafts (Blake Snell, in particular, had an ADP of 41).
Let’s look at the flip side: the eligible pitchers with the lowest risk of a bad start in 2019:
Extremely low risk (<10% Bad%): Justin Verlander, (2.58, 59%), Gerrit Cole, (2.50, 70%),
Jacob deGrom, (2.43, 69%).
Very low risk (10%-15%): Zac Gallen, (2.81, 27%), Mike Soroka, (2.68, 48%), Clayton Kershaw, (3.05, 54%), Max Scherzer, (2.93, 52%), Michael Pineda, (4.01, 35%).
Low risk: Sonny Gray, (2.88, 48%), Yonny Chirinos, (3.54, 39%), Shane Bieber, (3.26, 52%), Lance Lynn, (3.67, 48%), Frankie Montas, (2.63, 56%), Luis Castillo, (3.40, 50%), Mike Clevinger, (2.71, 71%), Chris Paddack, (3.33, 54%), Jake Odorizzi, (3.51, 47%), Hyun-Jin Ryu, (2.31, 69%), Jack Flaherty, (2.75, 55%), Stephen Strasburg, (3.31, 55%).
Not a lot of surprises on this list; after all, avoiding bad starts is one key to being a top starter. Soroka, Chirinos and Lynn are all notable as low-volatility starters who have been drafted outside the top 100.
Finally, we’ll consider outright disasters in 2019. These are pitchers who had at least one start in which they allowed eight or more runs, regardless of how many innings they threw. As we discussed earlier, an eight-run outing can be tough to overcome. A disaster can happen to anyone (Cole even had one), but five pitchers had two disasters each in 2019: Foltynewicz, Marquez, Lester, Jose Quintana and Joe Musgrove.
We’d use this particular list more to assess the risk of potential sleepers. Is Musgrove on the cusp of being a solid starter? Maybe, but his 2019 shows he can absolutely kill you if you’re wrong. In a 50-game season, we’d likely look somewhere else for sleeper potential.
Again, we want to emphasize pitcher quality is important, so you won’t be well-served using volatility by itself as a determinant. We’ve also seen that the very best pitchers typically avoid bad starts (though not all will completely avoid disasters). Consider this another tool in the toolbox.