Pitching by the Numbers: Wait on arms

Let’s start Pitching by the Numbers not by projecting individual pitchers but instead looking at general draft strategy. How should we build a staff that increases our odds of winning a fantasy baseball championship?

The answer is the same way as ever before: Wait on starting pitching.

Let’s dispense with the silliness right away. I’m not worried about what I’ll do if everyone waits on starting pitching in favor of taking hitters. That never happens. Experts don’t even fully commit to it (they may dabble but they’ll crack by Round 6-7). So this is like worrying that everyone in the world is going to go to my favorite diner tomorrow morning for blueberry pancakes. And I’m not saying that I’m ranking 80 hitters over Clayton Kershaw even though I know I will take about that many over any starting pitcher. Trust me, someone is going to take Kershaw about where he’s ranked, same with all the other top pitchers. And you should silently thank your fellow owners for taking you off the hook.

Of course, like you, I’d love to roster big-name, safe pitchers. I want Kershaw on my team every time I see him pitch. But taking a guy like that costs me an above average hitter, who are much more difficult to acquire at bargain draft prices or via in-season waivers.

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So consider the following my case for why you, too, should wait, interminably even, on starting pitching:

There is more ranking divergence with starting pitchers than with the hitters 

The supply of pitchers I like much more than the market never end. This year: Phil Hughes, Jake Arrieta, Collin McHugh, Matt Shoemaker, Jacob deGrom, Brandon McCarthy, just to name a few. It doesn’t mean I’m right, of course. But it does mean that I shouldn’t pay retail for the relatively few pitchers everyone likes about the same when I can pay wholesale for the sleeper pitchers I think are likely to be winning assets. This happens inevitably in every draft. Think back as objectively as you can and ask yourself the last time you liked the last three hitters you drafted more than your last three starting pitchers.

Bad things happen to pitchers, so construct your team in a manner that will make this hurt your league and thus help you

Every year, big name pitchers get hurt or just lose their dominance. And every year, other pitchers emerge from nowhere to take their place as tremendous assets. You don’t want to be the team that drafts a pitcher early to see him get hurt or unexpectedly decline. You want that to happen to the other teams in your league. And while the competition is serious and other owners can also get the surprise aces at little or no cost, only you — the guy who waited the longest on starting pitching — can fully leverage this into a championship. The other owner who drafted pitching early is either trying to make up for losing the advantage he thought he paid for or needlessly adding to it. Plus the owner who waits on pitching is taking more starters late and therefore has more opportunity to find huge bargains.

You give yourself a built-in waiver edge

The people who invest in pitching will cling to it longer. Think of how long people held on to Justin Verlander last year. Maybe they abstractly understood sunk costs but they were waiting for a Verlander breakout like you and I would have, too, had we drafted him early. But when the pitchers we like bottom out, when we see peripherals that we don’t like (mostly involving strikeouts, walks and velocity), we just broom those guys. Who cares if you cut your 15th-round draft choice, never mind your 18th or 22nd? And when we see a guy who shows something outstanding (for example, any double-digit strikeout game), we pick that pitcher up and have no worries cutting someone because we are not wedded in any way to any of our hurlers. They are all, due to their low cost, fungible assets whenever we deem them to be.

We have way better tools to identify pitching breakouts quickly

All the advances are on the pitching side. We have velocity and pitch type and movement data that we could not have dreamed of a decade ago. So we can almost instantly quantify increased velocity, the addition of a new pitch or great improvement to an old one. And hopefully, early in the season, the fantasy stats have not tracked with these peripherals, which means we can easily beat the market in getting these pitchers for little cost. There are no comparable tools to identify breakout hitters (though we may be getting there with hard-hit ball data).

There are many more ways for a pitcher to breakout than for a hitter

Off the top of my head, sudden health, adding a new pitch, refining a new pitch, adding velocity, improving control, improving command, subtracting a poor pitch, mechanical refinements, stride length (reducing the distance to the home plate), moving on the rubber…. What can hitters do? They can change their stance and where they stand in the box, I guess. Maybe you can think of other ways. But that’s not going to change the bottom line.

So then we should expect many more pitching breakouts than hitting breakouts

This is a fact of our game. So build your team with this “found money” in mind.

Early pitching breakouts are more bettable than early hitting breakouts

The caveat here is “if supported by the fundamentals,” namely my (K minus BB)/IP or Fangraphs’ K%-BB% (I don’t care what you use). For the reasons stated above, you’re going to have incentive to grab these guys earlier than your league mates. But one dominant start can be enough, or even 30-40 innings where the K and BB data is elite, especially if it can be traced to something very tangible like increased velocity or a new or refined pitch. But if you are in need of a hitter and bet on a hot bat, the vast majority of times you are going to see that hitter regress to career norms. I know there are exceptions and hitters every year that also emerge. But always bet on the base rates, not the exceptions.