2023 Starting Pitcher Preview, Part 1
There are literally dozens of people doing position previews like this. You have all kinds of very sharp people doing podcasts on the subject and going into all kinds of detail - which makes it a little bit like “what can I even add to this?”.
But it’s fun, and maybe I have some followers out there that primarily rely on my takes and don’t get into too much other stuff. If that’s the case for a significant number of people, then I’d better get to work on breaking down SP.
I should remind everybody, and make newer subscribers aware, that I have already written up most of these players in detail in the team-by-team series I wrote from October through January. There will be more detail on each pitcher in there, but there are plenty of examples where my opinions have changed a bit on them - so this is kind of like a “refresh” in that regard.
Check out the rest of the positional previews at the links below.
Landscape
Here is the plot of how many SPs we see being taken in each round through round 34.
The player in the first round is, of course, Shohei Ohtani - who you might not even be using as a pitcher for much of the season depending on the league type, so really the SPs start in round two.
What I have found is that there are a definitive top two, and then a handful of other elite arms just with less certainty behind their names - and then a huge clump of very similar pitchers.
This clump to me is around picks 50-100. You can have Max Scherzer or Zack Wheeler around pick 50, and then down four rounds later you can still draft a name like Robbie Ray. Between those names, there are 13 other pitchers. It’s a huge grouping of very good pitchers that all have ace upside. I’m not saying that Ray is just as good as Wheeler or anything like that, but there really would not seem to be a 50-pick difference between these types of pitchers in a normal year.
We have to play the position relative to the league. Just because SP is deep does not mean you should wait on it - because the teams that don’t wait on it will still have a better staff than you. Your goal is to beat the other teams, not some set stat line. You should always keep an eye on what the rest of the league is doing with SP and try to keep decent pace with them in terms of how many SPs are on your team. We’ll talk more about this as we go.
One of the most important notes I can give you is that if you’re in a shallower league (12 teams, 25-30 rounds or so) - I would advise that you leave yourself the opportunity to add the breakout SPs that will inevitably show up in the early months of the season. If you fill up your pitching staff before pick 250, then you won’t have anybody that you’re comfortable with dropping - and you won’t be able to add the freebies (think Kyle Wright and Nestor Cortes last year). Getting your hands on those breakout SPs early in the year is a huge key to the fantasy baseball game, so you build your team so as to be able to take advantage of that. Leave yourself a spot or two on your team that you can quickly fill with an SP in April - because I promise you there will be some names available on waivers that end up being some of the key contributors to the fantasy season. How will you know who those names are? I’ll friggin tell you in the daily notes!
Now, onward to the tiers! I am tiering pitchers based on ADP rather than on my rankings. That won’t make a big difference but just wanted to let you know that’s the approach here - this isn’t necessarily my SP ranks in order.
Tier One
Shohei Ohtani
Corbin Burnes
Gerrit Cole
The reports from the Angels are that Ohtani will pitch every five games now instead of every six as they try to work things around to get him more starts. That makes sense, of course, given that he’s their best pitcher (by far). It also doesn’t hurt that he’s a free agent next year. If the Angels don’t intend to give him the ludicrous contract he will demand, they probably already know that and that might push them to a little bit looser usage of him.
If Ohtani was only an SP and was pitching on a normal schedule, he would be drafted as a top-five pitcher. He is really that good as a pitcher. Where you take him depends on the league type. If I have him in a league where I have to choose pitcher or hitter every week, I’m probably using him as a starter when he has two starts or a really good matchup - or more likely, just let the context of my team decide on a weekly basis. Anyways, he’s a legit ace pitcher but given the questions about how many starts he can actually make as well as the heightened injury risk given how much he does, he wouldn’t be a tier one SP.
Burnes and Cole are the two that separate themselves from the field. Over the last two seasons, only three pitchers in the league have 60+ GS with a K-BB% above 25% (Aaron Nola being the third). They will likely both be gone by the end of the second round in your league. Even with the really big tiers 2-3, I am perfectly fine with nabbing one of them in the second round. Pitching is pretty random year-to-year with ERA being subject to a lot of randomness and injuries being more common, but these two have proven to be the two most reliable ace pitchers in the league and that makes a difference.
Tier Two
Jacob deGrom
Sandy Alcantara
Spencer Strider
Brandon Woodruff
Aaron Nola
Shane McClanahan
Carlos Rodon
Dylan Cease
Justin Verlander
I had a lot of trouble deciding where to stop this tier, so I just cut it off at Verlander because that’s where round four ends per the NFBC ADP (using just 50s and DC drafts). As you’ll see, the next tier looks a lot like this one, but I guess you could argue that these names have a bit more upside.
deGrom: I don’t think I’m adding anything by talking about deGrom. It’s a roll of the dice. If he makes 25 starts, he’ll almost surely be the #1 SP in the game, but few starters are more likely to completely bust due to injury. It’s not a gamble I want to take, but I get it.
Alcantara: He got there last year by throwing 228 innings, lapping the field in that regard. That pushed him over 200 strikeouts, but just barely given his strikeout rate still being right at that 23% league average. He benefited a lot from the shifting stuff last year with his 54% GB%, and he continues to benefit from his ability to control the quality of contact he allowed. It’s perfectly fair to be skeptical about if he can replicate that again since most pitchers can’t. He’s the only pitcher in the top two tiers with K-BB% under 20%. If you get 200+ innings again, you’ll be fine, but it’s not like the guy is completely immune to injury and if he comes in at 160 innings he’s going to be a real downer as a third-round pick. I’m out at the all-time high ADP.
Strider: The rookie finished 12th in the league with 202 strikeouts last year, and he did it in just 131.2 innings. That’s ridiculous. His 38.3% K% is hard to believe, but the projections are almost there - the ASS system gives him a 34% K% with an 8.4% BB%. All of the fancy schmancy “stuff” metrics love him too:
My gut instinct in these situations is to fade the guy that came out of nowhere a season ago and is now priced as an ace, but I don’t really see any reason to do that. He has two of the best pitches in the league with that four-seamer and slider, and he’s still a fantasy ace even if we build in some regression. He’s great. I haven’t drafted him yet, but I want to!
Woodruff: You see Woodruff above in the “stuff” leaders. He is becoming nastier and nastier seemingly every year. He had a ridiculous 15.8% SwStr% on his four-seamer (38.4% usage), and then stupid SwStr% numbers on the changeup (28.1%) and slider (17.8%) to boot. The ground-ball rate came down a bunch as he went more to that four-seamer over the sinker, but it worked out just fine since he was still striking out 31% of the hitters he was facing. He had some injury scares later on last year, but he came back and we haven’t heard any negative news since - so I guess we shouldn’t worry about that. You can often get Woody in the late-third, and that’s just a slam dunk in my opinion.
Aaron Nola: This is where you start to realize like man there are a lot of aces available. Seven teams in your league already have a starting pitcher, and you can still start your staff off with Nola? A guy that we already mentioned above is right there with Cole and Burnes in terms of staying healthy and putting up elite K-BB% numbers. The reason Nola falls, I guess, is the 4.63 ERA he posted in 2021? He gave up 1.3 HR/9 in that year, but made 32 starts and struck out 223 batters with a 5.2% BB%. It was easy to ignore that bad ERA and draft him confidently in the third or fourth round last year, and surprisingly the ADP really isn’t all that much different this year even with the good 3.25 ERA he posted last season. I just can’t say anything bad about Nola, and he’s another guy in this group I’m happy to start my rotation off with. It’s these types that make you want to take Cole/Burnes in the second round a little bit less.
McClanahan: If he had not gotten hurt last year, he’d probably be in the top tier with Cole and Burnes. At the All-Star Break, McClanahan had a 1.71 ERA, a 0.80 WHIP, a 35.7% K%, and a 4.6% BB%. He was second in the league in strikeouts with 147 and first in the league in fantasy points scored with 488 (DraftKings scoring).
In the second half, he made 10 more starts with a 4.20 ERA, a 1.19 WHIP, a 20.5 K%, and an 8.3% BB% - so everything got a whole lot worse. It’s probably correct just to blame that on the shoulder and back injuries. He did not have all of his stuff after returning from the IL, and the numbers that followed are knocking him down towards SP10. So yeah, there is some risk here. I think that can get overstated though, especially with all of these other great options in this tier. A lot of people will take a Dylan Cease or Justin Verlander over him just because they feel better about their health. But if you get 30 healthy starts from McClanahan, he’s almost surely going to beat this fourth-round ADP.
Carlos Rodon: I was fully hands-off with Rodon last year, not trusting his health after just one full season under his belt in 2021. He made me eat that one though, throwing 178 innings and putting up another elite line with a 2.88 ERA, a 1.03 WHIP, a 33.4% K%, and a 7.3% BB%. Now he’s 30 and on a new team. Yankees Stadium is a worse place to pitch than AT&T Park, but it helps that he’s a lefty that absolutely dominated left-handed hitters. Most of those cheap Yankees Stadium homers come from left-handed hitters. I guess I still have some trust issues given how many injuries we’ve seen him undergo, and there’s some somewhat fair skepticism about him being in the first year of a long-term contract now. I don’t think I’ll draft Rodon this year, but I can’t really make a great case against him.
Dylan Cease: The field is really sharp. Cease put up a 2.20 ERA with a 1.11 WHIP on a 30.4% K% last year. He darn near won a Cy Young, but here sits as just the 11th pitcher off the board - an SP2 in some leagues! Not that it’s hard to see the issues with Cease. His 10.4% BB% is quite bad and he was fortunate in the home run department as well allowing just a 12% HR/FB (league average is 16%).
Projections never tell the full story, and that’s even more true with pitchers, but with guys like Cease, they give us important context. Projection systems will regress things like HR/FB and they will properly penalize high walk rates. My system spits out a 3.78 ERA for Cease with a 1.25 WHIP. That’s a legitimately bad WHIP, even if we were in tier four or five right now. All of the bad news aside, the strikeout rate is believable (projected at 31%), and that really is the most important thing. It’s hard to be bad with that kind of strikeout rate. I still think Cease is priced too high, and therefore I’ll have none of him - but any improvement in the walk rate (not an impossible improvement to make) could get him back close to what he did last season, so it’s not an egregious pick to make.
Justin Verlander: He fell short of an elite strikeout rate at 27.8%, but he made up for it with a sweet 4.4% BB%. That translated to 185 strikeouts in 175 innings, and a near-impossible 1.75 ERA with a 0.83 WHIP. There is no doubt that 2023 will be worse, but the price assumes that as well. My projection is a 3.34 ERA and a 1.05 WHIP with a 26.4% K% and a 4.4% BB%. Call me hard-headed or something but I just don’t want a 40-year-old as the anchor of my pitching staff, so I’ll pass on it.
This thing is super long already, which is good - I’m getting everything out! But I’m going to leave this here and just do two tiers at a time, so we’ll really draw this big boy out for you.
Let’s talk more about strategy right now. We have talked about 12 pitchers so far. Despite the depth of the position this year, if you don’t have one of these names, you’re behind the ball. You should probably get one of these pitchers. If you don’t, then you can probably make it up by quickly ripping off three picks in that picks 50-100 range - I think there’s some merit to that strategy, but I would be most comfortable having someone above. I’ll try my best to rank these names in terms of who I want most considering the cost (these are not my SP ranks!):
Woodruff
Nola
Burnes
Cole
Ohtani
Strider
McClanahan
Rodon
Alcantara
Cease
Verlander
deGrom
If I can get Woodruff or Nola in the third or even fourth round, I am skipping the rest of the tier and diving in for two names that we’ll talk about early on in the next post.
Hope you like the format here, and I hope this is helping some people out! Thanks for reading!