2023 Starting Pitcher Preview, Part 2
We are back to review the next several SPs on the ADP board. Check out part one at the link below if you missed it, and subscribe to the Substack page if you want and have not already done so.
Check out the rest of the positional previews at the links below.
Starting Pitcher (part 1)
In the first series, I reviewed the first 12 starters and made that into two tiers. It could have been three tiers, or it could have been two tiers with a lot of these tier three names in tier two. It really does not matter a ton. There are a ton of very similar SPs going after the third round or so. It takes until about the 12th round (pick 135 or so) before you’re getting into pitchers you can’t really feel that confident about.
Tier Three
Max Scherzer
Zack Wheeler
Julio Urias
Shane Bieber
Luis Castillo
Kevin Gausman
Cristian Javier
Max Fried
Alek Manoah
Zac Gallen
Yu Darvish
Joe Musgrove
Framber Valdez
Tyler Glasnow
Scherzer: It feels really weird to call Max a tier-three guy. If you were asleep all of last year and woke up to read this, you would probably think Scherzer had a bad year in 2022, but that is not the case at all. He posted another elite 2.29 ERA with a 0.91 WHIP on a 30.6% K% and a 4.2% BB%. The SwStr% stayed elite at 16%, and you can see there were no problems with the K-BB% at 26.4%. The “problem” we have is that he threw just 145 innings last year and just 179 in 2021. Now, 150 innings isn’t a dealbreaker at this point. It’s fair to call 180 innings a “full season” at this point, which lessens the sting of that 150. But yeah, Max is 38 now and you have to wonder if the Mets would even let him get to 180 even if he’s healthy. They have their eyes firmly on a World Series this year, so it would make a ton of sense for them to give Scherzer and Verlander some planned time off to keep them fresh. But hey, the discount we’re seeing takes care of most of that, and Scherzer is as good as anybody when on the bump. I’m fine with him as an SP1, but if he’s my guy I probably do come quickly back with another SP to have a strong 1-2 punch just in case he ends up under 160 innings again.
Wheeler: Very similar to Scherzer here as a guy who has been a top-ten pitcher in the league over the last two seasons, but dealt with some injuries last year which knocked down his ADP a bit. He threw only 153 innings last year with a 2.82 ERA, a 1.04 WHIP, a 26.9% K%, and a 5.6% BB%. The K% came down more than two points from 29.1% in 2021. That would be a little concerning if we couldn’t blame it on injury, which we probably can. The SwStr% also came down to 12.7%, not a great number - and one that more resembles his pre-2021 marks when he was routinely right around 12% (that’s about the league average). So we do have some doubt creeping in about whether or not 2021 was just a spike year for him and we should expect more of a 12% SwStr% and 26% K% rather than the stuff he showed in 2021. If we look at his first 20 starts prior to the injury stuff he had a 12.9% SwStr% and a 27% K%, but he was still only walking 5.3% of hitters and keeping the ball out of the air pretty well (45% GB%). I’m leaning towards Wheeler not truly having top-ten upside, but most guys at this point don’t have that for one reason or the other. It’s hard to say I’m completely out on Wheeler since the team context is strong and he is a guy that routinely gets deep into games. Anybody over a 20% K-BB% is fine in my book, but I suppose I’m a little less excited for Wheeler than some of the names behind him.
Urias: One of THESE guys! The top K% output of Urias's MLB career is just 26.3% - that came in 2021. Last year, it was 24.1%, but the 6% BB% kept the K-BB% near 20%. But if you look above and below Urias, you’re still finding a top of 20%+ rates, which right away makes me skeptical of picking Urias in this group. He has routinely limited hard contact, and it’s to the point where we have to start believing it’s a skill since he has never not done it. The highest barrel rate he’s ever allowed is last year’s 6.7%. His HR/FB last year actually did finally tick above the league average, but just barely so. I’m hesitant to trust the outliers, and I think long-term that’s a successful strategy. If Urias loses his ability to generate soft contact, it’s going to be very tough for him to justify this ADP - so I’ll be out on him this year.
Bieber: It has been a bit of a bumpy ride for Bieber since all the success he had between 2019 and 2022. He dealt with injuries in 2021 which derailed his fantasy value, but he stayed healthy last season - a good sign. However, the performance last season has some people worried. The ERA (2.88) and WHIP (1.04) show no problems, but he lost a bunch of velocity and saw his strikeout rate come to just 25%.
His calling card has always been the command, which he did not lose last season (4.6% BB%, above-average Location+ marks on four of his five pitches). It was good to see him be a fantasy ace (maybe he was more of an SP2, but you get it) with the lower K% and velocity. If he can add that velo back, you could see him easily as a top-ten arm.
After writing that last sentence, I decided I should figure out if that velocity is likely to come back. I studied it and put the results in this post, which you got in your inbox if you subscribe. Bieber is younger than most of the pitchers in the sample, but it’s not great news for him. The best guess would be to predict that he’s under 92mph again this year, so it’s possible the days of the 30%+ K% from Bieber are over.
If that’s true, I’d say this price is right rather than too cheap. He has such good command, and so many weapons to use - so I don’t really see him being a guy that kills your team unless another injury would happen.
Castillo: It’s possible that Castillo will flourish after getting out of Cincinnati. Here’s what he did in Cincy from 2021 to 2022:
47 GS, 3.63 ERA, 1.27 WHIP, 24.5% K%, 8.9% BB%, 0.86 HR/9
And in his short time with the Mariners:
11 GS, 3.17 ERA, 1.10 WHIP, 28.9% K%, 6.4% BB%, 0.83 HR/9
Immediately raising your K% by five points and lowering BB% by 2.5 points is pretty tough to believe in for the long term. We did an approach change after the trade though, here is how his pitch mix changed:
FF: 32% → 34%
SI: 21% → 27%
SL: 21% → 21%
CH: 26% → 18%
It does make sense that trading in some changeups for sinkers would result in fewer walks, so I’m on board there - however, does it make sense that the strikeout rate would come up? Not really, given that the sinker is a 5.7% SwStr% pitch and the changeup is at 14.0%. Maybe it just helped him get more out of his four-seamer (17% SwStr%) and slider (17% SwStr%)? Who knows. It’s a fair guess that his K% will be between those two marks. If he comes in with a 27% K% but another 10% BB% - we still have a problem, but if the BB% stays down below league average (2018 was the only other year of his career where he’s done that), he’ll be quite good. The talent is there, but I’m still not overly confident that he’s suddenly a reliable fantasy ace. We have seen too many ups and downs over the years with him.
But by now we are talking about a late-fifth or early-sixth-round pick (ADP 60), so we shouldn’t really be hoping for SP1s at this point. He’s a perfectly fine SP2, of course, and it’s quite possible that his best years are ahead of him since Cincinnati has been such a tough club to pitch on.
Gausman: Lots of Gausman doubters out there! I have never been really into him as a guy that is so dependent on his splitter, which is a very fickle pitch. We can talk more about that, but first, we should note that he went for a 28.3% K% and a 3.9% BB% last year, which is the most important thing. Those numbers are silly, and he has now turned in a K-BB% above 20% in three straight seasons (that is counting 2020, but since that 2020 season began overall Gausman has a 24.0% K-BB% that is sixth-best in the league).
The reason for doubt, I suppose, is that last year he threw a four-seamer 49% of the time, and it wasn’t a great pitch (9.3% SwStr%, 11.3% Brl%, .357 xwOBA). To say he pounded the zone with the pitch would be an understatement as his 67% zone rate on the pitch led the league by almost five whole points (Pablo Lopez second at 62.6%).
You can get away with that if you have one of the league’s best pitches as your secondary, and that’s what Gausman has. His splitter has SwStr% marks of 23.4%, 26.3%, 25.7%, and 26.9% over the last four seasons (chronologically listed there), so we’re past the point of expecting regression.
Gausman is certainly unique. Maybe he gets dragged down a bit by the shift changes and the ballpark changes, but overall I don’t know, I see him as a guy who throws a ton of strikes and has proven for several years now that the splitter can make him an ace pitcher, so I’m happily drafting him if he makes it to me in the sixth.
Javier: We kinda knew this was going to happen after what he did late last year, and especially in the World Series. Javier was on waiver wires last May, and now he’s being drafted as an SP2. He started draft season with an ADP above 70, but he’s come up a round since then and now you typically have to get him before pick 70.
Let me throw a cold bucket of water on you all. From April 2nd 2021 through May 31st, 2022 we got this from Javier:
15 GS, 142.4 IP, 3.22 ERA, 1.15 WHIP, 30.9% K%, 11.5% BB%, 1.2 HR/9
Not a bad line by any means but the 11.5% BB% stands out majorly.
After June 1st of last season, he had a much better 8.8% BB% and the ERA (2.59) and WHIP (0.90) followed. So what will the walk rate be this year? Probably still worse than average. The good news is that he truly does have 30%+ K% stuff (15% SwStr% on the four-seam, 17.4% on the slider), so he can easily overcome a 9% walk rate even if that does happen.
The other point not going in his favor is that he gave up the league’s highest FB% at 38.7% last year. He posted a 13.2% HR/FB, just a couple of points below the league average - so there’s no reason to expect any changes there, but if he does run into a year where he gives up a 17-20% HR/FB (this could very well happen, it’s a pretty random statistic), you’re probably going to see a not-great ERA from him.
The upside is great with him, of course, but to me, these red flags are too much for me to actually pick him ahead of the rest of these pitchers, and I think the field is chasing that playoff performance a little bit too much. I have only called a few names “fades” at this point, but I’m going to go ahead and do it with Javier here.
Fried: I might sound a little bit hypocritical here. I have said negative things about Alcantara and Urias so far, and the situation with Fried is very similar. His K% came in at 23.2% last year. Even his 4.4% BB% couldn’t get him over the 20% K-BB%. I said that I don’t really love drafting a lower K% guy this high, but things are slightly different with Fried.
A lot like Alcantara, he does have stuff that suggests he could raise the K% at any moment (you can’t really say that about Urias).
The other difference is the ADP, as he goes a few picks behind Urias and a ton of picks behind Alcantara. I think Fried is perfectly fine where he goes, but probability would have us saying that he doesn’t quite have the upside of the rest of this group. He benefited a lot from a low HR/FB last season of 9%. That is very likely to regress toward the league average of 15% this year, but there’s room for that to happen and for him to maintain an ERA under 3.00.
So we have pros and cons here. Overall, the ADP feels just about right to me. He wins a ton of games, and that should continue this year with the Braves being one of the league’s top offenses and Fried being a very efficient pitcher (a lower K% actually does help you get through more innings since you’re typically throwing fewer pitches per batter). I’ll sit on the fence with Fried this year and let you decide!
Manoah: Another lower K% guy here. He went for just a 22.9% K% last year, however, he did show us a better 27.7% rate in 2021. His 12.3% SwStr% is only slightly above the league average, and he continues to have trouble striking out left-handed hitters (19% K%).
One of my favorite moments of the 2022 season was when he was mic’d up at the All-Star Game and talked about how people always say he’s trash against lefties, so the guy is clearly aware of this and maybe that will have inspired him to improve on it this year (a simple pitch mix change could go a long way to smoothing out the splits). It’s not like he’s actually bad against lefties either since they slugged just .367 off of him.
He’s a good pitcher, and of all of the sub-24% K% pitchers we have talked about so far, he is the most likely to balloon up to 28%+ this season. I don’t expect that to happen, but it wouldn’t surprise me either. I’m not reaching for Manoah, but I’ll take him if he fits my team.
Gallen: The middle of the year was glorious for Gallen. He did not allow an earned run from August 8th through September 4th. That was more than 41 innings and he posted a 33% K% and a 5.7% BB% in that time with a 0.58 WHIP. It was a ridiculous run.
For the whole year, he had a 2.54 ERA with a 0.91 WHIP, a 27% K%, and a 6.6% BB%. We have never seen elite strikeout stuff from Gallen, but 27% is pretty good, especially with the sub-7% BB%.
His SwStr% was low at 10.9%, but his locations were (and always have been) great.
The stuff marks there are very good as well, and overall he has one of the league’s best 107 Pitching+ scores.
It’s all very good news and it backs up the idea that he should be drafted here. I would take him ahead of most of the names in this tier, I think. He’s young (27) and has just shown us so much good stuff that it’s really going to be interesting to see how high he can take himself as he continues to get experience in the Majors. Also, Arizona is primed to have their best season in quite a while with a solid lineup and some young pitchers that could come up and help their staff a lot.
Darvish: He is really just not a fun guy to draft. The HR/FB stuff finally normalized for him last year, which helped a lot, but the K% fell down to the lowest mark of his career at 25.6%. The good news was that the walk rate came down as well to 4.8%, so things were more or less fine.
The Padres clearly believe in him, giving him a huge extension in recent weeks. The fact that he’s 36 years old with that 25.6% K% and 12.5% SwStr% last year probably pushes me toward not drafting him. He still doesn’t get ground balls, and his season probably would have been pretty bad if not for the improved HR/FB last year. He’s still more likely to go for a 15% HR/FB next year (the league average is always the most likely for that category), so maybe we shouldn’t get hung up on that.
There just seems to be more risk affiliated with Darvish than upside, so I’ll be skipping him unless he falls to the bottom of or beyond this tier.
Musgrove: Another case here of a sparkling ERA (2.93) and WHIP (1.08), but with a sub-20% K-BB% (24.9% K%, 5.7% BB%).
It was Musgrove’s worst K% since leaving Pittsburgh, but also his best BB%:
The SwStr% falling below 12% is not what you want to see, but he was above the league average in HR/FB and his GB% stayed high - so there’s good and bad news all over the profile here.
Musgrove has proven to be a well above-average pitcher since escaping my hometown Pittsburgh Pirates, but it’s fair to wonder if he really has fantasy ace upside with the fact that he has mostly turned in mediocre strikeout rates in his career. Drew’s Stuff+ model hates him too, and I think that’s worthy of note:
Overall, that is a 76 Stuff+, a number that is bested by all kinds of bad pitchers like Kris Bubic, Erick Fedde, Chris Archer, and Jordan Lyles.
Those statements probably say more about not trusting Stuff+ than about not liking Musgrove, but it’s not meaningless. I’ll be out on Musgrove, I think, just because we have all of these other pitchers around and behind him, that seem to have much more upside.
Valdez: You might think this price is a little too much after Valdez put together the best season of his pretty long career. His 8.1% BB% was a huge improvement from the double-digit marks we’ve come to know him for. His strikeout rate was also the best of his career at 23.5% - which isn’t saying much!
If that’s all we knew about Valdez, he would be a pretty easy fade. We would be citing recency bias and regression and saying that he’s likely to regress back toward what he did over the bigger sample before last season.
However, we know that Valdez comes with a nice floor with his 65%+ GB%, and the Astros are a phenomenal team to pitch for. He’s a really good bet for ERA, quality starts, and wins, which is meaningful. The WHIP is a question, of course.
The other thing to note is that he added a cutter last year and it was a good pitch with an 18% SwStr%. He didn’t throw it a ton in the first half, and in the second half, while he was using it around 14% of the time, he raised his K% to 26%. That makes a 24%+ K% from him more believable.
The shift stuff doesn’t apply to him as much as people think because he’s a left-handed pitcher, there was a shift on behind him less than 30% of the time last year. However, ground balls are going to perform at least a bit better for hitters in 2023, and no pitcher generates grounders at a higher rate than Valdez.
I want to fade him, and probably still will, but I could still see a near SP1 season from him if he does finally get that K% above 25% - and the cutter makes me think that’s not impossible.
Glasnow: The worst thing about last season was how little of Glasnow we saw. He made it back from Tommy John surgery to make just two starts in the Majors, but he looked great in that time. He had a 15% SwStr% and a 38.5% K%.
His Stuff+ readings were deGrom-esque.
These numbers do stabilize quickly, but probably not THIS quickly. If he had thrown more of each of those pitches, you almost surely would have seen the Stuff+ marks come down. He clearly also knew he only had 50-70 pitches to throw each time out as well, so that probably made him throw a bit harder. He will come back toward earth this year, but not to earth. He’s one of the most talented pitchers in the league, and it was really good to see him get back in the Majors late last year since now we can feel strongly about his arm health.
I am really excited to draft Glasnow this year as my SP3, or even my SP2 if I really load up on offense early on.
I guess we’re only covering one tier today, since I just wrote so, so much.
I am two really, really long posts into this and I’ve only covered 26 pitchers so far. That was not what I intended, and I may have overwhelmed some of you. Anyways, here are my price-considered ranks for this tier.
Scherzer
Wheeler
Glasnow
Gallen
Fried
Gausman
Castillo
Bieber
Manoah
Valdez
Urias
Musgrove
Darvish
Javier
As I said, we’re 26 pitchers in. In a 12-team league, I want at the very least two of these, and probably three. I like to hit tiers two and three really hard. If I miss Burnes/Cole, I’m definitely getting something like Woodruff + Gausman + Glasnow.
So yeah, we have a ways to go! Next time we’ll talk about tiers four and five. I have nine pitchers in each of those, so check back next week for more!