2024 Fantasy Baseball Starting Pitcher Preview, Part 1
A full, detailed look at the starting pitcher position ahead of 2024 fantasy baseball drafts. We cover my top four tiers in this post, which makes up my top 26 pitchers.
Podcast Episode
Long one here. I talked for 58 minutes about these top 26 SPs, which make up my top four tiers. In this case, there’s more information and analysis in the podcast than in this post, and it’s completely free. So you can check that out on Spotify here:
Other Positions
Intro
We cannot handle the starting pitcher position like we handle the different hitter positions. With hitters, I lean heavily on projections. With pitchers, I don’t.
There are only four categories we’re after with starting pitchers in roto fantasy baseball:
ERA
WHIP
Strikeouts
Wins
Two of which are pretty hard to project (ERA and Wins). With so much variance going into those categories, projections will naturally be less accurate there, but since we know what we’re after and we have a few stats we like very much for evaluating pitchers, I tend to just stick to other stats from the past years rather than what the projections think.
When I say “We know what we’re after”, I mean that you aren’t drafting certain pitchers for certain categories and different pitchers for different categories like you do with hitters. With hitters, for example, I could grab Jorge Soler for power and Luis Arraez for batting average. But with pitchers, I just want good pitchers. There aren’t pitchers that are great for WHIP but bad for the other categories, for example - mostly the four categories are correlated together.
So I prefer just to take a close look at each guy, rank them how I see fit, and then draft off that list. That’s what we’re doing here, so you won’t see the projections at all unless I decide to just spit them all out in order of auction value at the end.
The stats I use most while evaluating pitchers
K%
BB%
SwStr%
Ball%
GB%
You can get a pretty good overall picture of that by looking at SIERA (however, that takes a bigger sample to stabilize rather than the individual stats that are the inputs into that SIERA calculation). I also like to look closely at the pitch mix. I want pitchers with
High Strike% on their fastball(s)
High SwStr% on their secondaries
I talked more about this process here, so check that out - it’s from last summer.
Starting pitcher is a lot of fun, and it’s basically half the game, so we’ll take our time here. We’ll cover the top 350 in ADP or so, which is about 100 pitchers. I won’t talk about them all individually, but we will say a lot of words here.
We’ll do it in two parts to lighten the load a bit, so let’s get it rolling.
Tier 1
Spencer Strider
Our favorite pitcher stat is K-BB%, and simply nobody touches Strider here.
There are the home run problems from last year that ballooned his ERA to 3.86. That’s not nothing, but there was some bad luck on that front. His barrels went for homers 10% above the league average rate. He gave up
22 Homers
1 grand slam
5 three-run homers
4 two-run homers
12 solo homers
He had an average of 0.773 runners on base when he gave up homers, the league average is .52, so you should see some positive regression there. This can be summed up by the fact that Strider’s SIERA of 2.86 led baseball and was a full run below his ERA.
This was too much time spent on one guy when we have like 100 to cover, but now you have my full justification for putting Strider in tier one by himself.
How to Handle Tier 1
That doesn’t mean I love the idea of taking him in the first round. With these six stud hitters (Acuna/Rodriguez/Carroll/Witt/Betts/Tucker) separating themselves from the pack, I want one of them in the first round. If I have a pick outside of the top six, I can see maybe taking Strider, but I still most often will go with a hitter here. It’s seemingly a safer investment, so that’s just a general strategy point.
Tier 2
Gerrit Cole
Zack Wheeler
Corbin Burnes
Kevin Gausman
Luis Castillo
Pablo Lopez
I want to avoid the large tiers here. So there are some guys in tier three who could easily be in tier two, and there are some guys I have lower than the consensus of analysts out there.
I think any of these six could be the overall SP1 this year. Lots of guys could, sure, but in my view, these first seven have a significantly higher chance of it than the rest of the field.
The order of the bullet points is how I rank them, by the way. A lot of people will have Cole in tier one, and he basically is by the ADP:
ADP
Strider: 7.7
Cole: 13.2
Burnes: 24.2
Wheeler: 26.6
Gausman: 29.0
Castillo: 30.2
Lopez: 38.5
Kirby is actually above Lopez, but we’ll get to him in tier three. The point here is that you see the ADP tiers would have Cole in tier one or tier two by himself.
But I’m a little worried about Cole, not gonna lie! We talked about it in the Yankees preview.
Cole:
2021: 51.7% Strike%, 15.6% SwStr%
2022: 51.0% Strike%, 16.4% SwStr%
2023: 49.5% Strike%, 13.1% SwStr%
Plenty of drafters know this and still take him in the second round, and I can’t say that’s a horrible idea or anything like that. He’s been the most reliable ace in baseball for many years now, and he’s still only 33 years old. But the 21% K-BB% and 3.63 SIERA (15th in baseball last year) make him look a lot like the rest of this tier.
What is certain is that I won’t have Cole on any teams this year, since I’m tiering him with five other pitchers that go at least a full round later than him.
The guy that most other people won’t have this high is Pablo Lopez. He has only had one true ace season, so people aren’t quite ready to buy in on him yet. But it was a freaking beauty:
194 IP, 29.2% K%, 6.0% BB%, 15.6% SwStr%, 45% GB%
Since he’s the cheapest of this tier, he’s my favorite, I think.
How to Handle Tier 2
I want one of these top seven pitchers. There are a ton of names I like late in the draft, but a winning fantasy team (depending on league settings, of course) has 5+ really good starters, so getting a couple of late gems isn’t enough. Get yourself an anchor here.
Price-considered rankings:
Lopez (ADP 39)
Wheeler (27)
Gausman (29)
Castillo (30)
Burnes (24)
Cole (13)
I think you start your draft with two hitters at minimum, and if you think you can start with three and still grab Pablo Lopez - do that. But it’s risky. If you miss this tier, I’d advise you to go with two pitchers pretty quickly.
The full post is for paid subs only, so become a paid member today to get this full post along with everything else I do. Check out the about page here for more information.