Rounding Third: Revisiting Early Starting Pitchers

In last year's guide, I discussed whether it made sense to join the crowd in drafting starting pitching early. Baseball is in an era where run scoring is way down – in fact, MLB teams averaged 4.07 runs per game in 2014, which was even lower than in 2013, which in turn was the lowest level since 1992. If starting pitching is less volatile, why are we avoiding it early on in our drafts?

Many of my competitors in the NFBC arrived at the same conclusion and drafted even more aces early on (defined here as the first five rounds in a 15-team mixed league format). My Main Event league featured 12 starting pitchers going in the second and third rounds combined, and 20 through the first five rounds. Keep in mind that the NFBC does not permit any trading, so there's a greater impetus for locking up the elite starting pitchers than there would be in other leagues. How did those pitchers work out? Here are those 20 pitchers drafted in the first five rounds and their value earned according to our in-season auction values generator, which assumes a 70-30 hitter/pitcher split.

Round 2 – Clayton Kershaw ($38), Stephen Strasburg ($19), Justin Verlander ($-2), Adam Wainwright ($27), Yu Darvish ($7), Max Scherzer ($20)
Round 3 – Cliff Lee ($-8), Madison Bumgarner ($22), Jose Fernandez ($-2), Felix Hernandez ($34), David Price ($23), Chris Sale ($22)
Round 4 – Zack Greinke ($20), Michael Wacha ($-2)
Round 5 – Anibal Sanchez ($3), Jordan Zimmermann ($19), James Shields ($13), Masahiro Tanaka ($12), Gerrit Cole ($4), Julio Teheran ($19)

There were more disasters in this batch than there were among the 2013 draftees covering the same rounds, and the magnitude of those disasters was also greater. Justin Verlander was an unrelenting healthy nightmare, while Cliff Lee, Jose Fernandez, Anibal Sanchez, and Michael Wacha all missed significant portions of the season with injuries. At least Fernandez pitched well before his injury and then was clearly out for the remainder of the season, allowing his owners to drop him and presumably find a profitable alternative. That Verlander and Fernandez ultimately earned the same amount demonstrates our need to look beyond the dollar values when drafting and when reviewing the results of our drafts.

This group got seven of the top 10 earning starting pitchers, and they did it all in the first three rounds among 12 starting pitchers chosen. Moreover, before Fernandez got hurt he was well on the way to being on that list – but we don't get credit for him precisely because the risk of injury is what makes starting pitchers appear to be so volatile. The next four on the list were all among those early drafted – Greinke, Zimmermann, Strasburg, and Teheran. This was a mostly efficient league in nailing the top earning starting pitchers, with only three of the top 14 starting pitchers falling through. Those three were Johnny Cueto (2), Corey Kluber (4), and Jon Lester (6). Of those three, only Kluber was available late, going with the last pick of the 14th round, with Cueto and Lester both getting selected in the eighth round.

We like to think that we are capable of finding good starting pitching late, but in 2014, getting the very best starting pitchers required us to pounce early. In citing the top 10 earners, one risks using selective endpoints, and expanding that list to 14 was a bit self-serving. However, there was a little bit of an earnings tier at that spot – those 14 earned $19 or more, whereas the next dropped down to $15 earned in 2014.

If you want to be able to filter these results more to take away some of the variance, look at those that failed to earned double-digits. Three of the six that fell short were second-year pitchers that had health woes – Jose Fernandez, Michael Wacha, and Gerrit Cole. Matt Harvey would have certainly been in this group too, but for needing Tommy John surgery in 2013 that forced him to miss all of 2014.

Every pick in a draft represents an opportunity cost. If you grab Clayton Kershaw in the first round, by definition you are starting behind the rest of your league in the offensive categories and will need more to go right with your subsequent hitter picks to catch up. Loading up on starting pitchers early on in the draft works best in a league where others are also taking pitchers with their early slots. You don't want those competitors that grabbed the elite hitters in their first four or five rounds to get a windfall on a top-10 pitcher later, so a little bit of knowledge about your league-mates and the league format as a whole goes a long way. Often leagues comprised of players from the various fantasy companies will wait on pitchers more than those in high-stakes contests, and the ability to trade in those industry leagues is the great equalizer.

I played in five draft leagues where I could test the notion of drafting pitchers early or not, three of them in the NFBC format – the 15-team Main Event, the 15-team Draft Champions league, which was a slow-draft event, and the NFBC Online, which consists of 12 teams. I like to refer to the NFBC leagues for data points because the players are investing real money in the leagues, suggesting that they are giving it their best shot year-round, and the ADP data is transparent. You can also review the individual draft results for each league once the season begins, and after the season to see how the winners built their respective teams. The team that won the Main Event picked from the first spot in its individual league (the first time that has happened since the inception of the contest, believe it or not). After taking Miguel Cabrera first overall, they followed that up with two aces – Max Scherzer and Adam Wainwright.

The draft results above were from my Main Event league, and in that league I had the 12-slot in odd rounds and the fourth pick in even rounds. I passed on Clayton Kershaw in the first round after reports of injury surfaced from the game he pitched in Australia, much to my chagrin. But he's an extreme outlier, and I would never take a player beginning the year on the DL in the first round. He went one pick ahead of me in the second round, and I passed on the rest of the elite pitchers with pick 2.4, thinking I would get one back in the third. Alas, it never happened, as the 12 pitchers in my first tier were all gone before I picked again at 3.12. I didn't get my first pitcher until the fifth round, and that pitcher was Gerrit Cole, who failed to bring me a profit. I ended up getting just 35 pitching points and finished seventh overall in the league.

However, in the Draft Champions League, I got shut out from the elite starting pitching again, but I was able to win the league. This was a league that drafted in February and thus was less formful, so I picked up a number of good bargains, such as Corey Kluber and Jake Arrieta among the starting pitchers, as well as Anthony Rendon and Charlie Blackmon among the hitters. The more that you believe you know the player pool, the better off you are drafting early. Sure, you'll miss out on knowing the results of job battles, but your competitors have to deal with that restraint too, and they don't get the chance to capitalize on the wisdom of the masses. If you've put in the homework and have your set of breakout candidates, you don't need ADP results to help highlight breakout players, and that's your edge against the pool.

In the NFBC Online contest, we drafted in mid-March – early enough that the Kershaw injury hadn't happened, but late enough that there were plenty of good draft results and after we had spent multiple segments discussing the notion of drafting pitching early on our radio show on Sirius/XM Fantasy Sports Radio. I took an extreme position and selected starting pitchers with three of my first four selections, and I hit on all three, grabbing Kershaw in the first round, Max Scherzer in the third round. and Chris Sale in the fourth. The gambit 'worked' – I took down 54 of the 60 possible pitching points in the league. But my margin for error in the hitting pool was gone, and I made multiple mistakes among the hitters. The hitters that I believed to be good bargains (Eric Hosmer in the sixth, Desmond Jennings in the ninth, and Jedd Gyorko in the 10th) instead demonstrated exactly why they fell, and my overall hitting numbers came up short. I ended up fourth of 12 in the league.

The examples above also illustrate the importance of draft position in executing a strategy. The team that won the Main Event had a pretty good idea that they were going to be able to double-up with their second and third-round picks, full in the knowledge that the remaining starting pitchers in the first tier wouldn't come back to them for their next two picks in Rounds 4 and 5. If they wanted to get two aces, that was the time to act. On the other hand, I wasn't quite sure that I was going to get shut out of the top 12 starters with the 42nd overall pick. I gambled in the second round that one of them would come back, or else I'd be comfortable in the knowledge that an elite hitter instead would come back to me. My reward for that gamble was taking Joey Votto in the second round and Dustin Pedroia in the third round, ensuring a mediocre season.

Extreme draft strategies regarding the elite starting pitchers can work – you can win without getting an ace, or by grabbing three aces, but both tactics carry a significantly high error rate. It's worth your time to know the room and to invest in one or two of those elite starters, even in a low-scoring era. You might be able to find good starting pitching late, but so will your competition so you're not guaranteed to get the next Kluber.

This article appears in the 2015 edition of the RotoWire Fantasy Baseball Guide.