RADIO
When creating a Fantasy Baseball team, there are many reasons to consider waiting on pitchers. The position is easier to fill than hitting roster spots, starters are more injury prone than position players, and a starting pitcher pitches only once every five days meaning their impact is limited to a much smaller sample size than a hitter. Often, a starting pitcher such as Clayton Kershaw or Felix Hernandez seems too good to pass up in early fantasy rounds, but their value can be made up by later round draft targets who may not appear as sexy.
Why to avoid top starters in early rounds
The first consequence to drafting a pitcher comes no matter what round you draft them in: season ending injury. With every day players, you run the risk of a torn ACL or a potential arm injury, but they happen less frequently than season ending injuries to pitchers. Already this season, early round pick Yu Darvish has been set down with Tommy John surgery, as has promising youngster Marcus Stroman, and Cliff Lee could potentially be the next to go under the knife.
No pitcher is immune to the infamous surgery and it eliminates any and all fantasy value that a pitcher may hold. If Clayton Kershaw were to experience the surgery, many people’s first round pick (probable early first round pick) would be wasted when it could have been spent on someone who plays every day like Giancarlo Stanton or Andrew McCutchen.
Then there are times when even the great Kershaw gets hammered and lasts only a few innings. This could have a lasting effect on a week’s worth of pitching stats because pitchers are only going to make one start (two maximum) per week and this bad week can cost people dearly (particularly in head to head leagues). If a hitter has a 0-5 day, it hurts their batting average on the week, but not in the same way that lasting 3 innings and giving up 8 runs would.
But a bad day can happen to anybody, right? One could argue that early round picks are less likely to have those kind of days than a late round pick, right? Right. Absolutely. But the risk is always there. Hitters are less likely to have that bad week that ruins your fantasy stats in head to head matchups. Normally the trends of a hitter can be calculated and examined prior to the week whereas a pitcher’s meltdown can often be spontaneous.
Why is drafting position players so crucial to success?
Fantasy owners must also examine lineup setting for the week and overall offensive output from that lineup. You can’t draft a first baseman and have him play catcher or second base. Picking position players early has the benefit of having strong offensive performers in your lineup at all of the positions. If you use early rounds to draft starting pitching, you will inevitably forfeit offensive output in one or more positions by drafting a position player in a later round. But if you use rounds 1-10 to draft your starting position players, you could have a lineup of strong offensive players at every position. So you could have a Jose Reyes at shortstop instead of a Zack Cozart.
In a fantasy lineup, the owner is given several slots to put a starting pitcher in. Pitchers are flexible in that they are not limited to any one position in the rotation. Whereas hitters are confined to just one position in a fantasy lineup and can only be replaced by a hitter of the same position, pitchers have the ability to be easily swapped out by any other starting pitcher. A late round starter is more likely to help fantasy owners than a late round position player.
What the later rounds hold for owners seeking pitching
The beauty of starting pitchers is that there are always a minimum of 150 who hold a spot on a Major League roster. That means that if a starting pitcher were drafted with each pick in a ten-team league, it would take 15 rounds before each starter was picked up. Similarly, it would take a mere three rounds to take all the starting first basemen in the league if only first basemen were drafted.
You can reach the eighth round and still have a number of quality starters still undrafted. We're talking about number one and number two type pitchers remaining. Here are some pitchers that could be taken around rounds 7-9: Sonny Gray (81.3), Gerrit Cole (84.8), Mashiro Tanaka (89.5), Tyson Ross (96.3), and Michael Wacha (139.0)
Those pitchers are reliable and consistent and have the potential to provide excellent value for a late round draft pick. On the other hand, taking an ace pitcher in the first few rounds would cost you an early pick that could be better spent on an elite hitter. You could even wait until later rounds 10-15 and find starters such as Yordano Ventura (151.2), Andrew Cashner (153.2), Homer Bailey (180.8), Collin McHugh (183.0), and Dallas Keuchel (189.2).
Are any of those pitchers going to finish the season with numbers better than Clayton Kershaw or Chris Sale? No, but if you can stock your rotation with late round value returners like these pitchers, you'll have a decent shot of killing it with your hitting draft picks while also keeping pace in the pitching categories.
