The 2016 baseball season is coming in hot, but more importantly the 2016 fantasy baseball season is squarely upon us. In a standard 5x5 league, your starting pitchers are going to be accountable for four out of the five pitching categories, with one of those being WHIP. The Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched stat is a great measure of success, as the only real way to struggle with a low WHIP is if you don’t walk anyone and simply give up five solo shots per start. Allow me to give you my thoughts on what the Top 10 WHIP leaderboard will look like at the end of the season.

I've been asked what it really means to find a pitcher with a strong WHIP. Do you just get widely regarded great pitchers and expect them to post amazing WHIPs? Do you rely on guys who prioritize command, racking up first pitch strikes and limiting walks? Is it more about the pitchers who generate soft contact? Those who pitch well out of the stretch and avoid being rattled by baserunners? Strikeout monsters who don't give anyone a chance to even put the ball in play?

I'll let sabermetric savant Bilbo Baggins respond: "All of them at once, I suppose."

Names that just missed my cut: Noah Syndergaard, Jake Arrieta (yup, sorry to disappoint), Masahiro Tanaka, Michael Pineda, and Jon Lester. Let’s have some fun and put totals here too, just because. Oh, and if Marco Estrada ends the year in the top 10 again I will probably go off into the woods for a few months for a good ol' existential crisis.

2016 Top 10 WHIP Leaders

10. Jacob deGrom – 1.04 WHIP

Jacob deGrom’s first full year of pitching in the majors yielded quite the bounty for the Metropolitans, as he struck out 205 in 191 IP with a 2.54 ERA (2.70 FIP) and 0.98 WHIP. His swinging strike rate improved, his first-strike rate shot up five full points to 67.8% leading to a nice cut in his walk rate from 7.6% to 5.1%. His home run rate wasn’t abnormal, nor was his strand rate.

The line-drive rate went down from 23.2% to 20.9%, and while it’s possible he takes a small hit thanks to his BABIP normalizing above last year’s .271 mark, that’s also going to be on how the Mets defense takes shape behind him. He pitches in the NL East just like his buddy Harvey. His hair reportedly distracts hitters. What more do you need?

9. Carlos Carrasco – 1.04 WHIP

Let’s kick this off with a bang, as Carrasco’s 1.07 WHIP last year was actually worse than his 0.99 WHIP from 2014, but he stands to improve on last year’s numbers with room for value. The 216 strikeouts in 183.2 IP drive up his cost, but the 14-12 record along with the 3.63 ERA are still keeping him a little low on most lists.

His FIP/xFIP/SIERA was still 2.84/2.66/2.74, his swinging-strike rate improved from 13.4% to 14.0%, his first-strike rate jumped from 62.6% to 67.3%, and batters pulled the ball less (42.6% to 39.9%). Cleveland’s defense stands to be better than last year, when they finally called up Francisco Lindor to be a defensive spark it really helped them go from laughable to respectable. This should also help this next fellow out.

8. Corey Kluber – 1.03 WHIP

Kluber did not continue to take the world by storm in any conventional way after winning the AL Cy Young Award in 2014, as he went from going 18-9 to 9-16 with an ERA that went from 2.44 to 3.49. Interestingly enough, his WHIP dropped from 1.09 to 1.05, but most people aren’t noticing that with such sharp declines in those other, more conventional, metrics.

Honestly, Kluber did not pitch as well as he did in 2014, but his swinging strike rate went up from 12.0% to 12.9%, his walk rate dropped from 5.4% to 5.1%. The biggest thing to me is that his ground ball rate dropped from 48.0% to 42.4%, and with the aforementioned improvements to Cleveland’s defense, it should hold that grounders are not the enemy anymore for Kluber. If he can bring back some of those while continuing to work in his ruthless cutter, look out world.

7. Zack Greinke – 1.02 WHIP

What? This is the guy who led the league in WHIP last year with an astounding 0.84 figure, Nick what are you thinking? Well, you may have heard all of the regression hounds nipping at Greinke’s heels, though I’m not banking on that as much as others because he genuinely did pitch better.

His 19.1% line drive rate dropped nearly four percent from 22.8% in 2014, and was the lowest it’s been since 2010. He generated soft-contact 21.7% of the time, the second best figure of his career behind 2011. His first-strike rate was 64.1%, the highest since 2005 when he went 5-17 for Kansas City with a 5.80 ERA in 183 innings. That’s a bizarre line to read nowadays. Look for Zack-Attack to continue doing well in Arizona, just not well enough to lead this list.

6. Dallas Keuchel – 1.02 WHIP

The Yankee fan in me hates writing this, but just watching the horrible contact that the Yankees were getting on the ball in that Wild Card game last year was indicative of Keuchel’s whole 2015. He locates the ball so well on low corners that he just devastates anyone hoping to square up a pitch. Just look at that sexy 61.7% groundball rate.

I hated him, but I respected him. The jump in strikeouts, from an 18.1% to 23.7% K-rate, alongside a further drop in walks (5.9% to 5.6%) vaulted him to the top of many leaderboards. His 1.02 WHIP being one of them. Much of this has to do with how effectively he used his slider, as it went from having a -0.7 pitch value in 2013, to -0.3 in 2014, to an astounding 18.0 last year.

5. Madison Bumgarner – 1.00 WHIP

Bumgarner put in another year of over 200 innings in for San Francisco, striking out a career-high 234 along the way. He brought his much improved 4.9% walk rate in 2014 down even further last year, to a neat 4.5%. His soft-contact rate was 19.2%, the lowest it’s been since 2011, though his hard-hit rate (27.8%) was the worst since 2010 and his line drive rate (22.7%) was the worst of his career.

Other batted ball profile rates held steady, and his 1.01 WHIP from last year appears to be a strong tether point. His strikeout stuff has been trending upwards his whole career, while his control is improving. If he can turn those extra line drives from last year back into grounders, he could very well post a WHIP under one. There’s also the whole “Giants even year voodoo” thing, although it’s funny how Bumgarner’s strongest WHIP years were 2013 and 2015.

4. Matt Harvey – 0.97 WHIP

I probably am guilty of not giving Harvey enough credit going into this year, as he was shaking off the cobwebs at the outset of 2015 and still posted a 2.71 ERA and 1.02 WHIP on the year. His second half WHIP was 0.92 compared to 1.09 for the first half. 2016 Harvey has 2015 behind him and a healthy offseason in the books coming into this year, so it’s hard to not see “second-half Harvey” as much more of the pitcher we’ll see all year.

Overall, Harvey still posted a nice 68.2% first-strike rate last year (he had a rate of 64.4% in 2013 before everything went to pieces), and while his strikeouts took a small step back, again we are looking at a guy whose full year is difficult to judge. He won’t pitch like he did in August (0.33 ERA, 0.63 WHIP) all of the time, but I still really like his chances to be strong in the WHIP department moving forward. The Mets defense looks to be improved over their -7 Defensive Runs Saved metric last year (good for 21^st in the majors), but they’ll need to stay healthy and utilize their defensive substitutions wisely. Big things cometh for Harvey here.

3. Chris Sale – 0.97 WHIP

Sale is a monster, but pitching in the AL Central is obviously less than ideal at first blush compared to other options. Basically, it comes down to Sale being such a tank that he is just that good regardless of the division around him. I would like to see a year out of him pitching in the NL East or NL West just for the sake of future debates (sorry to any White Sox fans I just rattled). Sale posted a career-best walk rate of 4.9% (2014 was 5.7%) which gave him a very strong 27.2% K-BB rate, as he is still generating strikeouts at an incredible rate (32.1% last year, his best since 2010 when he operated as a reliever).

Sale’s WHIP was 0.97 in 2014, but jumped up to 1.09 last year thanks to a career-high 0.99 HR/9 and a BABIP of .323. Oh no, BABIP without context? We can’t have that, just know that the highest BABIP he had allowed before last year was .294, so a 29 point jump seems unlikely to hold considering he didn’t slip up with anything else in his game.

2. Max Scherzer – 0.94 WHIP

Scherzer finished last year with a 0.92 WHIP, good for fourth in the majors. Of course, throwing two no-hitters really helps one’s cause. He has absolutely devastating stuff and brought his walk rate down from his usual ~7% to 3.8% last year. This was backed by an incredible jump in his first-strike percentage, as he bumped it up from 63.3% to 71.3%. That is insane.

It’s not like he was just grooving in pitches either, as his swinging-strike rate went from 11.8% to 15.3%. He kept his ground-ball rate around 36%, the norm for him, while seeing a 4.9% bump in soft-contact (16.0% to 20.9%) and gave up line drives 18.6% of the time, compared to 21.7% from 2014.

At the end of the day, I think Scherzer’s 2015 is pretty much “peak-Scherzer” (I know, bold right?), but I do think that it’s replicable. He gets to pitch in the NL East against teams like the Marlins, Phillies, and Braves. Look for him to continue his dominant run and put some heat on this next guy for the NL Cy Young Award. I do not

1. Clayton Kershaw – 0.89 WHIP

There’s little to say here, but we have to say it anyway. Kershaw’s control and raw stuff make for him being the unquestionable top pitcher in the game. I know, Jake Arrieta won the NL Cy Young Award blah blah, but Kershaw is rocking Smitty Werbenjagermanjensen’s hat from Spongebob, he was number one. His WHIP was 0.88 last year, and was 0.86 in 2014. Strikeouts aside, he went a second straight year of posting a FIP under 2 (it was 1.99 last year, slackin’) and somehow bumped his swinging-strike rate up from an already gaudy 14.2% to 15.9%.

It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but 2014 was going to be hard to beat. He gave up more line drives, his walk rate went from 4.1% to 4.7%, and his soft-contact rate dropped from 24.5% to 19.9%. The point here is that he had such a strong year even with a few things not going his way, which is encouraging moving forward that you aren’t looking for a career-year replication on all fronts. Mix in the fact that he pitches in the NL and baby, you’ve got a stew going.

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