2015 Fantasy Baseball Rankings > Cheat Sheets > Starting Pitchers
2015 Fantasy Baseball Cheat Sheets:
Starting Pitchers
This page is a quick reference that you can have open during your fantasy baseball draft or fantasy auction. Remember to balance out your pitching staff, especially your starting rotation. You need guys who pitch a lot of innings (hence the Innings Pitched category). You need a guy with a low WHIP, and you need a guy with good K/9 as well as a guy with a lot of total strikeouts (a guy with a high strikeout total is often a sign that he tends to stay healthy). Of course, you need a guy with a low ERA, too, so check out the cheat sheets below and visit this page often during your fantasy draft or auction.
2015 Starting Pitcher Cheat Sheets Sorted by Stat
SKIP TO: Innings Pitched | ERA (Earned Run Average) | Total Strikeouts | Strikeouts per 9 Innings | Back to all Cheat Sheets
Top 100: WHIP
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Top 50: Wins
Top 50 Innings Pitched
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Fantasy Pitching Strategies
What's the most-important fantasy pitching stat to look at when drafting starting pitchers?
As you've probably noticed by now, there are a lot of stats we've told you about in our cheat sheets that aren't tracked as scoring categories in your fantasy league, yet they are very indicative of predicting how a player will likely perform in your scoring categories. When it comes to drafting your starting pitchers, one category stands above the rest as your best bet to predicting success: WHIP. WHIP: Walks + Hits divided by Innings Pitched.
Essentially, a WHIP is the average number of base runners a pitcher allows on base every inning he pitches. The basic logic here is just that: basic. The fewer base runners you allow on base, the fewer opportunities the other team has to score. Look at the leaders in WHIP. More specifically, look at the WHIP leaders who also threw a lot of innings: Clayton Kershaw, Felix Hernandez, Johnny Cueto, Chris Sale, Adam Wainwright... these guys are household names. Sure, we know - we skipped over some of the others like Jake Arrieta and Collin McHugh who aren't necessarily household names... yet. But both of those guys had and ERA well under 3.00 which is no coincidence when you look at their respective WHIP. In short, if you're trying to decide between a couple of pitchers on draft day, it's almost always a safer bet to choose the one with the lower WHIP. What Fantasy Stats Tell Me to Stay Away from a Certain Pitcher?When determining which fantasy starting pitchers are likely to ruin the season for you in 2015, we actually recommend you look at a combination of stats - just two at a time, for the most part.
Difference Between ERA and WHIP. If you come across a starting pitcher in your fantasy draft who has a high WHIP (i.e.: over 1.25) but a low ERA (i.e.: under 3.50), we want you to bve careful. Of the starting pitchers with a WHIP of 1.25 or more, only 12 had an ERA under 3.50. Of the starting pitchers with a WHIP of 1.25 or more, 105 had an ERA over 3.50. If it comes down to choosing a starting pitcher based on his WHIP vs. his ERA, we'd go with the lower WHIP every time (and we were right 89.7% of the time in 2014). Strikeouts per 9 innings pitched (K/9) is more important on draft day than total strikeouts.
You probably noticed that we took the libery of showing you the number of innings a starting pitcher actually pitched in a lot of our cheat sheets. We have long per a proponent of abolishing the total strikeouts category in the pitching stats because it's largely reliant upon the randomness of the scheduling. If you have a crappy pitcher on your roster, but he pitches twice in a week (once on Monday, then again on Saturday or Sunday), he's likely to strike out more batters than your best strikeout pitcher for that week simply because he pitched twice thanks to the luck of the schedule. Beyond that gripe, looking at a pitcher's K/9 gives you a much more accurate depiction of his capabilities and what you can expect out of him every time he takes the mound. Take Yesmeiro Petit for example, and let's say he gets thrown into thestarting rotation again like he did last year. If you look at last year's stats, you can see that Petit struck out a total of 133 batters to which you would initially say, "Big deal. He sucks." But then we see that he started 12 games, but he pitched in 39 games total. Now what? Looking at his K/9, you know you can expect him to at least strike out a batter every inning he pitches, so if he gets thrown into the rotation, you know what to expect out of him every time he takes the mound. James Shields is another guy who had a fantastic season in 2014. He struck out 180 batters, but it took him 227 innings pitched to do it. Keep in mind, this is fine - it's great to have a guy who pitches that many innings on your roster. If he lasts that long in every game, you know his numbers are going to be solid. But, if you're looking for a strikeout guy, you would have been better off with Yu Darvish (while he was healthy) or Zack Greinke or even Alex Wood, each of whom had more strikeouts per 9 innings pitched. Keep in mind, we still want you to focus most of your attention on getting the lowest WHIP you can get, but you cant ignore the strikeout category. Understanding that drafting for K/9 is more important than total strikeouts will be key to your success. You can also check out our fantasy rankings, too, if you need an easier time deciding.
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Top 100: ERA
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Top 100: Total Strikeouts
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Top 100: Strikeouts per 9 Innings (K/9)
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