2016 End of Season Rankings: Starting Pitchers

Clayton Kershaw missed a big chunk of the season yet he was still a fantasy MVP. The real world NL Cy Young award debate was duplicated in fantasy land with Max Scherzer and Kershaw comfortably leading Jon Lester, Kyle Hendricks, and Madison Bumgarner. What’s more valuable, Scherzer’s quantity or Kershaw’s quality? Our auction calculator says quantity by $1.50.

In case you’re just tuning into this series for the first time, I recommend going back in time and starting from the beginning. Luckily, you won’t need a time machine. The post on catchers has notes on important methodological changes. You can also go straight into the calculator to tweak values for your league.

For these articles, I’m going to assume a 12 team, 5×5, standard deep roster with a pitching cap of 1475 innings (most leagues are 1450 or 1500, I split the difference). I set the batter split at 65% because that produces what I consider to be the most realistic position adjustments.

Although I provided actual fantasy stats in past versions, I opted to list the monetary value of each stat for pitchers.

While 2016 wasn’t the worst case scenario for Kershaw, it’s heartening to see that things can go wrong and still result in first round value. Kershaw’s performance was on par with the top hitters in the league. That’s partly due to me setting a slightly unusual 65/35 hitter-pitcher split. I did that to tinker with the positional adjustments, but it also distorts the relationship between hitter and pitcher value. A more typical 70/30 split results in the top hitters outperforming the top pitchers by about $12.

Most of the replacement level pitchers only worked for partial seasons. As we’ve discussed, the calculator can be rather harsh to part-time players. Musgrove was precisely replacement level while Rodon was the closest thing to an everyday $0 starter. You would have been better off with multiple Musgroves over one Rodon.

With starting pitchers, we use the term “breakout” loosely. Many of the newly valuable pitchers rose due to a big win total. I’m looking at you Porcello, Hendricks, Happ, and Roark. While those pitchers did improve considerably, much of their fantasy value was in the most difficult category to predict. Other surprise performances include Sanchez, Hill, Duffy, Fulmer, and Pomeranz.

Devenski and Phelps were the best swingmen. Every year, there are a couple not-really-starters who perform well above replacement level. In my experience, these guys tend to be very volatile in future seasons. Think Yusmeiro Petit.

A replacement level pitcher was worth $0. A league average pitcher returned $10. Lo and behold, the $10 pitchers are a Who’s Who list of the merely adequate. Guerra, Eickhoff, Colon, Straily, and Hellickson were within .50 cents of average.

No pitcher was more disappointing than Keuchel. Unless it was Cole. Or Archer. Or maybe Stroman, Nola, Pineda, Zimmermann, and Wainwright. With apologies to the latter quintet, we were always very aware of the risk in selecting them.

The same was not true of Keuchel, Cole, and Archer. Keuchel was supposed to be the next Cliff Lee – or so I said on multiple occasions. Cole had improved in multiple consecutive seasons. He looked like a monster in the making. Archer proved himself to be one of the most eloquent speakers on the subject of pitching during the 2015 postseason. The thoughtfulness and the breakout 2015 season fooled some of us into thinking he was a hard throwing Maddux.