A Forensic Inquiry: How Much Should You Spend For Pitchers?

A few years ago, a guy named Jabari Blash streaked across the Fantasy Baseball firmament like a doomed comet. He had tremendous raw power, but was a three-true-outcomes guy with a vengeance, and most of those outcomes were strikeouts. His plate discipline, his glove, and his baserunning skills were such that he had to hit a lot of home runs to keep a major league job, and when he didn’t, first the Padres and then the Angels kicked him to the curb. We ourselves didn’t expect Blash to succeed, but we nonetheless took him in various deep drafts out of our sentimental recollection of a story we heard in our youths.

The tale goes like this: A young man’s fantastically wealthy grandfather dies. He leaves his entire estate to charity. To the young man, he leaves only some words of wisdom and advice. The key to success and happiness, says Grandpa, can be stated in a single word: BLASH. But to find out what the word means, the young man must do as the grandfather did in his own youth and seek out a certain guru who lives as a hermit at the top of a remote Tibetan mountain.  After much travail, distress, danger, and expense, the young man scales the mountain and finds the guru. “Guru,” he says. “I have come from far across the sea to acquire the wisdom that you alone possess. What is the meaning of BLASH?” And the guru says, “Buy Low And Sell High.”

In the same spirit as the young man’s grandfather, we are now going to unlock for you the one-word secret to success in drafting pitchers in fantasy baseball. It is GUDTRIP. And unlike passive-aggressive Grandpa, we’re not going to make you climb a Tibetan mountain to find out what the term signifies. We’ll tell you right now what it stands for: Get Urself Drafting The RIght Pitchers.

We mean, isn’t that right? If through Faustian bargain or Boolean rigor you managed last year to draft, say, Brandon Woodruff instead of Walker Buehler, or Max Fried instead of Lucas Giolito, or Sandy Alcantara instead of Chris Sale, or any pitcher not named Eduardo Rodriguez instead of Eduardo Rodriguez, we congratulate you, and hope we’re not in the same league as you this season. But the rest of us need some general guidelines and principles to apply to the delicate art and complex science of pitcher drafting. To that end, we conducted an empirical study of draft approaches to pitching that succeeded and those that, uh, didn’t succeed. And we reported on the first results of our research in our opening article of the season. Our salient findings were (1) The more successful the 5×5 fantasy team, the more it spent on pitching; and (2) whatever may have been the case in the remote or even recent past, it’s very difficult to thrive in a current-day 5×5 fantasy league without allocating at least 40% of your budget to pitching.

This prompted a couple of obvious follow-up questions. First of all, what caliber of pitcher are the owners who are spending big bucks on pitchers  spending them on? Secondly, how are they dividing those bucks between starters and relievers? As you’ll see from the  charts below, the answer to both questions is “yes.” The various columns are pretty much self  explanatory. The “quintiles” are the 705 teams that competed in last year’s NFBC Main  Event (5×5, 14 hitters, 9 pitchers, 7 reserves, FAABs), divided according to their rank, top to bottom, in the final overall standings. The  first chart shows the allocation by dollars, the second by percentiles; for reasons we explained in the earlier  article, there’s a potentially significant difference.

Main Event Pitching Allocation Dollars, by quintile Main Event Pitching Allocation Dollars, by quintile
# teams Avg pitching $ Low $ High $ Average SP $ Average RP $ % pitching to SP Avg Overall Rank Avg League Rank Won League In-the-money Top 10% Overall
Quintile 1 141 $126.46 $116.47 $157.32 $92.83 $33.63 73.41% 310.62 7.11 9 40 20
Quintile 2 141 $110.52 $105.20 $116.45 $80.01 $30.51 72.39% 348.25 7.89 12 34 17
Quintile 3 141 $101.40 $97.68 $105.07 $73.83 $27.57 72.81% 360.15 8.17 10 25 13
Quintile 4 141 $93.18 $88.72 $97.50 $65.79 $27.39 70.61% 360.18 8.04 10 24 13
Quintile 5 141 $81.20 $51.83 $88.69 $60.74 $20.46 74.80% 385.6 8.63 6 20 8
Main Event Pitching Allocation Percentage, by quintile
# teams Avg pitching % Low % High % Average SP % Average RP % % pitching to SP Avg Overall Rank Avg League Rank Won League In-the-money Top 10% Overall
Quintile 1 141 50.80% 46.96% 64.33% 37.34% 13.47% 73.50% 338.56 7.6 9 36 17
Quintile 2 141 44.39% 42.35% 46.95% 32.22% 12.17% 72.58% 319.4 7.36 12 40 19
Quintile 3 141 40.62% 39.03% 42.35% 29.24% 11.38% 71.98% 360.85 8.17 12 27 16
Quintile 4 141 37.24% 35.32% 39.01% 26.45% 10.79% 71.03% 358.23 8.08 8 19 11
Quintile 5 141 32.42% 20.31% 35.31% 24.30% 8.13% 74.95% 387.77 8.62 6 21 8
Main Event Pitching Allocation Dollars for SP and RP, by quintile
# teams Avg $ per Starting Pitcher Avg $ per Relief Pitcher SP Max RP Max
Quintile 1 141 $12.91 $12.58 $35.18 $19.91
Quintile 2 141 $11.62 $11.17 $29.19 $17.57
Quintile 3 141 $10.56 $10.28 $25.33 $16.36
Quintile 4 141 $9.63 $10.36 $21.04 $16.16
Quintile 5 141 $9.07 $8.03 $17.78 $12.25
So what do  these charts tell you? We don’t know that they “tell” you anything, but they’re pretty suggestive, aren’t they? Here are our possible takeaways:
–The  teams that did well drafted not just more pitching but better quality pitching. Even after controlling for the  fact that most teams in  the top quintile drafted a true ace (which let’s say is one of the  top 5 or 10 SPs), their remaining SPs were still on average of higher quality. The winning strategy isn’t to draft a lot of so-so pitchers, hope some of them do great and figure you’ll drop the others, use FAABs, and stream. You just can’t expect to be  successful streaming SPs; if it was ever a viable strategy in a deep league, it’s not any more. You need to spend 40 to 50% of your draft capital on good (which in this context means pricey) pitching. And since there are only  so many pricey pitchers you  can get and still have enough money for hitters, the pitching strategy that suggests itself is stars and scrubs.
–It looks like pure bargain-hunting for your closers is unlikely to end well. We haven’t looked at which closers, exactly, the various teams were getting, but assuming everyone’s buying at least two guys who, at the time of the draft, stand a good chance of closing a lot of games, then the $30 or so that Quintiles 1 and 2 are spending gives them two solid closers, or one ace and an okay guy or  a speculative pick or maybe even two, while the $20 or so  Quintile 5 is spending gives them very little.
–But maybe Quintile 5 figured it could skimp on closers and grab an unexpected closer earlyish in the season via FAAB? If so, it didn’t succeed, perhaps–and this is purely speculative–since fewer teams are using set closers, or using a single backup closer when the planned closer doesn’t work out, the free agent closer  market is likely to disappoint.
–As you’d expect, there seems to be such  a thing as spending too much on pitching, and that fuzzy line is at or somewhere slightly south of 50%.
So there you go. Spend between 40 and 50% of your total budget on pitchers. Go stars and scrubs with  starters. Get two midpack or better closers. Buona fortuna. Bon voyage. And GUDTRIP.





The Birchwood Brothers are two guys with the improbable surname of Smirlock. Michael, the younger brother, brings his skills as a former Professor of Economics to bear on baseball statistics. Dan, the older brother, brings his skills as a former college English professor and recently-retired lawyer to bear on his brother's delphic mutterings. They seek to delight and instruct. They tweet when the spirit moves them @birchwoodbroth2.

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weekendatbidens
1 year ago

Increased spending on batters backfired because the deadened ball reduced output. As hitters were reduced, pitchers experienced a boon. This reversal allowed fantasy managers who invested more money in pitching categories to succeed. Any changes made by players and teams, as well as new regulations, could negate the advantages pitchers had in 2022. As a result, it is situational and possibly moot.

Jeff Zimmermanmember
1 year ago

Are you talking about point or roto leagues?

Rotoholicmember
1 year ago

That isn’t the cause of teams that invested more in pitching performing well. It’s all relative.

Doesn’t matter if the league ERA is 5.50 or 4.50; Heavily investing in pitchers means you will have better pitchers than your competitors, regardless what the ERA is indexed at. Same for hitters.

Last edited 1 year ago by Rotoholic