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.