Below are the latest playing time changes for pitchers in the past week, highlighted by AJ Smith-Shawver’s season-ending injury that increases the importance of Grant Holmes and Bryce Elder in Atlanta’s rotation.

Daily SP Chart archive

The chart includes their performance for 2025, their opponent’s wOBA rank versus the pitcher’s handedness from this year so far, my general start/sit recommendation for 10-team, 12-team, and 15-team (or more) leagues, and then a note about them. Obviously, there are league sizes beyond those three so it’s essentially a shallow, medium, deep. If a pitcher only has an “x” in 15-team, it doesn’t mean there’s no potential use in 10s and 12s, but it’s a much riskier stream for those spots.

These are general recommendations, and your league situation will carry more weight whether you are protecting ratios or chasing counting numbers. This is for standard 5×5 roto leagues. The thresholds for H2H starts are generally lower, especially in points leagues so I thought there would be more valuable focusing on roto.

ICYMI last night: Probably gonna be board-only pieces the rest of the week as I head out to Charlotte to catch a Savannah Bananas game with a couple friends and link up with our very own Jason Collette as well! I think I’m gonna make the Saturday and Sunday boards with the current probables and load them into the WordPress so I don’t have to do it on my laptop and then I will make any changes in-place meaning I won’t remake the boards. So let’s say a 1-x guy gets moved out and a stud is moved up in his place, I would put the 3-x stud in that 1-x guy’s row as it’s much easier on short notice during a vacation… so I’m choosing convenience over style in that case. But that’s only if there are changes.

Friday’s board is paper-thin, especially for a 30-arm slate!! Not only is it light on studs, but many of them are facing tough teams: Skubal v. CHC, Sonny v. LAD, Senga at Coors (COL sucks, but always a dangerous park), and Lodolo v. ARI.

NOTE: for board-only days I’m going to put a “W” in the box to indicate a Win-chase, someone you’re using because you think they’re team can support them enough to get a Win even if they give something like a 5 IP/4 ER start. This will be used as almost a half-x as I’m only advocating for them in a specific case so if you don’t care as much about the Win potential, you can ignore the reco.

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American League

Astros

• Jacob Melton will not play every game, and when he does, it’ll be against righties.

“We’re taking it a little slow with the groin. We were playing [Jacob Melton] four days a week in the minor leagues and it kind of fits here,” Brown told the team’s pregame radio show.

“He’s probably going to come up here and face right-handers, gives us that left-hand bat we’ve been looking for. We don’t have to play him here every day, but we’re gradually going to break him in and see what he can do.”

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Every week, I look through my rostered pitchers noting the worst ones and churn them out next week. This week, the Yusei Kikuchi stood out. Someone with a 3.06 ERA and his ERA estimators around 4.50. It was his ERA estimators throwing red flags, but I have other pitchers worse. It was his 1.52 WHIP, third worst among qualified starters behind Kyle Freeland (1.63) and Jack Kochanowicz (1.56). With WHIP being its own Roto category, it has as much weight as ERA but ERA is the mentioned multiple times more often than WHIP. I’m just going to create a simple WHIP to ERA conversion to put both on the same scale.

To get the conversion equation, I used the overall rankings for the NFBC’s Main Event (15 team) and Online Championship (12 team). With them, I ranked the WHIP and ERA values separately. I removed the the first and last 10% of values because the change for them isn’t linear.

With the tails removed and plotted the best remaining WHIP with the best remaining ERA. I did that for each one. Here are the plotted results.

The correlation is nearly perfect, so the correlation equations can be used to convert a WHIP to an ERA equivalent. Here is conversion table.

The results for the two league types are close so I’ll only use the Main Event information going forward. Besides the above table, I have created a public Google Sheet (copy by going to File -> Make a Copy) where a WHIP can be entered and an equivalent ERA is spit out.

Kikuchi’s 1.52 WHIP would be equivalent to a ~5.50 ERA. No one is starting/rostering a pitcher with a 5.50 ERA this deep into the season. The high WHIP can’t be ignored and I’m likely to move on where I can find decent options.

Besides Kikuchi, Here are the qualified pitchers who have a WHIP that does as much ratio damage as a 4.50 or worse ERA.

Gavin Williams and José Soriano have been devastating managers’ in the WHIP category but it doesn’t seem as bad with sub-4.00 ERA.

WHIP is probably one of the most misunderstood categories and hopefully I made it easier to understand an expectable value.

Daily SP Chart archive

The chart includes their performance for 2025, their opponent’s wOBA rank versus the pitcher’s handedness from this year so far, my general start/sit recommendation for 10-team, 12-team, and 15-team (or more) leagues, and then a note about them. Obviously, there are league sizes beyond those three so it’s essentially a shallow, medium, deep. If a pitcher only has an “x” in 15-team, it doesn’t mean there’s no potential use in 10s and 12s, but it’s a much riskier stream for those spots.

These are general recommendations, and your league situation will carry more weight whether you are protecting ratios or chasing counting numbers. This is for standard 5×5 roto leagues. The thresholds for H2H starts are generally lower, especially in points leagues so I thought there would be more valuable focusing on roto.

Probably gonna be board-only pieces the rest of the week as I head out to Charlotte to catch a Savannah Bananas game with a couple friends and link up with our very own Jason Collette as well!

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The best friends are there for you when you need them:

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Daily SP Chart archive

The chart includes their performance for 2025, their opponent’s wOBA rank versus the pitcher’s handedness from this year so far, my general start/sit recommendation for 10-team, 12-team, and 15-team (or more) leagues, and then a note about them. Obviously, there are league sizes beyond those three so it’s essentially a shallow, medium, deep. If a pitcher only has an “x” in 15-team, it doesn’t mean there’s no potential use in 10s and 12s, but it’s a much riskier stream for those spots.

These are general recommendations, and your league situation will carry more weight whether you are protecting ratios or chasing counting numbers. This is for standard 5×5 roto leagues. The thresholds for H2H starts are generally lower, especially in points leagues so I thought there would be more valuable focusing on roto.

—

Read the rest of this entry »

6/3/25

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live. Support the show by subscribing to our Patreon!!

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INJURIES/TRANSACTION NEWS

• Corbin Burnes fully cooked this yr?
  • Tyler Mahle tangent
• Jac Caglianone called up
• Ronny Mauricio called up

Outfield (12-tm Player Rater)

• Aaron Judge
• Pete Crow-Armstrong
• Kyle Tucker
• James Wood
• Corbin Carroll
• Seiya Suzuki

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Here are the latest changes in projected position player playing time since last Tuesday, led by some Tigers outfielders finally getting healthy and, of course, the debut of Jac Caglianone.

Nice way to come back!

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