National League Starting Pitcher Tiers: June

by
June 10, 2015

If you followed the unveiling of our positional rankings updates then you probably have a good idea of how I feel about the NL pitching landscape, but a straight ranking of all starting pitchers is a little different than tiering the arms in one specific league. We’ve also gotten five or six more days of information since releasing those rankings. In short, I’ve made some changes. Nothing sweeping, just a few moves here and there in comparison to last week’s rankings. If you want to see how things compare to the previous months, they can be found here:

As in May, I’ve got 10 tiers, but I’ve bumped the total number of pitchers from 70 to 72. There are 75 guys in rotations at any point in the NL, but they aren’t all rank-worthy and in fact, this isn’t even 72 of the 75 as some of these guys are on the shelf or still in the minors. For the naming of the tiers, I’m choosing 10 of my favorite TV shows right now. They’re all funny, witty, smart shows, at least in my estimation. If you haven’t seen one of them, you should check it out. The shows used for each tier aren’t really related to the pitchers in the tier, but there were some happy accidents after I ranked the shows 1-10.

Tier 1: Community

Harvey out, Cole in, though not through any real fault of Harvey’s. The simple fact is that even without a six-man rotation the rest of the year, Harvey will be getting fewer innings than the premium aces as the Mets aren’t willing to drop 220 on his arm his first year back from TJ, at least not in the regular season alone.

Kershaw is still the world’s best pitcher right now, a 3.36 ERA be damned. By the way, LOL at a 3.36 being considered “bad” for anyone! The fact is, his skills are very much in line with his recent run of historical dominance and thus he could chop a full run off of that ERA the rest of the way and no one would be surprised. Despite the “struggles” he’s had this year, he is still toting a 31% strikeout rate, thanks to a career-best 15% swinging strike rate. Dirty.

I’ve been drooling over Cole for a while now and the transformation into an ace seemed more of a “when” not “if” proposition for Cole, even understanding how risky pitching is as a whole. He has the arsenal, the pedigree, the skills, the size, and the supporting cast. It is all there and we’re seeing it come together in the form of a 1.73 ERA through his first 78 innings with a 28% K rate and 6% BB rate.

Even with a repeat of last year’s awesome K rate (25%), Greinke has earned top tier status. As a Dodger he has a 2.55 ERA, 1.10 WHIP, and 4.0 K:BB ratio in 460 innings. The 22% strikeout rate is light among this tier, but he’s shown the upside (and not only last year) for more. In the end, the impeccable ratios and his presence on a team that should feed him plenty of wins are enough to sustain him here even if the K% stays around this 22% mark.

Tier 2: Bob’s Burgers

So much for that World Series hangover for Bumgarner, huh? At least not yet. He had a 5.29 ERA through three starts which I’m sure is all his detractors needed to believe that his 2014 workload was going to be a 2015 problem. Alas he has put together a 2.83 ERA, 61 Ks, and 5.6 K:BB ratio in 60 innings since then, finishing six innings in all but one of the nine starts and reaching the reaching the seventh in all but two. Neither the first three starts nor these last nine say one way or the other how much last year’s workload has impacted him which is why we should’ve just listened to Jeff Zimmerman when he said the high workload portends neither doom nor success.

deGrom jumped two tiers from May thanks to a huge month. His May alone might’ve only earned him a single tier jump, but the timing of these tiers was such that he’s snuck in a pair of June starts, both excellent, and thus he gets the double jump. Through 12 starts, he is showing that 2014 was legitimate, in fact he’s improved both his K and BB rates.

Speaking of backing up a 2014 campaign, Arrieta is doing it as well. His breakout season last year was a little surprising because he was a well-regarded prospect coming up as opposed to a 27-year old rookie who played shortstop in college like deGrom. And that’s not to take anything away from Arrieta, just pointing out the differences. Arrieta leans on a pair of devastating breaking balls along with low-to-mid 90s heat yielding a high-strikeout, low-walk, high-groundball profile which is the best profile as far as I’m concerned. Missing bats to limit contact and then putting that contact on the ground when it does happen (51%) is a great way to generate tons of success.

Wacha probably doesn’t belong this high based on year-to-date numbers as his strikeout deficiency (16%) puts him way behind his peers, but the stuff is there for so much more and we’re already starting to see it (22% over his last five). So since these are rest of season rankings, he found his way into this tier. There’s a good chance the team with him in your league is looking to sell high, fearing his 3.56 FIP which is nearly a run and a half away from his 2.18 ERA, but you should consider buying. He should be in the 20-22% range with his strikeout rate the rest of the way and the 25% we saw in ’13 still remains a realistic upside.

Tier 3: Key & Peele

Zimmermann was a little shaky to start the season and his strikeouts remain light, but it has been much better results-wise over the last month-plus. The question surrounds the strikeout rate. If we’re not going to get last year’s 23% rate again, can he at least get back to the 19-20% level that we’ve seen throughout his career? His 7% swinging strike rate is a career-low outside of his Tommy John return season when he posted a 5% in 31 innings. The talent and track record are worth buying either way as that 1.30 WHIP just can’t stay that high.

Cashner has been one of the most confounding pitchers in the game this year. I knew the Ks were in there given his stuff, but back-to-back 18% rates were a bit underwhelming. He’s up to 23% this year, but everything else has gone to hell. The strikeouts seem to have come at the expense of his groundball rate (career-low 46%) and homers have become an issue as well resulting in a 4.05 ERA and 1.42 WHIP.

Perhaps the change at catcher is part of the problem? He went from Rene Rivera to Derek Norris, which is a massive drop in catch-framing capability. Rivera was fifth last year, Norris was like 75th… yes, “like 75th” because I didn’t want to count every single guy on the page. The call-up of Austin Hedges has been a net positive for Padres pitchers, though Cashner hasn’t seen it in his results just yet. With Norris, he has a paltry 2.1 K:BB ratio in 42 innings yielding a 3.89 ERA, but with Hedges it’s at 10.0 in 25 innings though that’s left him with just a 4.74 ERA. It’ll get better. I’m buying here as well.

 Tier 4: Broad City

I realize his results (1.84 ERA/0.98 WHIP) suggest Miller should be much higher, but I promise that this ranking is me buying him. There have been improvements from last year that justify a jump in performance, but not quite to this elite level. In other words, he has to come down some barring even more skills evolution. Perhaps if he starts striking out guys at the same clip we saw in ’13 (23%) while maintaining this newfound groundball rate (51%) then maybe he jumps a tier or two, but that’s unlikely.

Miller’s really good and I love how the groundball focus has more than halved his home run allowance, but we’re probably looking at a 3.20 ERA the rest of the way on the high end. While there is a large variance between his current results and what I see the rest of the way, he is actually one of the most stable guys in this tier. He is more of the high floor with good upside while the others all have sky-high upside, but injury or performance risk that kept them from the first three tiers right now.

Strasburg’s health and awful numbers to date make him a challenge to rank. I still think he can be elite when healthy, but will we see a healthy version this year? How much of his first 10 starts were pitched while hurting? Outside of his walk rate, he has had a major skills breakdown across the board and it has been that way from the jump so maybe he’s been hurting since April. There is enough track record here to still have some confidence for a rebound, plus he is tracking to return in June so dropping him further just isn’t something I am ready to do yet.

I’ll admit that Martinez might be under-ranked given his recent work and overall upside, but we’re still dealing with a 23-year old with known control issues in the midst of his first full season as a starter. A pair of 7 ER duds to open May gave everyone a taste of the volatility in play here, but he has rebounded with a 0.84 ERA in his last five starts (32.3 IP). He has 40 strikeouts and just 20 hits allowed during that run, but 13 walks (10% BB rate), too. There will be some more valleys with this kind of control profile, but enough peaks to sustain and remain an all-formats option.

Tier 5: Veep

Prior to a start in Coors on Monday, Lackey had a 2.93 ERA and 1.19 WHIP. The ERA was due to jump some, but Coors accelerated that (8 ER in 4 IP) and now he’s at 3.74. I think he’s no worse than a 3.74 ERA the rest of the way and likely a good quarter-to-half run better. It’s not flashy because he lacks an impact strikeout rate, but the 18-20% that he has done for most of his career is adequate.

I’m a known Teheran fan, but I’m concerned. We’ve seen him just lose it for a spell before when he dropped a 5.08 ERA in 131 innings at Triple-A in 2012. It was a similar sort of collapse, too, where home runs became a real problem. His 1.7 HR/9 is the reason for the 4.87 ERA as a 19% HR/FB rate has punished him despite a sizable uptick in groundball rate (to career-best 41%). I bought a lot of last year’s excellence from Teheran and thus I can’t rule out a full rebound, but at this point the reasonable expectation, even with a rebound, should probably live around the mid-3.00s.

Expectations are through the roof for Fernandez and he’s likely to fall short of them as a result. I’d love if he went Harvey on us and just dominated from the jump, but he didn’t have the same layoff which I think is a big part of why Harvey has been so good right away. I think even this is aggressive for Fernandez, but he is such an otherworldly talent that I can’t rule out the unexpected. In other words, what “normally” happens doesn’t really apply to him because he’s been well beyond normal throughout his young career.

Tier 6: Louie

Kennedy just can’t stay this bad. Yes, he has had HR issues in the past, but never at a 2.2 HR/9 clip. His 24% HR/FB rate is obscene. Next-closest is teammate Shields at 20% (hmm, wonder if it’s something with San Diego?), but the highest qualified (162+ IP) HR/FB rate last year was 16% so I just can’t see Kennedy maintaining this level. The worst part is that his other skills look great. He held a lot of the strikeout gains from last year while cutting his walk rate again and his 41% groundball rate is a career-high.

If you’re not a fan of his game, I bet you go “yeah, see, told ya he sucks!” every time Colon has a bad game, but no matter how bad his bad starts are, he seems to always bounce back from it. He allowed 13 ER in two starts in mid-May and has bounced back with three straight quality starts. He had a three start run of 8.31 ERA in early-May last year and then put up a 1.58 ERA for seven starts. In fact, he did that kind of stuff all year in ’14. Every time he had one or two bad ones, he backed it with five or six good ones. That means you just need to leave him in your lineup and let it play out. If the skills start collapsing, then you can worry, but he leads the NL with a 10.2 K:BB ratio and while it is built on walk-suppression, he isn’t devoid of strikeouts.

It’s not like Garcia is old at age-28, but staying on the field has been a major challenge after two nice years to start his career. The skills are there to be a quality asset while he is upright so hang on and hope he can find some health for the next four months. If there is one concern in what we’ve seen for these first 27 innings, it’s that his 7% swinging strike rate is his lowest since a 16-inning cup of coffee as a 21-year old in 2008. But the elite 65% groundball rate can cover a strikeout deficiency and sustain a quality ERA.

Tier 7: Last Week Tonight

There is some risky upside within this tier. Nelson, Folty, Bettis, DeSclafani, and Rubby carry some prospect pedigree and they’ve shown flashes to back that pedigree up, but hiccups remain likely. Heston and Bolsinger have neither the prospect acclaim nor the raw stuff of the other four, but they’re performing, especially Bolsinger. Heston has had some run-ins with Coors and a couple of non-Coors meltdowns, but a 13% K-BB% and 54% groundball rate in a park that favors pitchers is intriguing.

Tier 8: Archer

Tier 8 lacks the upside of Tier 7, but trades it in for a higher floor. It’s a mixed bag of talent, but by and large these are relatively average pitchers. They have different strengths (Koehler at home, Leake on the road) and weaknesses (Ks is a problem for most of them), but in the end they can give you some solid innings. Some of underperforming, others are overperforming, but in the end they will probably be around the same range (high-3.00s, low-4.00s).

Tier 9: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

The injury group. These guys are all on the shelf right now and stand to miss another chunk of time. There could be some value to be mined here in the form of some buy-lows, but the risk is high without a ton of payoff. I’m more inclined to just wait for them to return so I can get an idea of how they’re pitching.

Tier 10: You’re the Worst

The low upside group with a couple of prospects who could be on the way. I love what Morton is doing with his groundball rate (73%), but I’m not sure if even a groundball rate that high can sustain an 8% K rate. His 4% swinging strike rate doesn’t look good for additional strikeouts, either. I suspect he’ll strike a better balance between the two and he could feasibly move up to Tier 8 if he recaptures that 19% K rate from last year.

Matz and Nola are the best NL pitching prospects with a realistic shot to come up this year and make an impact. The Mets have already gone away from the six-man rotation and I’m sure they’re still aggressively trying to trade one of Niese or Gee to open the door for Matz.





 

Paul is the Editor of Rotographs and Content Director for OOTP Perfect Team. Follow Paul on Twitter @sporer and on Twitch at sporer.

17 Comments
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Oliver
8 years ago

Awesome stuff thanks!

Ok to drop lackey for Matz? Have Kluber scherzer hamels Thor Gio mchugh odorizzi (12 team points league and Matz could be kept for one year

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Oliver
8 years ago
Reply to  Oliver

Also great choice with community for number 1! #andamovie

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