Of Openers and Followers: How the New Meta Affects Fantasy Play

Baseball has a problem, one I’ve personally touched upon numerous times on this site, my personal blog, twitter, in chats, and whilst walking around the grocery store. The traditional role of starting pitchers is dissolving. Even though it has led to teams playing smarter, it’s also deteriorating the product on the field. Baseball, after all, is selling entertainment. We like to pretend that winning equals entertainment, but perhaps that’s not always the case. In fact, we have some decent evidence it is, indeed, not the case.

I explained the problem from a high level on my Patreon yesterday (paywall). I’m hardly the only person to notice this issue – it’s a frequent talking point among baseball circles. Recently, Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer quantified the ways in which starting pitchers are ceding innings to relievers. Bill  James had a rare good tweet about the point of baseball (i.e. entertainment). Jeff Sullivan kindly confirmed that people are pissed via a poll. Sometimes, writers aren’t the best barometer of fan preferences. In this case, we’re all on the same page.

When the way baseball is played changes, so too does the way we play fantasy baseball. The latest trends in pitch usage have altered the way I will approach the 2019 season.

Of Openers and Followers

Perhaps the most visible shift is the growing prevalence of Openers and Followers (O&F). For the uninitiated, an Opener is a reliever who throws the first inning or two of a game. He gives way to a Follower, somebody who typically throws three to six innings. In a traditional sense, the follower is the starter. He just doesn’t appear in the first inning.

In most formats, fantasy baseball isn’t designed to closely mirror reality. For example, we know there are copious issues with the win and quality start as tracking stats. They don’t do a good job capturing pitcher quality. Wins can be earned or not-earned in undeserved ways. See Jacob deGrom’s run support. Quality starts exclude the multitude of good starting pitchers who frequently don’t finish six innings. Wins exclude those who don’t fire five frames.

When an opener pitches, there is a zero percent chance for a quality start. Meanwhile, the follower has an increased chance to earn a victory. This is because he doesn’t have to last five innings to earn the victory. All he needs is run support. If his team had the lead when he enters the game or gains it while he’s in, the win reverts to him. They broke our system!

Rays follower Ryan Yarbrough posted 16 wins in 38 appearances totaling 147.1 innings. That’s a shade under four innings per appearance. Of his six actual starts, only two were converted to wins. The other 14 victories came in 32 relief appearances.

Yarbrough is perhaps an extreme example. Or maybe he isn’t. We don’t have a lot of data at our disposal. The Rays were the most frequent users of the O&F strategy with the Athletics also experimenting a bit down the stretch. Other clubs dabbled in an uncommitted kind of way. In total, I count six pitchers who were used with some consistency as followers: Yarbrough, Yonny Chirinos, Austin Pruitt, Jake Faria, Matt Andriese, and Daniel Mengden. I could easily be missing somebody.

While Yarbrough soaked up victories, Andriese, Faria, Pruitt, and Mengden failed to record wins at an above average rate. Mengden won one of five tries. Ditto Faria. Pruitt and Andriese were used in a variety of multi-inning roles making it a tad challenge to pin down which outings fell into which bucket. Pruitt won only two games in 69.2 innings. Andriese won three in 78.2 innings. And then there’s Chirinos. He captured five wins in 10 tries as the follower. He really thrived in the role.

The point here is that two of six followers provided stealthy fantasy value. A 33 percent success rate in a small sample is enough for me to build followers into my overall strategy for 2019. I’m certainly not designing my teams around using a Yarbrough – especially because I might get stuck with an Andriese. However, this offers another avenue to fix roster issues created by injuries or a botched draft. For a typical 12 team mixer, followers should mostly be treated as streaming quality pitchers.

We’re going to see more openers and followers in 2019. I’m confident in that statement. This could be a boon for high effort fantasy owners and a huge setback for those who take a hands off approach to ownership. Even I had trouble keeping track who was going to follow for the Rays on a given day. That made it difficult to proactively target players like Yarbrough and Chirinos on the right day.