Selective Starting

By: Robby Wellington – Staff Writer

Author’s disclaimer: The following article applies specifically to daily transaction leagues, particularly the last paragraph. The unique one-start, two-start importance of weekly transaction leagues merits its own article.

One important goal of any fantasy baseball manager is to isolate their players’ good performances from their bad ones and to make sure that most of the bad stat lines occur on the bench. While there are a number of ways you can do this with your hitters (sitting them against a stud SP, a lefty against a lefty, a slumping bat or a marginal Rockie or Ranger on the road), the easiest and most profound way to exploit matchups is with your starting pitching staff.

Let’s consider baseball’s starting pitchers as four tiers. First tier are your studs, guys who you start every game, regardless of their opponent. There are maybe 20 hurlers in this group, give or take five throughout the season. They’re your horses, and their final season stat line is going to be identical or nearly identical to the stats that they provide your fantasy team, just plug ’em and play ’em.

Next come the solid starters that fill up the next couple of slots in fantasy rotations. You’re going to be hard-pressed to sit these guys with the exception of the most difficult matchups (i.e. @ Colorado, @ Texas, vs. Boston or vs. the Yankees), when they are hurt and/or slumping or occasionally when they are matched up against an ace with a tough lineup. Suffice it to say, by the end of the year you’ll probably get 75 percent to 90 percent of their innings pitched counting toward your own stats, with hopefully a favorable record and lowered ratios.

Third are the fringe/situational starters, which is, believe it or not, the group that can make or break your rotation and certainly requires the most attention. Based on a variety of factors (opponent, opposing pitcher, home/road splits, recent performances, health) you’ll probably end up starting these guys anywhere from 50 percent to 70 percent of the time, and by the end of the year, their stats in your starting lineup should be noticeably better than their numbers on your bench. This is also the region where you want to target guys with significant splits (usually ones who throw in “pitchers parks” or in weak divisions) because it is easier to mine good stats and productivity out of the guys with mediocre overall numbers if you have a better idea of how to isolate his good starts. It is also for this same reason why young, erratic pitchers are not good fits for this spot; someone like Scott Kazmir can go out and shut down the Yankees, then get lit by the Tigers when you plug him in the following turn (Kazmir’s ERA is in fact twice as high vs. Detroit at 3.43 to 6.86. The sample size is small of course).

Now picking and choosing your pitchers’ starts obviously isn’t going to work all the time, in fact, it often seems like the moment I sit someone they go 4 for 4 or throw a 10K gem. More often than not, however, by paying close attention to your staff, especially the fringe guys, you should be able to maximize your wins while keeping your ERA and WHIP lower than the pitchers’ overall numbers would indicate.

Now, while this “selective starting” should give you a competitive edge over your opponents in the pitching categories, you’ll presumably be behind in IP and need to make up for this somehow. The last thing you want to do is drop a bat or good reliever to add these innings. Instead, you can use a new feature this year on Yahoo! Baseball that tells you exactly which free agents have a start the next day. Which brings us to our fourth and final level of fantasy starting pitchers: the waiver wire rabble. The guys who aren’t good enough to be on anyone’s team – at least not permanently. Assuming your league doesn’t severely limit transactions, you should reserve one spot on your team for a rotating player. At least a few times a week you should be able to find a pitcher on waivers primed for a solid outing. It’s not terribly difficult to “spot start” and exploit solid waiver matchups, ending the year with 300-400 IP, 20-30 wins and ratios around 4.00 and 1.30 for that one roster slot. On days when you can’t find a useable matchup, you can add a good middle reliever (or one in line to get a save for the night if you are extremely vigilant) or a bat, if needed. To make a long story short, there is a lot more to managing a fantasy rotation than just plugging each guy in 30 times a year.