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Saturday, March 3, 2007

Fantasy Baseball Rankings - Starting Pitchers

Here is a list of our Fantasy Baseball Rankings of the Top 45 Starting Pitchers. Pitchers in orange are ones that we feel could provide the best value for you. As of now these rankings don't take injury risk into account. In the future we hope to find a minimally subjective way of doing this, but for now this list is based on skill alone. These rankings are meant for 5x5 redraft leagues.

For ERA we use a formula that takes DIPS (Defense Independent Pitching Statistics) principles into account as well as Batted Ball Data. We use Expected Home Run totals based on batted ball information. Since pitchers have little control (some experts say none at all) over how hard or how well a batted hits the ball, we derived a simple formula that gives a pitchers expected Home Runs that we use in our formula. The formula included Ks, BBs, HBPs, Expected HRs, GBs, FBs and LDs, and IFFBs.

For Ks, we simply used K/9.

For WHIP, we used a stat we call Defense Independent WHIP. As pitchers can't really control how many hits they give up (it is a combination of the hitter, the defense, and luck), we don't use actual hits. We use batted ball data to provide us with an expected, defense and luck independent WHIP. We do use walks and hit batters, as this is something pitchers can control.

After coming up with our main stats for every player, we put each stat on the same scale and then averaged them to get a value that weighs each stat equally and represents a player's objective fantasy value.

So here they are, the Saberoticians Fantasy Baseball Rankings for Starting Pitchers!

Rank Pitcher Score
1 Johan Santana 11.50
2 Ben Sheets 11.37
3 Jake Peavy 10.31
4 Felix Hernandez 10.01
5 Curt Schilling 10.00
6 Chris Carpenter 9.92
7 John Smoltz 9.52
8 Scott Kazmir 9.51
9 Brandon Webb 9.51
10 Cole Hamels 9.43
11 Brett Myers 9.37
12 Roy Halladay 9.28
13 Mike Mussina 9.11
14 Jeremy Bonderman 9.10
15 A.J. Burnett 9.09
16 Rich Harden 9.03
17 Roy Oswalt 9.00
18 C.C. Sabathia 9.00
19 Josh Beckett 8.91
20 Danny Haren 8.88
21 Kelvim Escobar 8.83
22 Javier Vazquez 8.82
23 Dave Bush 8.78
24 Carlos Zambrano 8.77
25 Scott Olsen 8.76
26 Jered Weaver 8.74
27 John Patterson 8.72
28 Aaron Harang 8.72
29 Randy Johnson 8.59
30 Andy Pettitte 8.59
31 John Lackey 8.47
32 Matt Cain 8.43
33 Chris Young 8.39
34 Derek Lowe 8.37
35 Erik Bedard 8.36
36 Oliver Perez 8.31
37 Brad Penny 8.24
38 James Shields 8.22
39 Jon Lieber 8.19
40 Rich Hill 8.13
41 Chris Capuano 8.07
42 Orlando Hernandez 7.98
43 Odalis Perez 7.97
44 Jason Schmidt 7.97
45 Doug Davis 7.89

We encourage you to let us know what you think about these rankings. If you think a particular player is too high or too low, let us know! There's a good chance we'll go over why they are ranked where they are and an outside shot at a changed ranking. There isn't a ton of room for error the way we do our rankings, but we will certainly triple check for you!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow...Schmidt ranks very low according to your system. Just curious how the following pitchers rank/score:

1) Dontrelle Willis
2) Justin Verlander
3) Bronson Arroyo
4) Ervin Santana
5) Chien-Ming Wang
6) Freddy Garcia
7) Ian Snell
8) Kevin Millwood
9) Anibal Sanchez
10)Jose Contreras
11)Chuck James
12)Jon Garland
13)Mark Buehrle
14)Tim Hudson
15)Cliff Lee

Plus, where do you think Dice-K, Papelpon, and Wainwright would rank?

Derek Carty said...

I'm in the process of writing an article about some of these guys. It'll be posted fairly shortly.

Anonymous said...

i am surprised c zambrano is so low

Derek Carty said...

Yes, Zambrano is a player I would avoid this year. While he gets a lot of strikeouts, his command is quite poor. If it is going to improve, this year or next would be the time, but he is a risk not worth taking this year.

Roysaidit said...

Why do you think Oliver Perez will have a better season than Rich Hill?

Derek Carty said...

I don't think Perez will have a better season than Hill, only a better fantasy season.

Perez's ranking is based partly on his 2004 season, in which he Ked almost 11 batters per nine. If his K/9 doesn't get above 9, he will probably be a worse bet than Hill for fantasy purposes.

Hill is somebody I'm prepared to eat my words on. He's a guy with little major league experience and therefore not a lot of data on. His ML groundball percentage is horrendous, but his Minor League GB Percentage is actually quite good. It's going to depend which Rich Hill shows up and whether or not he can improve on his control. He certainly could end up being a top 10 or 15 pitcher this year.

My philosophy though, is not to take many risks, and Hill is a risk. I'd rather take a guy with more experience who has proven to be a good pitcher.

Come the end of the season, there is a decent chance my ranking of Hill will be very wrong.

Anonymous said...

Why is Odalis Perez on this list at all?