Fantasy Baseball Rankings - Closers

These rankings are more for informational purposes than anything else, as we don't advocate taking closers early. For more Closer information, read these two articles we've recently written on the subject. In short, wait until the late rounds of the draft to take closers.

Draft Day Strategy - Closers
Sleeper Alert - Late Round Closers

Like our Starting Pitcher Rankings, these don't take injury risk into account. While Gagne is #1, I wouldn't recommend drafting him - even if I recommended drafting top closers in general - because he is a huge risk and has Akinori Otsuka (a great option if Gagne does go down) breathing down his neck. Our Closer Rankings include player's involved in Closer Battles, not just the front runners.

Lastly, these Closer Rankings only represent the player's skill, not his likely hood to receive save opportunities. As this is a delicate thing to predict, we aren't even going to attempt it. We don't have a scientific way of doing it at the moment, but it is something we will be looking into for 2008. This is explained more in our Draft Day Strategy article on Closers.

Without further ado, our Fantasy Baseball Closer Rankings.

Rank	Pitcher	Score
1	Eric Gagne	13.59
2	Joe Nathan	12.86
3	Brad Lidge	12.86
4	Francisco Rodriguez	12.36
5	Billy Wagner	12.32
6	B.J. Ryan	12.22
7	J.J. Putz	11.10
8	Jonathan Papelbon	10.78
9	Jose Valverde	10.68
10	Bobby Jenks	10.65
11	Tom Gordon	10.36
12	Mariano Rivera	10.26
13	Takashi Saito	9.91
14	Octavio Dotel	9.90
15	Huston Street	9.76
16	Francisco Cordero	9.63
17	Trevor Hoffman	9.34
18	Brian Fuentes	9.34
19	Chad Cordero	8.91
20	Jorge Julio	8.71
21	Jason Isringhausen	8.66
22	Danny Miceli	8.45
23	Bob Wickman	8.39
24	Chris Ray	8.28
25	Ryan Dempster	8.12
26	Armando Benitez	8.07
27	Arthur Rhodes	7.87
28	Salomon Torres	7.80
29	Chris Reitsma	7.79
30	Dustin Hermanson	7.70
31	Bill Bray	7.49
32	Joe Borowski	7.34
33	Mike Stanton	7.18
34	David Weathers	7.13
35	Todd Coffey	7.10
36	Todd Jones	7.05
37	Seth McClung	5.26

Teams that have closer jobs up for grabs include:

Reds

Red Sox

Devil Rays

Marlins (Tankersley's DLed to start the year and Owens and Lindstrom aren't included, but Owens is a good sleeper if he gets the job)

Teams whose closer has an above average chance of getting injured or losing his job by year's end:

Tigers

Rangers

Braves

Cubs

Pirates

Cards

Giants

Phillies

Indians

The two lists above illustrate one of my biggest arguments for waiting on closers. Guys will be available on the waiver wire, and this year, lots of great options will be.

UPDATE 3/9: Brendan Donnelly, Joel Pineiro, Craig Hansen, and Jonathan Papelbon added with the news of Mike Timlin's injury (Thanks to Jason McAdams of My Baseball Bias for the tip). I wouldn't touch any of these guys until something is resolved. Unless Papelbon takes the job, which doctors continue to say he shouldn't do for health reasons, I don't see the Red Sox trusting any of these guys in their run for the playoffs. I see a mid-season trade as the most likely scenario.

UPDATE: 3/16: Julian Tavarez, Chris Reitsma, and Arthur Rhodes added.

UPDATE: 3/26: All Red Sox (except Jonathan Papelbon) removed with news that Papelbon will close. Dustin Hermanson added.

UPDATE: 3/26: Jorge Julio added with the news that he has been traded to the Marlins.

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!