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!