Fantasy Baseball 2017 Positional Preview: Starting Pitcher

Check out my top 250:
Fantasy Baseball 2017 Top 250

It’s time to step on the mound and take a look at starting pitchers. In addition to giving you the top players to draft at the position, I’ll offer up breakout players, sleepers, busts, and an overall strategy of how to go about drafting the position. Let’s get this preview going.

*PR stands for 'Player Rater' which is a measure of how good a player was in a standard 5x5 roto league

Breakout players – Julio Teheran, Kevin Gausman, Matt Shoemaker
Sleepers – Marco Estrada, Matt Moore, Zach Davies
Busts – David Price, Rich Hill, Marcus Stroman

Position Overview

Starting pitcher is probably the toughest position to rank. You have your sure things, your solid but low ceiling veterans, your high ceiling, low floor younger guys, your strikeout artists, your innings eaters, and the next best thing class who will be frustratingly inconsistent. Take all of that and try to mix it together and you get my top 100 SP.

My draft strategy will depend on how the draft room feels about starting pitching. In my mocks, I’ve had times where I miss out on most elite SP and other times where I have multiple great SP and have to pass on another great SP because I need to address other roster spots. I plan on letting the starting pitching values come to me. If I grab a top 9 SP early, I’ll waiting until past SP #20 unless a bargain comes around. If I miss the elite class, I’ll try to draft two #10-#20 SP to compensate.

If my roster has 8 starting pitching spots, I want to balance out my risk. I don’t want a pitching staff full of high risk pitchers. I want to mix in a John Lackey or Cole Hamels for every Steven Matz or Danny Salazar. In addition to this, I usually will fill my bench with high upside starting pitchers. This will allow me to own a future breakout starter instead of trying to scoop him up off waivers after his big game. Keep in mind that starting pitchers get hurt, a lot. When this happens, minor leaguers get the call or middle relievers get a spot start. Your highest turnover on your roster will be starting pitcher. For AL/NL only leagues, steady veterans are even more reliable. Gio Gonzalez, Marco Estrada, and Jason Hammel might have low ceilings, but they have great track records for consistency which helps a lot when the player pool isn’t quite as deep.

Check back tomorrow as we close out the positional previews with relief pitchers! See you then and thanks for the read.

Other positional previews:
Catchers
First Base
Second Base
Shortstop
Third Base
Outfield
Relief Pitcher