2021 Fantasy Baseball: Repeating Top 50 Innings Pitched

Zach Wheeler ended up having the most innings pitched in the regular season, just like we all expected right? Last year it was Lance Lynn and the year before that it was Justin Verlander. In fact, no pitcher has had back-to-back seasons being among the top three in innings pitched, and only Justin Verlander has repeated a top five performance (twice). In essence, it’s rare to see a pitcher go the distance repeatedly. But who is surprised? It’s tough to pitch for an entire season. It’s tougher to maintain that pace for multiple seasons, and nearly impossible to do it for five seasons. Injuries, limitations, poor years, and larger pitching rotations have limited many pitchers to a lower number of innings than we would have historically seen 10 or 15 years ago.

Five pitchers have been among the top 50 in innings pitched each year from 2017 – 2021 (Gerrit Cole, Zack Greinke, Aaron Nola, Patrick Corbin and Max Scherzer). Among those five pitchers, only Cole has been in the top 15 each year and only Greinke and Corbin have been among the top 30 each year. Why is this important? For those of you that play fantasy football you may recall the curse of the 370. When a running back had more than 370 carries he was statistically very likely to bottom out the next season, as it was too much wear and tear on a human body, even at elite athletic levels.

There have been 130 total Pitchers to land among the top 50 in IP over the last five years (out of a potential 250 spots – top 50 x 5 years)

• 65 pitchers made it just one year (50%)
• 32 pitchers did it two years (25%)
• 16 pitchers did it three years (12%)
• 12 pitchers did it four years (9%)
• 5 pitchers did it all five years (4%)

Photo by Casey Sykes/Getty Images

Looking into top 10 innings pitcher performances

• If a pitcher DID happen to land among the top 10 in innings pitched, they repeated a top 10 innings performance 28 times out of a possible 50 (62% of the time).
• So elite pitchers are going to be elite more often than not.
• On average, if a pitcher finished in the top 10 AND finished in the top 50 the next season, they averaged a finish of 25^th.

Looking into top 50 innings pitcher performances

• If a pitcher was among the top 50 in innings pitched, the feat was repeated 95/200 times over the last 5 years. This means if your pitcher was a top 50 pitcher in innings pitched, there is a 47% chance they will do it again in 2022.

The summary of this is – trust in the elites: Cole, Greinke, Nola, Corbin, Scherzer, DeGrom, Lance Lynn, Yu Darvish, Lucas Giolito etc...to repeat a lengthy number of innings pitched. Be wary of a repeat performance when you see a Zac Gallen, Clayton Richard, Chris Flexen, Jameson Taillon, Chris Archer, Julio Urias, James Shields, Aaron Civale, Ervin Santana etc.. because they repeat it less than half the time.