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Pedro Martinez aside, the odds of a pitcher actually performing with anything remotely resembling brilliance are absurdly minimal. Who needs those guys?
Like it or not, pitching is the ultimate arbiter of more fantasy pennants than most of us would care to acknowledge. That's because the hitting side of the typical fantasy baseball ledger is dominated by cumulative categories that tend to settle out by August and September, leaving little likelihood of great leap-frog advances being made in the waning days of a season. The pitching categories, meanwhile, are predominantly proportional, offering much more opportunity for your hurlers to effect significant point swings in the heat of a pennant race.
If you have pitching, that is. The problem is, few of us ever do, and fewer still are ever willing to part with it in the waning days of a season, when you need it most.
Pitching is the most unnatural of athletic acts, and every hurler is one curve ball away from complete and utter destruction. The difference between mediocre and good pitching, and between good and great, is often little more than the width of a fingernail on the seam of the ball. Putting money on pitchers is a mug's game. They are just as likely to blow out their arms as they are to stumble upon that one last final adjustment in their mechanics that turns them from journeymen into 20-game winners.
What's a fantasy owner to do, then?
Develop three lists before draft day.
The first, and easiest to compile, is the roll call of the top two dozen or so hurlers we all can name - Pedro, Randy J, Kevin Brown, et al - who have consistently demonstrated a high level of achievement AND whom you are absolutely confident will do so again this season.
The second list, equally simple to compile, names all those hurlers you absolutely do not wish to have anywhere within a half mile of your roster: pitchers with the words 'arm' and 'injury' intersecting in their player profile, unproven pitchers and those whose proven level of performance is uniformly bad, and everyone on an abysmal team.
The third list is crucial to your Draft Day success. It will include all of those pitchers are fall between "reasonably effective" and "pleasantly surprising." These are the pitchers who possess the arm, the head or the guts to win more ballgames than they lose and those who pitch for strong teams.
Scrutinize the pitchers in this third group as carefully as you can, then rank them -- not by dollars, but in order of preference. Your assessment will be more subjective than deductive. You should be guided by certain prejudices, however: mine include pitchers who are young, strong and healthy, hold down one of the top three spots in a set or solid rotation, throw hard, walk very few batters, give up fewer hits than innings pitched, toil for teams with excellent pitching coaches and have an excellent chance of finishing with a winning percentage of .500 or better.
Come D-Day, select only from the first list until all its names are exhausted. File the second list away after promising yourself that not one of its names will ever pass your lips. Then take your third list and simply start selecting or buying from the top down, ignoring price points and statistical finery in favor of getting the best pure arm available, period, every chance you get.
If you must use numbers, keep it simple. One number is better than many, especially as an aid to quick thinking in the eye of the D-Day storm. One easily-managed rule of thumb is available by simply adding all of a pitcher's main negative indicators - hits, earned runs and bases on balls - and dividing the total by his innings pitched. It's shorthand, not science, but you will quickly learn to discard any hurler over 2.0, recognize that most good starters fall between 1.8 and 2.0, and equate good relievers with anything below that line. (Pedro, by the way, is a God-like 1.171 over the last three years, topped only by Trevor Hoffman's 1.169 in many, many fewer innings. Others below 1.5 include Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson and Kevin Brown among starters, and relievers Mariano Rivera, Keith Foulke, Armando Benitez and Robb Nen.)
If all else fails, take heart - and some consolation - in the fragile nature of pitching itself. Many hurlers will flame out and disappoint this season, but plenty of opportunities for redemption will be offered by the equally numerous crop of rookies, stop-gaps and sudden surprises trotted out from the bullpen or called up from the minors. If you don't catch lightning in a bottle on D-Day, be ready to try again during the season; you'll have your chance, as sure as God made arms not to throw balls.
Next week, we'll look at the art of stacking your playing roster to withstand injuries to key players during the season. If you have questions or comments in the meantime, please e-mail me and I'll try to respond between my number-crunching for D-Day.
Fantasy Baseball Index, March 9, 2001
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