Hello readers, welcome back! After reviewing hitters, in this post, we are going to take a look at the Steamer projections for starting pitchers and analyze average draft position (ADP) to see if we can identify some good and bad values as we prepare for draft season.

If you are unfamiliar, Steamer is a projection system that comes out very early and is constantly updated. You can access them directly from FanGraphs. Of course, these projections are far from perfect — no projection system is ever going to get every player correct. However, it does provide an intelligent guess as to what players will do, and the forecasts become even more valuable when fitting them to our league settings and then incorporating ADP data. The projections take the names out of the equation and let us work strictly with the numbers. Let’s take a look!

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Starting Pitchers – Categories Leagues

For this example, I am using the standard four pitching categories (wins, ERA, WHIP, and strikeouts), leaving saves out of the picture. I simply took all pitchers projected to make 20 starts or more and got a percentile rank for each pitcher in each category. I then averaged out those percentiles to make pitcher rankings. We can then compare that rank to their pitcher-only ADP, removing hitters from the data to make this an apples-to-apples comparison. Here is a quick look at the top 20 pitchers, per Steamer projections with these standard league settings:

Just to get a feel for what I’m doing, we can that Chris Sale stands out as a good value through this research. The projections have him coming in as the fifth-best pitcher, but he is currently the 10th pitcher off the board. This obviously has a lot to do with the injury concerns, and those are things you have to consider, but he’s a good example of an insight to take from this study.

Now we will get into the under-drafted players. These pitchers have lower ADP’s than their projection rank. I am only using the top-100 pitchers per ADP data. Here are the top 20:

The nature of this analysis is that higher ADP guys will be near the top of lists like these since there is more potential difference as the numbers get higher. If you are in a standard league, you probably need not be concerned at all with Kevin Gausman, Nate Eovaldi, and Dylan Bundy. However, we see some more relevant pitchers listed like Chris Archer, Pablo Lopez, Johnny Cueto, Andrew Heaney, Lance McCullers, and Jose Urquidy, who are all undervalued right now based on their Steamer projections.

Let’s do this same thing using just the top-50 ADP:

Here is where things are really interesting. Dinelson Lamet is the 22nd pitcher by Steamer, but he’s the 47th pitcher being drafted right now. That is a huge opportunity if you buy into the projections. Carlos Carrasco comes in second here following last year’s leukemia diagnosis. If he looks healthy in spring training, he will climb up draft boards in a hurry. If drafting now, however, there is a really nice buying opportunity. Max Fried, Lance Lynn, James Paxton, and Zack Wheeler wrap up the other pitchers with large positive differentials.

Now we will take a look at the potentially over-drafted pitchers. Here are the top 20 using the top-150 pitchers in ADP:

Steamer is really hating on Sean Manaea with a bloated 4.58 ERA projection. You should not just take these projections at face value, but that provides some reason to take a closer look at Manaea, who looked incredible after returning from shoulder surgery late last season. Some other red flags are Zac Gallen, who to me is a “prove it” player. He was the beneficiary of a lot of good luck, and Steamer has worked that into his projection. Lucas Giolito is in a similar situation, as he flipped a switch about midway through last year to suddenly become one of the game’s most dominant pitchers. There will be some reasonable hesitation with a player like that.

That is the analysis for standard category leagues. Take a close look at the screenshots above and see what else you can find. Of course, this will change as you tweak the category settings, so I encourage you to give it a try using your own league specifics.

Starting Pitchers – Points Leagues

We are going to use standard ESPN points league settings below but I have to stress that things can change drastically as you adjust the settings of your specific league. For example, you will see much different ranks if you make strikeouts more or less valuable. Keep that in mind. Here is the scoring system used here:

IP: 3
H: -1
BB: -1
K: 1
ER: -2
W: 5
L: -5

Here are the top 20 projected points scorers:

You can see a really large gap between deGrom and Sale. This kind of analysis makes it easy to tier off pitchers so you know how to prioritize your draft picks. If those top-four guys are gone, then maybe it becomes worth it to take a hitter and wait until the next pick to grab one of the five guys all projected very similarly in the next round. That’s a topic we will cover more in-depth in another post.

Let’s check out the biggest over-drafted players in points leagues based on this analysis:

You can see Gallen once again popping out, as he is projected for the 67th-most points scored while being drafted at the 42nd pitcher off the board. We see many of the same names from the categories analysis. It is important to note that innings pitched are king in points leagues. The problem for most of these guys is that they are not projected to approach 200 innings. You can be pretty effective in a rotisserie league by throwing 150 sparkling innings, but in points leagues, you are really behind the 8-Ball if you can’t get the volume.

Now for the potential value picks, here are your leaders when using the top 150 in ADP:

More deep-league only guys at the top, but if you are in one of these big leagues, there may be some nice value in the Eovaldi, Archer, Bundy, Garrett Richards, and Kyle Gibson types.

Let’s chop that down to the top-50 ADP:

Lynn, Lamet, Carrasco, and Fried are king once again, with Lynn swooping in for the top spot. Steamer believes in the Rangers righty, at least in terms of innings pitched and strikeouts, which are probably the two most important things in this scoring format. Lynn has a real shot to be a top-20 pitcher for a really affordable price.

That’s it and that’s all, folks! If you have any questions about how to do this (I used FanGraphs data in Excel) for your specific league format, you can reach out to me on Twitter and I’ll do what I can to help. Happy draft season!

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