The Spin: Fantasy baseball and the impact of recent major pitching injuries
I close my eyes and I can see all of them, vividly, in perfect color.
Jacob deGrom is painting the corner and Justin Verlander is working on a no-hitter. Max Scherzer is blowing away hitters and Clayton Kershaw is spinning his curve, that slow teasing leg kick perfectly described by Vin Scully.
If you love baseball, you eat nostalgia for breakfast.
I cling to those memories these days. It's all I have. Baseball's at a tipping point with pitcher injuries, and so many of our favorite arms can't work right now.
Everyone I listed in the open was hurt to begin 2024, of course, and they're all veterans with high mileage. But last week's news hit hard. Shane Bieber is done for the year, headed for Tommy John surgery, and the news is ominous with Spencer Strider. And this is on the heels of a brutal spring for pitcher injuries — Gerrit Cole, Devin Williams, Eury Pérez, Kyle Bradish and Kodai Senga all received bad news at some point over the last two months. The list goes on and on.
If you want to watch a past Cy Young winner pitch in The Show this week, you have two options. Blake Snell makes his season debut on Monday. Corbin Burnes works at Fenway Park on Tuesday. That's the list. Everyone else from the Cy Young dinner is trying to come back or is gone for good.
The ask of starting pitchers has changed significantly in recent years. Complete games are mirages in the desert. Some starting pitchers will be trusted to work through a lineup three times, others just a couple of times. Often there's no modulation with effort — just throw with your hair on fire for a few innings, then hand the ball over to the bullpen, where a handful of teammates will try to replicate your work, one inning at a time.
The baseball industry is constantly trying to figure out how to save the pitcher, with marginal results. The smartest guys I know accept that maxing out on velocity and spin rate is likely a bad thing, but how do you tell a pitcher not to do what makes him most effective? And what if max effort and velo are the difference between someone making it to the majors and not having a legitimate baseball career at all?
How do you tell that guy to dial it down when his livelihood depends on it?
I'm not a pitching coach and certainly not a doctor; I'm just a writer and fantasy analyst. I wish I had some tidy fantasy strategy to combat all the carnage. I'm just trying to make an intelligent guess, like anyone else.
In the preseason, I steered into the idea that maybe less was more, that perhaps the low-walk, modest-strikeout pitchers could give me the quality innings that I needed. You can get the strikeouts through volume. And the efficiency of throwing strikes allows a better chance at wins.
So I looked for affordable aces like Logan Webb and George Kirby. Chris Bassitt was a regular middle-round target. The idea was that these guys aren't living in the high 90s — Kirby gets to 94-95 mph, Webb and Bassitt a few ticks lower. Maybe they're safer, I told myself.
| Player | IP | ERA | WHIP | K | BB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 L. Webb | 204.2 | 3.47 | 1.23 | 172 | 50 |
 G. Kirby | 191 | 3.53 | 1.07 | 179 | 23 |
 C. Bassitt | 171 | 4.16 | 1.46 | 168 | 70 |
Of course, none of them have pitched well so far — Webb's ERA is almost 5 (thanks Dodgers), Kirby's is over 5, and Bassitt's is almost 8. It's early. Small sample size, all that. It's also worth noting that Webb and Bassitt both had Tommy John surgery about a decade ago. Even your safe guys might not be so safe.
One thing every fantasy manager will try to do is get lucky with late-round pitching. The Boston rotation is filled with fast starters, especially Nick Pivetta, Kutter Crawford and Tanner Houck. Maybe pitching guru Andrew Bailey is cooking up something good there. Granted, the Red Sox started on the road and faced some of the weakest offenses in the majors.
Everyone expects Yoshinobu Yamamoto to be great, but perhaps the ADP discount on Shota Imanaga made more sense.
Burnes and Imanaga haven't walked anyone yet, so they're the leaders on the K/BB page. But that list also includes breakouts like Garrett Crochet and Jared Jones and Brandon Pfaadt. Jack Flaherty was great in his first start (not great in his second). Jordan Hicks is trying to make it as a starter. Dean Kremer joined the bagel parade on the weekend.
Of course, Bieber is also on this list, which breaks my heart. Those pretty 20 strikeouts, that one scant walk. He was dotting the "i" perfectly in both of his starts, two lovely games that went down like cold lemonade on a warm summer night. I can't believe it's already over.
All we can do is keep making good decisions. In most formats, your fantasy bench should include a chunk of plausible-upside pitchers. Sometimes you can accept a lesser package of skills if the opponents line up nicely — I'll stream against the AL Central as much as I can this year. Sometimes you're chasing a pitcher who has strikeout stuff but hasn't mastered control yet. Other times, it's the control master who catches your eye, especially if he keeps the ball on the ground.
You can be unlucky or flat-out wrong an awful lot in this game and still do well. You just need to run a little bit better than the other managers. Keep grinding.
And if you ever get too jaded, just think of Kershaw and Verlander and Scherzer. We should see them all again this year. Maybe deGrom can make it back, too. Walker Buehler isn't far off.
Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And tomorrow can be better than today.
