2023 ROS Starting Pitching Rankings

MLB may have just put the finishing touches on a busy trade deadline, but the hot stoves in fantasy circles are just starting to heat up. As the calendar turns to August, we’ve officially entered the trading season in most fantasy leagues.  Contenders are attempting to fortify weaknesses on their rosters while those who have fallen out of contention look towards a brighter, more hopeful future. In the hopes of helping you maximize your trade values, we’ve put together starting pitcher rankings for the rest of the season. A successful manager is a confident manager, so get yourself prepared to win those trades!

More great fantasy baseball advice and analysis: Waiver Wire & FAAB Recommendations | Daily MLB Injury Report | MLB DFS Picks | Line-up Analysis | Dynasty Rankings and Strategy | MLB Bullpen Updates | MLB Player Props | Prospect Rankings & Analysis | Fantasy Baseball Risers and Fallers

About these rankings:

Ranking pitchers is hard! Especially with all the injuries and promotions/demotions that we have seen this season. So when we thought about what info to use in these rankings, three crucial pieces of information seemed to be of the most importance:

1. How good have they been thus far and what can you expect in the future?
2. How good are they right now?
3. Who will they be playing for the rest of the season?

To answer number 1, we utilized the Auction Calculator tool on Fangraphs. That allows us to establish a baseline value for the pitchers in our starting pitching ranks. Using the calculator’s default setting (standard 5×5, standard rosters), we ran two sets of projections:

• 2023 year-to-date (YTD) stats, to tell us how each player has performed thus far, and

• 2023 rest of season (ROS) using Derek Carty’s The Bat X projection system to give us an idea of how that player will perform moving forward

These numbers are expressed in a dollar amount, based on an auction budget of $260. The higher the dollar value, the more valuable the player.

For our second piece of info, we turned to Eno Sarris, fantasy baseball man-about-town, and all-around good guy. His handy model, Stuff+ has become a widely-used metric in the industry and is available on Fangraphs as well.  Their amazing Leaderboards tool, allowed us to pull our Top 100’s numbers to get a sense of exactly how their pitches were performing at the moment.

And finally, a strength of schedule tool found here, helped us to identify which teams had the toughest (and easiest!) roads ahead of them. Similarly to the auction value mentioned before, the higher the Strength of Schedule (SOS) number, the tougher the schedule.

The players are ranked by number and, maybe even more importantly, by tier. Since so many of your roster decisions are league type- and scoring-dependent, use the tiers as a mile marker when valuing a potential trade target.

We think it’s best to exclude players from our rest of season starting pitching rankings who are currently injured, so you won’t find Clayton Kershaw, Nestor Cortes, Shane Bieber, along with some others, here. Once they are back and healthy we’ll insert them where appropriate.

We did, however, keep a couple of guys who are currently in the minors on an assumed Innings Pitched break as they seemed too valuable and relevant to drop totally off the list.

Thanks you for stopping by! If you have any thoughts, suggestions, or ideas, or just want to drop a virtual high-five, send a note to [email protected] and/or give a follow on Twitter @LDeePee

2023 ROS Starting Pitcher Rankings

The starting pitcher rankings below are based on traditional 5 X 5 roto scoring. If you would like to get a color coded list that provides a quick look evaluation feel free to grab this downloadable PDF.

⚾️ Home Run Derby Champion Signed Jersey Giveaway⁠
⁠
Like and Comment below your Fantrax Username for a chance to win a Signed Vladimir Guerrero Jersey!⁠ pic.twitter.com/v4HHvwK0uO

— Fantrax (@Fantrax) July 13, 2023