Fantasy Categorical Breakdowns: The Landscape: Wins

Jose Quintana is the unluckiest starting pitcher in baseball. It’s not even that close. The 27-year-old southpaw has logged an astounding 96 quality starts since signing with the White Sox as a minor-league free agent castoff. Only 14 pitchers have recorded more quality starts over the last five years. Of that exclusive cluster, Quintana’s 46 wins rank dead last. Nobody else has fewer than 61. An apt comparison would be Bobby Flay masterfully grilling rib-eye steaks, only to watch his staggeringly incompetent sous chef drop half of them on the floor. Quintana has consistently pitched like an iron chef for nearly half a decade. However, his win total is straight out of Hell’s Kitchen.

Even Malcolm Gladwell would certify Quintana’s status as an absurd outlier within the game. Despite a 3.58 DRA over 151 career starts, he had never won more than nine games in a single-season prior to last year. The Quintana conundrum is a perfect illustration of the role contextual factors beyond a pitchers control can have on their win total.

Wins are the quintessential context-dependent statistic. Not only does a starter have to pitch deep enough to qualify for a win, but also has to hope that his teammates score enough runs to take the lead before he departs, and that the bullpen preserves the victory. Despite its rather obvious failure to accurately reflect the quality of an individual pitchers performance on any given night, wins remain an integral component of traditional fantasy formats. Until mainstream leagues follow their more progressive counterparts toward utilizing quality starts, or different metrics altogether, fantasy owners can’t ignore them just yet.

On the heels of a bizarre 2015 campaign, when only 13 pitchers recorded 15 or more victories (the lowest single-season total since 1994), win totals bounced back among the upper echelon of fantasy stalwarts last season. In addition to 23 starters posting 15 or more wins, veterans Rick Porcello, J.A. Happ, and Max Scherzer eclipsed the lofty 20-win plateau.

Starting pitcher win totals 2011-2016 (minimum 100 innings pitched)

Unfortunately, the batch of starters recording 10 or more victories hasn’t experienced a similar bump. That number fell to its lowest single-season total (68) in over two decades last year. The driving force behind the recent development appears to be a linear decline in innings pitched per start over the last two seasons.

Increased bullpen specialization, and a data-driven emphasis centered around limiting the number of times through the order back-end starters face opposing lineups, have conspired to drive down innings totals on a per-start basis. The numbers don’t lie.

League-average innings pitched per game started (2007-2016)

Major-league starters averaged fewer than 5 2/3 innings per-start in 2016, the lowest number in history. The recent phenomenon has chad the biggest impact on the value of back-end fantasy starters, who are no longer consistently working deep enough into games to rack up prodigious win totals. Without a high-volume of innings and strikeouts to insulate against and offset weaker ratios, the gap between lower-tier starting options and truly elite starters (who provide a high volume of innings, working deep into games) has increased even further.

The widely used mantra in fantasy baseball (in some form or another) has always been, “pay for talent and wins will follow.” That remains true. However, it’s becoming increasingly important in the current landscape to target workhorses. Starters who display an ability to grind it out and consistently last deep enough into games every fifth day.