Alex Fast’s 2022 Top 100 Fantasy Starting Pitchers

I have a problem.

Well, a few actually.

The most pressing one at the moment is that my wife and I are expecting our first child any day now (that’s not the problem) and when that baby comes, I’ll likely not have any more time for one of my favorite things in the world: video games. Specifically, Elden Ring.

You see when I play a FromSoftware game, I become fully masochistic. I will not sleep until I’ve beaten that boss and done it alone. No online walkthroughs, no guides, nothing. I’m in it to complete the game, however long it takes. With baby Fast due any day, I can’t do that with Elden Ring. I can’t spend hours roaming Liurnia searching for a spell an NPC hinted at with some esoteric comment because that takes away time that I could be fighting bosses. If I’m going to experience as much of the game as possible, I have to be more decisive and methodical.

Thanks a lot, baby.

While doing some analysis on my list this year, it dawned on me. I should be approaching my research this way, too: swifter and more efficiently. Not because I don’t have the time but because I don’t have the mental energy.

My usual process for one pitcher would entail pulling out all the statistics that I thought pertinent into an incredibly large spreadsheet, setting them all to league average, going to their Fangraphs page and looking for any interesting variance, looking at their splits both overall and on a pitch-by-pitch basis, looking at the plate discipline metrics for each pitch in their arsenal, comparing that to Baseball Savant and seeing what changes in utilization that they had, looking at the individual pitch metrics to see if any pitch had upside in terms of movement profile then going to Brooks Baseball and looking at the individual horizontal and vertical movement data to see if things happened over the course of a season, getting sidetracked by whether or not a pitch tunnels well, spending an hour in Adobe Premiere only to realize I’d just wasted an hour, then going to Pitcher List’s player pages (where you should be going) to see if there were any drastic changes in location before manually outputting an ERA, IP total, WHIP, K%, K amount and a ranking and then writing a 10-12 bullet point list detailing all of my findings including a 2-3 sentence TL;DR that I could use for talking points.

After researching about 40 guys that way I realized that this was dumb, unsustainable, and draining. I thought that time sink would allow me to get a clearer picture of a pitcher and while sometimes it did, it mostly led to decision paralysis. So I stopped. I gave myself permission to not get over-inundated with facts and embraced failure; embraced being wrong. Does that make me feel any less confident about the list? Nope. I still think I’ve set you up for success in your drafts the best way I know how.

Which will finally let me get back to Elden Ring (that Radhan was a real pain, huh?).

This list was made with standard leagues in mind (W / ERA / WHIP / Ks) and ADP is provided via Fantasy Pros.  As usual, feel free to reach out to me in the comment section here or on Twitter (alexfast8) with any questions.

 

 

Photos by Icon Sportswire | Adapted by Doug Carlin (@Bdougals on Twitter)