Fantasy Baseball Today - Chris' Early Top-20 Starting Pitchers Entering 2025! (Fantasy Baseball Today in 5 podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Let's take a look at Chris's top 20 starting pitchers for next season on fantasy baseball today in five. Welcome into FBT and 5 on Saturday, November 30th. I am Frank Stamph. I'm joined by Chris Sowers and let's take a look at your early top 20 starting pitchers for next season. We'll go in groups of five. And your top five is Terrick Scouble, Zach Wheeler, Paul Skeen's, Corbyn Burns, and Logan Gilbert. Something we've talked a lot about Chris is there's a pretty clear consensus top three. starting pitchers and then it opens up at SP4.

Starting point is 00:00:32 You have Corbyn Burns ranked as your SP4. Does that mean you are buying the adjustments we saw from him later on in the season? Yeah, I think the one thing that I always like to focus on is when a player is aware of where things are going wrong for him because we can, you know, oh, his cutter's not as good. Well, if he's throwing the cutter the same way

Starting point is 00:00:52 and it's just not working the same way, then, you know, that becomes difficult to fix. In Corbyn Burns case, he's talked about how he had a really bad August and everything kind of came to a head where he said, you know, my cutter kind of turned into a bad foreseamer. He used more colorful language at the time. But that was the gist of it. And he said, I didn't worry about it because I was still getting guys out. And then August happened and he got crushed. He had an ERA, I think over six in the month of August.

Starting point is 00:01:23 It was really bad. And he put in the work to reorient the cutter, get the. movement profile back, got a little velocity back. It looked more like it did pre-20203. And the whiff rate in the month of September was 27%, which was right where he was in 2022 when he had a, you know, I think a 30% strikeout rate. Did he win the Siyang in 22? I think it was 2021 he won the Salyang.

Starting point is 00:01:49 But was one of the best pitchers in baseball. I'm not necessarily saying he's like all the way back. You know, I don't necessarily want to bet on a 30-year-old bouncing all the way back to their peak, but we saw enough signs there in September that I can go ahead and look at Corbyn Burns and say, I know the floor is super high. Now there's the path to a high ceiling as well, you know, maybe 220 strikeouts instead of, you know, 190-ish like you had last year, good ratios. I think all of that is pretty easy to project from Corbyn Burns. Yeah, Corbyn-Burn Syung Award winner in 2021 and just finished fifth here in 2024. Your SP 6-6-10, you have

Starting point is 00:02:29 Cale, Cole Reagan's, Garrett Crochet, George Kirby, and Dylan Sees, and Crochet, a polarizing pitcher all offseason. He was on a per inning basis, maybe the best pitcher in all of baseball, but there are questions. What team is he going to be on next season? And how does his arm respond going from 25 total innings in 2023 all the way up to 146 this past season? I mean, look, starting pitcher is a position defined by unpredictability. unprojectibility. I don't know if that's a word, but we'll just say it is. And I think that's as true or more true this year than ever. When you look at the position as a whole, there are just a ton of guys. We'll talk about a few more of them who just, you look at them and it's like, I don't really know what to think. Like I could see Garrow Crochet being a top. In terms of just talent, I think he might be number three. I think it might be skein, scoble, and crochet in some order. based on what he showed last year. Best K-minus walk rate in baseball,

Starting point is 00:03:32 best Sierra in baseball, good quality of contact metrics, elite swinging strikes on his multiple pitches, including his cutter. I just don't know. He's never thrown anywhere close to as many innings as he did last season. And he faded in the second half.

Starting point is 00:03:48 He had a four year A after the all-star or after July 1st, I believe. I don't know what to make of that, right? Like it was the most odd, circumstances of starting pitcher at the major league level has maybe ever had to deal with. Has this huge breakout in the first three months on the worst team in baseball thinks he's going to get traded, has the demands about a long-term contract. If he does get traded, the White Sox don't trade him, but they limit him to four innings or less in every one of his final starts in the month of July, August and September.

Starting point is 00:04:21 Pitching on an uncompetitive team, pitching in that scenario, how much of that is just like it's hard to stay 100% focused? that won't be an issue in 2025. He's going to be at minimum, he's going to be on a team that projects to win 35, 40 more games than the White Sox did last year. So I don't worry about wins. I don't really worry about talent. I have a lot of questions about injuries.

Starting point is 00:04:43 I have a lot of questions about how he's going to just bounce back from that. But I'll bet on the talent here. And for a guy who's not currently injured, at least. All right. Your SP 11 through 15. You have Garrett Cole from Amber Valdez. Michael King, Pablo Lopez, and Yoshinobu, Yamamoto. And Pablo Lopez is a name that you're actually higher than Scott on.

Starting point is 00:05:06 You have at 14, Scott has at SP19. The underlying skills still look very good for Pablo Lopez, but he also has a 387 ERA since coming over to the twins. So at this point, it almost feels like that's the expectation with Pablo Lopez, is that he will have a higher ERA and maybe a little bit of a higher whip than you'd like. Yeah, and that's a really, reasonable argument to moving him down to more like an SP, you know, a lower end SP2 than where I have him, which is a higher end SP2. I think one just philosophical gap between Scott and I this year when you look at our rankings is I think Scott cares way less about projecting workload. I think he's just ranking talent. And that might be the right way to go at a position where nobody's projectable as far as workload goes because everybody gets hurt. I can see the case for it. But Lopez feels to me like one of of the, I don't know, five most projectable in terms of volume in terms of the number of

Starting point is 00:06:03 strikeouts you're going to get in terms of the number of starts you're going to get out of him. There are going to be bad starts in there. Maybe he's more like the new age Aaronnola where he's not quite an ace, but like 80% of the time he is. And that might still be worth drafting this high. I could very easily be talked into moving Pablo Lopez down. But at a position where there are so many question marks, he's not one. Let's talk about one more question mark.

Starting point is 00:06:30 SP 16 through 20. You have Luis Castillo, Shoto Imanaga, Blake Snell, Jacob de Grom, and Arandola. Only one question mark in there? There's lots of question marks.

Starting point is 00:06:40 Jacob de Grom, I have no idea. I mean, he made his return from Tommy John surgery late last season. He should be ready to go on opening day. Still seems electric.

Starting point is 00:06:51 I mean, he got a bunch of whiffs in his very small sample size. He also has not thrown more than 92 innings. Since 20, So how did you decide where to put Jacob to Crom? I put a blindfold on.

Starting point is 00:07:06 Some darts at the wall. I did an Excel function just equals random. I don't know if that's actually a function in Excel, but let's say it is. I don't know. Like this is how I feel about Jacob de Cromp. Like his velocity was down last year. Was that because he cannot throw 9. 99 miles an hour anymore?

Starting point is 00:07:32 Or is it a conscious effort to put less strain on his elbow? I don't know. I don't know if Jacob de Grom knows. It's wholly unknowable. I think when Jacob de Grom is on a mound, he will be one of the best pitcher in baseball. Maybe the best pitcher in baseball. I don't know if that's going to be 170 innings.

Starting point is 00:07:49 That's possible. I don't know if it's going to be 170 pitches. It's just a wholly unknowable. The upside is he's by far the best pitcher in fantasy baseball. If he makes 160 innings, that might be enough for Jacob deGron to be the best pitcher in fantasy baseball, based on what we've seen the past like seven seasons when he's been healthy. He might not make it out of spring training. I genuinely have no idea.

Starting point is 00:08:12 And it's not one where I can look at it and say, well, if he's good in spring training, I'll rank it. It's not a question of whether Jacob de Grom's good right now. It's a question of how long he can stay on the mound. This is very much splitting the difference, probably being on the optimally. end of splitting on splitting the difference. That being said, his ADP is the SP8 right now. So I'm not being optimistic on Jacob de Grom, I guess. I have no idea what to do with him.

Starting point is 00:08:41 All I know is if he's going to be the number eight SP drafted in most drafts, there's no world in which I have Jacob Gras on my team. And same can be said for me, Chris. I think the entire podcast, the way that Jacob Grom is being ranked by you and Scott, and I haven't ranked yet, but yeah, Probably we'll have DeGrom somewhere around here. We're not going to be drafting him if this ADP remains. For more extensive fantasy baseball coverage, listen to the Fantasy Baseball Today podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere else podcasts are found.

Starting point is 00:09:11 Thanks for listening to Fantasy Baseball Today in Five, and we will do that back again next week. Bye-bye.

Fantasy Baseball Today - Chris' Early Top-20 Starting Pitchers Entering 2025! (Fantasy Baseball Today in 5 podcast)

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