Starting Pitchers Are Balloons

A new way to think about pitching in fantasy baseball

Before we get started I want to give credit to one of my favorite fantasy football writers, Jakob Sanderson, for first using this balloons analogy to describe a position in fantasy sports.

Jakob’s article is titled “Running Backs and Balloons”, and after reading it this summer I reached out to ask if it was alright to repurpose the comparison for starting pitchers in my baseball writing. He graciously said that it was.

If you aren’t a football person then bear with me for a minute because I think it’s important to build my pitching thoughts off of Jakob’s RB opinions. He writes about how we view the position in fantasy, where the assumption is that a running back can handle more and more work until they can’t. The balloon gets bigger, and more exciting for fantasy purposes, until it pops (another way to phrase injury or ineffectiveness). Some balloons grow really big. Others can only handle so much inflation.

This made me think of starting pitcher workloads.

Additionally, Jakob notes that some teams prefer to view a RB’s effectiveness as finite, with Nick Chubb as an example of a player the Browns have never truly ran into the ground. My comparison for this would be SPs who have their workloads restricted either on a season-long innings limit or on a per-start basis.

Before we fully move on to baseball, I want to share one passage from the end of Jakob’s piece:

“Tying this all together, I posit that Running Backs are not gasses, liquids or solids in the opening metaphor. Running Backs are balloons. Depending on the air blown into the balloon, they can be wildly different sizes. However, as you blow more air into the balloon the colour beings to lose its richness, and eventually the ballon becomes more and more brittle and unable to resist any pressure applied to it. If you continue past that point it eventually pops entirely.”

I’ve wanted to write about this idea since reading that, but the point was really driven home for me in late-September when I updated my dynasty SP ranks on Patreon.

I quickly realized how comfortable I was betting on “older” pitchers, even in dynasty.

Aging Is Advantageous

I don’t intend for this to be the most analytical piece I’ve ever written. This post is really more of a thought exercise that I feel has helped reshape my view of pitchers in fantasy, and I’m curious to see if it resonates with others.

With that framework in mind, I’m going to mostly be writing this more conceptually, but something I wanted to look at is the ages of pitchers who totaled the most innings in 2023:

For the red-green conditional formatting there I set the midpoint as 27 years old. This better reflects the entire player pool, and there aren’t that many young arms represented in this chart (which is more or less the point of showing it).

Just 4 of the top 30 are 25 or younger, and when I further scroll down the list we see that only 5 of the top 45 are younger than 26.

Here’s 2022:

Once again, 4 of the top 30 are 25 or younger.

But this time just 6 of the top 53 meet that criteria.

In no way I am advocating to avoid younger arms at all costs, or to overvalue boring innings eaters at the cost of upside.

What I am hypothesizing is that for starting pitchers, aging is advantageous. And in a fantasy community that is (rightly) hyper focused on pitcher skills, K-BB%, Stuff+, FIP, SIERA, PLV, and all the other great metrics we have at our disposal — we shouldn’t forget about innings pitched.

K-BB% is extremely important, and probably my single favorite pitching stat to look at, but constructing a top-tier fantasy rotation means building up volume as well.

Innings help drive strikeout totals, and correlate to both wins and quality starts. When our fantasy staffs have big (and quality) innings totals, our ratios become sturdier.

In other words, workloads/innings/balloons are somewhat of a market inefficiency.

Continued Ramblings

I likely could’ve just written a data-driven piece on the importance of innings when constructing a pitching staff in fantasy.

But I wanted to give this analogy a shot, and to provide a more dynamic way to think about starting pitchers, because we also can’t only focus on workload. Skills matter too.

When viewing pitchers as balloons, though, I ask myself questions such as “who can I trust as fully inflated workhorse aces? Ones who will put up big volume with elite skills. I land on a top-7 tier of Gerrit Cole, Spencer Strider, Zack Wheeler, Corbin Burnes, Luis Castillo, Kevin Gausman, and Zac Gallen.

This line of thinking helps keeps me grounded on a premium breakout pick such as Bobby Miller, in addition to Grayson Rodriguez and Eury Perez.

I’m in love with their talent upside, but would I prefer a more sturdy balloon option such as Aaron Nola or Logan Webb?

I also think of Mason Miller, who might be the poster boy for this entire thought exercise. Imagining a full season of him leads to asking yourself “what if he was fully inflated and could be trusted for 175+ IP year over year?” We know that isn’t the case with him, and we should think more about how unlikely rookie/young arms are to deliver big workloads — even ones without Miller’s extent of injury risk.

Someone who is young and could be projected to comfortably inflate over time? George Kirby.

But (Mason) Miller still has some filling up to do, but then he might pop again, inflate a little more, have a mini-pop, etc. There could be workload-increasing restrictions from the team. All in an attempt to find out an ideal inflation setting. When I think of Mason Miller I think of Tyler Glasnow. How big do the Rays want his balloon to get this season?

The balloon analogy is why the mantra “there’s no such thing as a pitching prospect” exists in the first place. It isn’t just that pitching prospects bust more than hitting prospects. It’s that when pitching prospects get hurt, re-inflating their balloon can take years.

On talent alone Daniel Espino is still seen as an elite pitching prospect, but it’s hard to get excited about him in dynasty since he’s pitched just 18 1/3 innings since the end of 2021.

Even if he were to be fully healthy this spring, it’s going to take several years for him to build up a workload that will be fantasy relevant in a meaningful way.

This is also why I’m extremely willing to trade away SPs in dynasty immediately after undergoing Tommy John surgery, provided I get close enough value of course. Those are fully deflated balloons that have no chance at growing for at least a year.

Instead, I want my roster to be full of balloons who are inching closer and closer to the elite tier where good talent meets opportunity. Pablo Lopez took that leap this season.

I want aces, of course, but I also want the middle section of my SP staff to be more inflated than my league mates’.

A strong fantasy rotation can only have so many Taj Bradley types. Give me all of the Chris Bassitt/Jose Berrios/Merrill Kelly/Jordan Montgomery tier. There will always be smaller upside balloons that arrive over the course of a season.

The balloon analogy is another way to reflect on Hunter Greene’s breakout case from this past season. In addition to everything discussed in my “What I Got Wrong in 2023” piece, Greene had a slim path to fully inflating in just one year.

Sometimes it happens. Shane McClanahan worked out the year prior, but he then eventually popped (elbow injury) upon further inflation in 2023.

We’ve had age concerns about Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander for half a decade now, but I think the correct way to have viewed them during this time would’ve been as fully inflated balloons (minus Verlander’s TJ year). Assuming there isn’t massive injury concern, like there is with Clayton Kershaw every year, I’m comfortable drafting pitchers in their 30s. In fact, I prefer it when the alternative is a Year 2 arm who has yet to exceed 120 IP in a pro season.

Zack Wheeler being 33 isn’t really a risk in and of itself. Without injury concerns, he’s actually the ideal prototype of everything we want in a fantasy ace.

He could start deflating in the next 3-5 years, like what we saw from Scherzer in ‘23, but that risk is offset by knowing these younger arms are going to take similarly long to fully inflate.

I’ll have more macro starting pitcher thoughts throughout the offseason as I continue to think through the effects the new MLB rules had on the position as a whole.

(It’s a lot).

Starting pitching definitely feels different this year. One edge to begin considering is how many inflated balloons you need to finish with when constructing a fantasy rotation.