More than ever these days your drafts are going to be cluttered with pitching in the early going; an approach that hasn’t always been the case. But with all the uncertainty around the league at the position and with offense at the forefront of everything, it’s crucial to lock down a couple of aces to anchor your staff.
That said, mostly everyone is entering drafts with the same mindset so being creative with the back end of your pitching staff could make the difference in a championship or finishing middle-of-the-pack. With much more focus on openers and the guys that follow the opener than ever before, it’s something we need to factor in and heavily consider taking part in.
With it being a shortened season in 2020, the best example of this approach is still the 2019 Rays with Ryan Yarbrough . Yarbrough’s season consisted of 28 appearances and just 14 starts while tossing 141.2 innings, notching 11 wins and a strong 4.13 ERA. The importance of bringing up the wins is because the key component to rostering an opener is that he’s pitching past the fifth and picking up the win.
Openers
When it comes to openers in fantasy baseball, it’s very, very hard to trust them in standard, traditional drafts. They aren’t going to accumulate enough stats to really make much of an impact. They’re not in the game until the fifth as mentioned above so they’re really impacting games in the win column. Yes, they could be high K/9 guys, but they’re not going to rack many up because they’re going to pitch two innings max more often than not.
One benefit to taking one or multiple openers is that later in the year they transition into a later inning role, maybe picking up holds and possibly even saves. Outside of that and outside of very deep formats, the openers are wasting a roster spot more often than not. They could potentially provide minimal boosts to the ERA and WHIP categories, but the key word there is minimal.
Tandems
Where the real fantasy value comes into play are the guys that follow the openers. The reason they’re so much more valuable is because of the innings and situations they’re entering into. If your headliner or tandem pitcher enters in the third inning, he could be facing the bottom of the lineup and if he enters and maintains a lead, all we need are three innings and he could secure a victory.
Your best bet with drafting someone such as Ryan Yarbrough or more recently Tyler Alexander in Detroit, are in leagues that still use wins as a metric of success. Alexander made 14 appearances in 14 games in 2020, only making two starts in that span, but he gave us flashes of what a successful tandem pitcher can look like.
Something we should consider when drafting tandem pitchers is the format you’re playing in. Points leagues could benefit you tremendously if you’re awarded the standard ten points per victory. If your league doesn’t value ERA and wins heavily, well, maybe taking a tandem pitcher isn’t the way to go and taking more traditional starters are.
Finding the diamond in the rough like Ryan Yarbrough is the key to making this whole thing work. Knowing which pitching staffs would be unlikely to deploy these tag team outings and who will make this strategy click.