I know inventions such as refrigeration and the printing press are higher up on the food chain with respect to sustaining and advancing society, but the fact that about ten hours ago I was heading East on the Massachusetts Turnpike and I’m typing this from my laptop in a Super 8 in Long Beach, California pretty much blows my mind.

Anyway, I want to wrap up the series on addressing pitching in drafts. I’ll keep this short as there’s only one more point to make. By means of review, first, we used some math to suggest waiting on pitching could be a mistake. Then we backed off that a bit and showed how it can be done. Finally, we’re about to flip it back the other way and reveal the 400 pound gorilla yet to be discussed.

The backbone of the process utilized rank pitchers by ERA, assuming WHIP dovetails along. On paper it usually does though there is more variance with ERA so sometimes you can earn or be deprived of points in the category by pure happenstance. Additionally, a staff with a majority of ground ball artists may sport a WHIP earning fewer WHIP points than ERA points since the BABIP on ground balls is higher than fly balls. Ergo it follows that a staff or fly ball pitchers may earn more points in WHIP than ERA. Regardless, the method discussed is suitable for building a staff; you have 180 days to work the categories.

The missing piece is strikeouts, especially in this era of increased whiffs. The problem is two-fold. Not only do you have to do the obvious and make sure you’re controlling your ratios while pounding up the punch outs, ranking of pitchers is via their overall potential, not ERA as could be inferred from the previous discussions.

The additional factor makes waiting on pitching that much more perilous since strikeout pitchers usually are jumped up the rankings, often at the expense of lesser ratios. And it’s not just starting pitching either, the top ranked closers can fan 20 or 30 more hitter than the middle tier.

Tracking and accumulating ample strikeouts isn’t a reason not to wait on pitching, it’s simply a yellow flag warning that it’s not as easy as it may seem.

I know what some of you are still thinking. You don’t care what the numbers say, you can defeat them. Perhaps you can but consider this. Some research I did for Baseball HQ reveals that the quality of pitching that is drafted is superior to the season-ending numbers. That is, while we can anecdotally cherry pick arms like Jacob deGrom, there were more Anthony DeSclafani’s that didn’t work out so well.

This pair was not picked by accident. In National League Tout Wars, both of these hurlers were purchased for the identical 22 FAAB units during the same transaction period. Revisionist history makes us forget when deGrom came up, he was a complete crapshoot. No one expected what transpired.

Let’s quickly circle back to the fact that incoming pitching is of lesser quality than drafted pitching. That same research demonstrated that league champions IMPROVED their ratios from their opening day lineup. Please realize this doesn’t mean they got lucky with the likes of Corey Kluber since his stats would be included in both drafted and season-ending numbers. The study teaches us that champions manage their staff, and in fact improve it, over the course of the season. This could be via pickups or sage streaming from reserves. Either way, the winning manager needs to be proactive.

Waiting on pitching is one thing. Effectively managing it into a better staff is quite the other.