It’s no secret that you can find valuable pitchers at all stages of a fantasy baseball draft. However, the deeper into a draft you get, the harder it becomes to find value and production out of hurlers. You want to emerge from a draft with at least one top arm, a few solid ones, and a few risky, high-upside pitchers. Therefore, the question then becomes when to target pitchers if you prioritize hitters early on (a strategy I highly recommend).

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Let’s take a look at the top 12 pitchers from 2018. Rather than use fantasy metrics, since league scoring settings can vary, let’s instead use something simple like WAR to get a snapshot of who had the best years:

For the most part, that list probably looks pretty similar to the top 12 pitchers in most fantasy leagues last year by the end of the season. With the exception of Sale and Bauer, all the other arms on that list exceeded 190 innings. They were studs in virtually every format, but where were they drafted?

Here is a consensus list of the top pitchers taken in most 2018 drafts:

The “big four” (Kershaw, Scherzer, Sale, and Kluber) were almost universally agreed upon, and after that, there was some discrepancy. Let’s toss out Bumgarner since he was not drafted early once news of his spring training injury broke. For many, Nola was closer to the top 12, and the same was true for Carlos Martinez, but most drafts featured those 15 coming before most others.

It could be argued that only Scherzer returned draft day value among the “big four,” though Sale was excellent when he pitched. Kluber battled some back pain and diminished velocity, and his curveball (his best pitch) wasn’t quite as dominant as a swing and miss offering. Kershaw had injury red flags last year and there are even more this year.

Ray and Archer quickly faded, and Strasburg, Martinez, Syndergaard, Kershaw, and Darvish couldn’t stay healthy. In their place, Corbin, Cole, Bauer, Nola, and Snell all emerged as “aces,” and fantasy owners who loaded up on hitting and took at least one of these arms found themselves sitting as pretty as a moonshot over the fence in left on a balmy summer evening. If you had invested high picks on pitching trying to come away with two or three of those top ADP starters, you would have been swimming in mud unless you took Scherzer, Severino, deGrom, or Verlander. That’s because the majority of the remaining 11 or so did you little favors, or in Sale’s case, pitched well, but not for as long as you hoped.

In many of those drafts, Nola wasn’t taken until the seventh or eighth round. The same was true with Cole. Bauer typically lasted into the double-digit rounds, while Corbin and Snell were late-round upside picks for many.

None of this means that most of the top ADP starters are going to bust every year. It just means that it’s better to target hitters first since you can still find ace-level talent later in most drafts if you know what to look for. Somewhere around Round 4 or 5, you want to pivot to pitching. It’s here where you want to target those arms ranked between the top 10 and 25 or so. If any arms in the top 12 have slid this far, jump on them like a kid at a piñata party.

The next item of business is determining what to look for in a starter. I call these five skills the “five elements.” If we’re waiting this long, we’re focusing on starters that check as many of the following boxes as possible:

High K/9 Rates (strikeouts per nine innings, preferably supported by whiff rates)

Above Average Ground Ball% (lots of bouncers, dribblers, choppers, and worm killers)

Low Hard-Hit% (weak contact by opposing batters)

High O-Swing (how often hitters swing at pitches outside the zone)

Low Walk Rate (poor control leads to high BB/9)

I call these the five elements since they are generally the elements makes a great pitcher. If you keep the ball in the yard by not getting hit hard, strike hitters out with “swing and miss” stuff, and don’t give free passes, you’re probably going to have good numbers and ratios by the end of the year, barring terrible luck on balls in play. Using ratios like these, in some variation or another, is actually quite common when identifying great fantasy arms.

The principles behind the five elements are derived from a similar formula developed by the Birchwood brothers over at FanGraphs to find value, who in turn expanded on Bret Sayre’s work over at Baseball Prospectus, prioritizing pitching skills that minimize downside risk. One key difference is that the five elements place a premium on pitchers who can get hitters to chase rather than relying on called strikes; thus, it’s less reliant on catcher framing. A similar statistic, swinging-strike rate (SwStr%), can also be used.

Some would argue that fly balls lead to more outs than ground balls do, and ground balls tend to lead to a high BABIP for pitchers. However, in an era with more power than ever before, the time-honored fact remains that fly ball pitchers allow more home runs and damage per batted ball than ground ball pitchers.

It should be noted that not all great pitchers check all these boxes. Sale, Cole, and Scherzer, for example, don’t induce many ground balls; however, Scherzer struck out 300 batters last year, Cole whiffed 293 by throwing more breaking balls in Houston, and Sale set a record for K/9 (10.86). You don’t care much about ground balls when nobody can touch you. All this proves is that fly ball pitchers like this must be able to generate significantly more strikeouts than most ground ball pitchers to outperform them.

For the rest of the mere mortals out there, they’ll take outs any way they can get them, and there will always be less damage inflicted on balls that are hit on the ground because you can’t hit a chopper over the fence (unless you’re on the cover of a Marvel comic book). Let’s take a closer look at the top 30 pitchers in terms of ground ball rate last year, but let’s only focus on the ones that also have strong K/9 rates (anything above 8.00). Here’s what you will find:

Lance McCullers Jr.

Trevor Cahill

Aaron Nola

Walker Buehler

Lance Lynn

Kyle Gibson

Carlos Martinez

Zack Godley

Noah Syndergaard

Steven Matz

Sonny Gray

Patrick Corbin

Clayton Kershaw

Jon Gray

That’s an intriguing list of arms, many of whom were on sleeper and breakout lists last season. Some delivered (Buehler, Corbin), while others struggled with injury (Martinez, McCullers, Kershaw), were dogged by walks and poor control (Godley), or got hit hard (Jon Gray). Since the league average ground ball rate is about 44%, we can extend the list to the top 60 or so, and you’ll find yet another mix of familiar and valuable arms from last year with above average GB%.

Charlie Morton

German Marquez

Masahiro Tanaka

Nick Pivetta

Carlos Carrasco

Jacob deGrom

Ross Stripling

Nathan Eovaldi

Jameson Taillon

Luis Castillo

Anibal Sanchez

Shane Bieber

Zack Greinke

Cole Hamels

Blake Snell

Joey Lucchesi

Chris Archer

C.C. Sabathia

Corey Kluber

Finally, let’s look at some exceptions to the rule to test its validity. Some pitchers like Miles Mikolas (6.55 K/9, 49.3 GB%), Kyle Hendricks (7.28 K/9, 47 GB%), and Kyle Freeland (7.7 K/9, 46 GB%) all enjoyed success, but those seem to be outliers rather than the norm. Consider that Mikolas is armed with elite velocity, Hendricks has stellar command of the strike zone on both sides of the plate, a great changeup, and ability to mix and match velo, and Freeland survives with inside fastballs and sliders down and away to avoid the middle of the plate and mitigate Coors Field elevation. These pitchers’ zone rates are very strong and their hard-hit rates are low, so their lack of strikeouts doesn’t matter since batters don’t square them up often. All three should have value in 2019 provided they continue to demonstrate spectacular command, but it’s important to notice that they are exceptions to the rule.

It should also be noted that there are a few starters with average or below average GB% but elite K/9 (Trevor Bauer, Tyler Skaggs, Stephen Strasburg, Mike Foltynewicz, Jack Flaherty, Jose Berrios, Andrew Heaney, Luis Severino, and Mike Clevinger). All of those players returned various degrees of value and production last season, ranging from elite (Bauer) to valuable (Berrios/Clevinger) and to very useful (Heaney/Skaggs). The lesson here is that if a pitcher doesn’t induce worm killers, he better be adept at inducing whiffs. A good metric to use here would be HR/FB since these pitchers tend to get more of their outs via strikeouts and balls hit in the air. If the ball is going over the fence, it doesn’t help you.

The point is that it’s still safe to stray from the five elements if a pitcher is exceptionally skilled at getting swings and misses and keeping the ball in the park. However, since HR/FB can be fluky, it’s better to use one of the elements (low hard-hit rate) to verify that an arm you draft with a low HR/FB rate isn’t due for some ulcer-inducing regression.

If we look at the aforementioned list, eliminating the top names likely to be gone in the first three-to-four rounds of fantasy drafts, we begin to see names like Buehler, Corbin, Morton, and Taillon as obvious targets if somebody like Snell or Carrasco doesn’t slip. Targeting potential breakout arms like Kyle Gibson, Shane Bieber, and perhaps Nick Pivetta, plus taking a gamble on a bounce-back year from Luis Castillo or Sonny Gray, allows you to begin seeing the makings of a potentially dominant rotation with tremendous upside, and you didn’t have to sell your soul and unborn child in Rounds 1-3 to get it. If nothing else, hopefully, you see that you can use the five elements to build a worthy staff at a fraction of the cost — a staff that could easily compete with fantasy owners who invested early in pitching, allowing you to stock your cupboards with elite hitters who will be bat flipping on your opponents all season long.

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Paul Ghiglieri is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Paul, check out his archive and follow him @FantasyGhigs.