Well, here we are. The 2018 fantasy baseball season has come to an end. I’m sure we are all feeling that deep void now that we don’t have regular season baseball games every day. No?? Is it just me? Anyways, I wrote a steaming article every week (with the exception to the short 3-day week after the All-Start Break) for the entirety of the 2018 season. The threshold I used for the streamers was 25% owned and under using FantasyPros combined Yahoo/ESPN ownership rates. What that means is that the pitchers I selected were widely available in all 10 and 12 team leagues but were likely gone in 15-team and AL/NL Only leagues. However, most people play in 12-team leagues, so the 25% ownership rate makes sense for the masses.







The results of every single pitcher I choose to stream is listed and totaled. There were three pitchers that started a game and left due to injury, not performance. I still included them in the overall numbers but maybe I could have eeked out another win or two had they continued, but I digress. Either way, here is the link to the spreadsheet.

FreezeStats Starting Pitcher Streaming Results

Here are the results of all 120 pitchers I chose to stream this year.

IP ERA WHIP K W Season Totals 665.96 3.57 1.15 615 41

Overall, not bad! The win total may be a bit low, but we are talking about pitchers who are probably either somewhat volatile or on a bad team. We all know the win is a poor statistic to analyze a pitcher’s performance, take Jacob deGrom’s 10-win season in 2018 with an ERA that finished at an insane 1.70! Yes, it’s a fantasy category, so we want the best opportunity to receive wins. However, many of those pitchers who receive run support are likely scooped up. Check out the ERA and WHIP though! I sorted all starting pitchers with a minimum of 130 innings pitched this year and the 3.57 ERA from our streamers would rank 31st overall, one spot ahead of David Price. In terms of WHIP, using the same criteria, we are tied for 29th overall with Kyle Hendricks.

I’m not a genius, but those are definitely fantasy relevant numbers, especially in a 12-team league. If we assume our “streamers” were actual starting pitchers, let’s assume our fictional SP averaged 165 innings for the season which would rank between 50-60 overall in MLB in terms of innings pitched. Again, that’s just a reasonable assumption. Based on that assumption, our “Streamer” would have averaged:

10.25 Wins, 3.57 ERA, 1.15 WHIP, 152.4 Strikeouts in 165 IP

Based on the ESPN’s Player Rater, our most similar pitchers by 5×5 results are James, Paxton, Sean Manaea, Jhoulys Chacin, Jack Flaherty, Kyle Gibson, and Jose Berrios. Kind of a mixed bag but the highest ranked SP in that group is Chacin at 28 and the lowest is Kyle Gibson at 46. Even the 46th rank SP is rostered in all 10 and 12 teams leagues. Our streamer is a bit better than that as he would fall in around the 40th SP overall. Essentially, if you steamed all of the streamers I choose this year, you would have a solid #4 starting pitcher. In other words, you should have drafted 3 SPs and streamed the rest. If you had hit on your top 3 SPs, you would have definitely benefited from this strategy. Maybe this can be a strategy going forward?

Unfortunately, every single one of these pitchers is unlikely to be available when I suggested to stream them, so it’s not quite a slam dunk. At least I can feel pretty good about my streaming efforts and I hope to improve on these numbers next year. If you took my advice, I hope it helped you win matchup or better! Thanks for reading.

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