Before I try to do this in a (slightly) more scientific way, let me say that you can easily create tiers via the sniff test. Take a look at the pitching pool and try to assign groups labels, like ‘ace’ and ‘front of the rotation’ and ‘mid-rotation’. It’s what we do when we are trying to talk about prospect pitchers and where they might slot in later, it should come fairly naturally, and it will help you make sense of your specific player pool. It’s a worthy exercise no matter how rigorous the background work was.

Now let’s try to apply a more reasoned approach to the matter.

If you were to graph tiers, what would they look like? If the y axis was auction value, and the x axis is a pitchers’ rank, then you’d be looking for a straight horizontal line. That’s a group of pitchers with the same auction value but a different rank — a group of pitchers separated by cents, not dollars.

So I made that graph, using our auction calculator and regular 12-team mixed settings.

I looked for big vertical gaps between markers, and put my tiers in there. For the most part, the slope before the tier is horizontal, and then there’s a little vertical moment, and then there’s another horizontal part. It’s not necessarily precise, but it’s backed by the idea that the slope of the line changes in these places, and notifies of a gap in value.

The nice thing is that this approach produces about five tiers for mixed leagues, and that lines up well with how we think of major league rotations. Of course, there’s the Human Caveat, Clayton Kershaw. He’s so far above and beyond the rest of the pack that he’s one of those single-tier players. Let’s not draw a line for him and him alone, though. That’s not, by definition, a tier. There are no other players that are comparable that can live in his tier with him.

Another nice thing is that you see — even if you quibble with where exactly I put my lines (the $10 line should be a bit further right, maybe) — that we have the $30 pitcher, the $20 pitcher, the $10 pitcher, the $5 pitcher, and the $1s. If you’re making a plan and want a pitcher from each tier, there are your budgets for each of those slots.

A major part of the tier system is finding comparable players. Let me update my rankings from last week with tiers that generally follow the plan from above.

If Noah Syndergaard or Felix Hernandez are my aces, I’m fine with that. If I waited till the end of each tier and came out of the 12-teamer draft with Noah Syndergaard, Michael Wacha, Justin Verlander, Joe Ross, and Jerad Eickhoff as my staff — all players that I’m relatively high on versus the crowd — I’d do the happy dance and go ogle my strong starting lineup, most likely.

My tiers don’t perfectly line up with the graph. I see more aces, for one. I see the fewest true number twos, which makes sense to me intuitively — a number two is good enough to have the track record and the stats to sit at the top of your rotation, but not good enough to be an ace. That’s rare. I might not own a ton of twos. And if you look at the graph, there’s as good an argument for moving the $10 line left as there is to moving it right. Maybe there are really only ones, threes, and fives, generally speaking.

But my tiers agree with the ranks in a very important place: 50. Around the 50th-ranked pitcher, there’s a lurch downward in the values. As much as I like Carlos Rodon, I can’t yet put him in with the threes, who are either veterans with established track records or young pitchers that haven’t struggled as much as Rodon so far. Your Lackeys and Severinos.

And, really, I think there’s no such thing as a number four. That four/five grouping melds together, and I’ll probably be finishing up my bullpen and getting some bench/utility hitters with upside instead of trying to get the best fours and fives. As much as I love Carlos Rodon and Anthony DeSclafani — and you know I love the latter — I love Aaron Nola and Andrew Heaney and Jaerad Eickhoff about as much. At least enough to go zigging while the rest of the league is zagging.

So there you have it. Not really scientific in the end, but at least a slightly more rigorous undertaking. On my ranks, since I don’t project each player, I couldn’t find the tiers by science. But I could look at the general population for trends, and apply those to my own ranks. Which is something I suggest that each of you do going into the draft. You’ll find a road map to the draft in your tiers.