Fantasy owners can turn to middle men for relief

When Noah Syndergaard (or Corey Kluber or Cole Hamels or take your pick) went down with an injury, fantasy owners far and wide scrambled to find an adequate replacement for their team’s starting rotation.

Inevitably, when we lose a starting pitcher, our first thought is to get another starter to fill the slot. Gotta keep getting those wins and strikeouts, right?

Maybe not.

In many instances, owners will reluctantly fill the open roster spot with Ubaldo Jimenez, Mike Pelfrey, Jered Weaver or any of the other soggy dead leaves floating around in their league’s free agent starting pitcher pool.

But the free agent pitcher pool has dozens of highly talented middle relievers who can provide high-quality innings that protect or even enhance your ratios — and in the right bullpens, can even snag you a few saves and wins.

Maybe it’s time for owners in shallower mixed-league formats to follow the example of their single-league brethren and look at the middle reliever advantage.

Fantasy Math 101: The starting pitcher count

Your interest in middle relievers should start with a quick review of why starters in your free agent pool are in the pool in the first place.

There’s a reason most of these guys weren’t already in a rotation someplace in your league: Owners — including you — didn’t think they were good enough.

On opening day, every major league club has five starters, or 75 in each league. So that’s about six starters apiece for teams in 12-team American League- or National League-only fantasy formats. If every fantasy team in such a league targets six starters, the league will all but empty the entire starting pitcher pool. And some owners will have been tossing end-game darts at the worst of the fifth starters.

As a result, owners in AL- or NL-only leagues have learned to understand and appreciate the importance and value of non-closer relievers and swingmen.

Of course, the situation is looser in 15-team mixed. The opening-day pool is 150 starters, so each team can draft five without reaching for a fifth starter at all. Some teams do go deeper, drafting six or even seven starting pitchers (and we’ve even seen instances of owners going with nine starters).

But even at five apiece, what’s left in the pool will be pretty much each MLB team’s fifth starter. And they’re the slim pickings left in your free agent pool when you need to replace a starter.

Math 102: Oh, my aching decimals

The trouble with those fifth starters — or, even worse, emergency call-up starters — is that they can absolutely kill your ERA and WHIP.

Let’s look, for example, at a fantasy team in a typical 15-team mixed league that just lost Syndergaard, and let’s further imagine Syndergaard doesn’t return this season. Before the injury, this team projected to finish with 1,200 innings, a 3.95 ERA and a 1.19 WHIP.

Losing Syndergaard and his 175 projected remaining innings and 2.83 ERA/1.13 WHIP is a blow, no doubt about it. But signing a fifth starter to replace him is like trying to stop a house fire by smothering it with old newspapers.

Let’s suppose this owner reaches into the free agent pool (using a pool from an experts league) and sees Minnesota Twins starter Phil Hughes. Focusing on Hughes’ fast three-win start and acceptable 4.32 ERA, our owner ignores Hughes’ 1.38 WHIP, holds his nose and places a FAAB bid and — lucky guy! — adds Hughes to his roster.

The issue is that Hughes isn’t even as good as his first few starts and his projected stats are not helpful. If we subtract Syndergaard’s BaseballHQ.com pre-injury projection and add Hughes’ projection in its place, this team will finish with an ERA of 4.20 and a WHIP of 1.21. Those losses could cost this fantasy team a ton of ranking points. And the results are the same or worse for almost every other starting pitcher in the free agent pool.

Now imagine the owner wisely ignored Hughes, Jimenez, Pelfrey and Weaver, along with Nick Martinez, Andrew Cashner, Bronson Arroyo and other zombies, and focused instead on top-drawer setup men such as Jeremy Jeffress, Jonathan Holder or Addison Reed.

By adding Reed into the open slot, the team’s projected ERA is just 4.06, still a bit worse than with Syndergaard, but 0.13 better than with Hughes. WHIP is even better: With Reed, the team’s WHIP stays at 1.19.

Our owner might object to the loss of wins, but that concern is overstated. Fifth starters are notorious for short outings, limiting their ability to get wins and strikeouts. Starting pitchers in general get wins in only about one-third of starts. Of the 27 starters in our representative experts-league pool, only three are averaging at least six innings per start, and as a group they’re averaging just over one win apiece.

Meanwhile, quality middle relievers are increasingly getting into more and longer high-leverage situations, where they can get more “vulture wins.” And they might even provide a few of those two- or three-inning saves along the way, which you aren’t getting from Hughes.

Similarly, while there will be a downturn in strikeouts, it is often not as drastic as it seems. Hughes is notching 3.5 strikeouts per outing, while Reed is averaging 1.3 — but Reed pitches several times per week (Hughes has only one two-start week so far).

With more major league managers figuring out ways to get their top middle relievers into more games for longer stretches, the strikeout totals should not be as big a factor in choosing starting pitching replacements as it might seem.

Conclusion

To be clear, an owner losing Syndergaard or Kluber is going to suffer from that loss. In particular, no free agent pool pitcher — starter or reliever — can replace ace-level strikeout production, nor, to a lesser extent, ace-level wins.

But the wise owner accepts that he can do little about those losses and focuses instead on protecting his other categories, especially the ratios.

That’s why there’s a strong argument to be made that quality middle relievers can be better than free agent starters as replacements for injured starters. They will protect or even improve the two ratio categories, while not too drastically affecting wins and strikeouts when compared with the free-agent starter alternatives.

The middle reliever tactic might not be so applicable in very shallow mixed leagues, like 10- or 12-teamers, where there should still be serviceable starting pitching options in the pool. But in any deeper format, even mixed, the smart owner will be looking at those middle guys to get some genuine fantasy relief.