It’s an age-old question that’s been bandied about on barstools, berms and BarcaLoungers forever. Who has the best starting rotation this year? In locales closer to San Diego, the wrinkle is just more personal: Now that Dylan Cease has joined Yu Darvish, Joe Musgrove and Michael King, how do the San Diego Padres compare to other starting pitching squads in the sport?
Advertisement
Numbers get a bad rap sometimes, but without them, this job is much harder. You’d have to play a giant game of “Would you rather …?” while slotting each Padres player against his comparative starter on another team. As division rivals and one of the best teams in the league, the Los Angeles Dodgers are an easy choice for the first comparison.
Maybe you’d rather have the younger duo of Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow at the top, but already you start asking questions. How many innings of Glasnow? Are we giving Darvish and Musgrove any credit for bouncing back off tough, injury-filled seasons? And then you start trying to compare Cease and King to Bobby Miller (with the short track record) and … who are you taking as the fourth? Veteran James Paxton? Or how many innings of Walker Buehler? And does it matter how you order these two? Who has better depth? Does that matter to this conversation? And what will Clayton Kershaw be to the Dodgers this year?
It’s a whirlwind, and we only tried it with one other team. Gotta repeat this another 28 times to get it right. Settle in if this is your method.
Bring in the numbers and it gets a little easier and quicker to settle, but you still have questions. Do we use last year’s numbers or do we use projections, which try to account for the fact that players bounce back all the time and sort of wobble around a true level of talent from season to season?
FanGraphs has taken projections and then assigned innings for starting pitchers, all the way down to the 12th starter (or beyond). It tries to account for injury risk in that process, as well as talent. There’s an element of the human touch here, but it’s based on projections, and FanGraphs has done the work systematically for all 30 teams. Here are the top 10 teams by its Wins Above Replacement projections, using FanGraphs’ depth charts for playing time distribution:
Seen this way, the Padres have entered the chat. They are in the top third of the league, in a group behind the trio of the Dodgers, Philadelphia Phillies and Atlanta Braves — teams that might have the consensus best rotations in ball this year even if you tried it by the first method. You might notice that the Padres have a lower projected ERA than some of the teams around them, but they also have a kinder park than the Cincinnati Reds and Toronto Blue Jays, as examples, and that’s accounted for in the fWAR projection.
Advertisement
Assumptions are still being made in this method. FanGraphs writers are making decisions about health, for one. They’ve given Tyler Glasnow 147 innings (which would be his career high in the majors), along with 71 innings for Clayton Kershaw (which might be a guess for anyone). Michael King gets 139 innings, and the fifth spot in San Diego is an innings amalgamation of Jhony Brito, Randy Vásquez, Matt Waldron, Pedro Avila and Robby Snelling. They do this because teams use around 10 starting pitchers on average and give many innings to the sixth and seventh starters. It’s a fact of life in today’s injury-ridden game.
When you’re debating this on the berm, is that really in the spirit of the debate? Are we really pushing back and forth about the ninth starter on the Reds, or are we talking about the front five? Or maybe even the first four? Because the fifth starter these days is always a mix of young and old, with openers and bulk guys and bullpen days.
And then there are the assumptions that come with the Wins Above Replacement framework, which assumes pitchers have the most control over strikeouts, walks, popups and homers. Therefore, FanGraphs weighs those numbers the heaviest when summing up talent. It’s fair because that’s what the bulk of past research suggests is true, but there are other frameworks.
Stuff+ is one, and it looks only at the physical characteristics of a pitcher’s arsenal. Things like release point, velocity, movement and spin are the most important here. Location+ looks at how well the pitcher puts those pitches in good locations. Here’s what the top of the Padres’ rotation looks like by Stuff+ and Location+, along with their ranks among the top 150 starting pitchers:
| Pitcher | Stuff+ | Location+ | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
107 | 102 | 32 | |
106 | 104 | 24 | |
114 | 96 | 26 | |
107 | 102 | 27 |
That’s kind of remarkable! What they lack in a true ace by the strictest of definitions, they make up for by having four guys roughly in the top 30 starting pitchers in the league. They all have excellent stuff — Cease was in the top 20 in Stuff+ last season, just a few spots ahead of the arm he’s replacing in Blake Snell — and three of the four add excellent command. Let’s take playing time concerns out, focus on the top four, use these stats and see what happens if we re-rack the team rankings with our new assumptions. This will be missing newcomers to the league, but for players who missed 2023, we can add their 2022 numbers.
Look out for that Seattle Mariners squad, and here come the Baltimore Orioles. But hey, this is also a fun table for Padres fans. By command and stuff of their front four starters, they sneak into the top five rotations in baseball.
Now they just have to turn that good process into results. Oh, and stay healthy. But at least there’s some confirmation that the Cease addition — whether you use no numbers at all, 2024 projections or more cutting-edge statistics — has pushed San Diego’s rotation into the top third of the league, and maybe higher.
(Photo: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
