Six-Man Rotations and Their Impact on Fantasy Baseball

Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

In Part 1, we talked about the Cubs going to a six-man rotation and why it may be a part of the future of baseball — and fantasy baseball. Here, we look at what kind of an impact that six-man rotations will make.

I briefly addressed this idea when talking about Tsuyoshi Wada yesterday and it was really the biggest reason that I feel he’s not a good add to your fantasy team for the remainder of 2014, despite how well he’s been pitching. So, Wada loses one start. What kind of impact will be felt if this happens around the league for entire seasons?

Let’s start here. Just for a refresher, this is what the two Cy Young Award winners — Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer — did in 2013.

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Now, if they pitched the same way, only in six-man rotations instead of five, this is what their seasons would have looked like, noting that some of the stats are a little different due to rounding.

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To give you a sense of a hitting equivalent. If a hitter lost that same percentage of games played going from one year to the next, they’d go from 155 games played to 129.

What does that mean when it comes to us fantasy players laying out our draft day strategies? Well, it means that decisions that were already difficult just got even tougher.

There’s no doubting how good guys like Kershaw, Scherzer, and Felix Hernandez are. But you know who were also reliable studs as recently as 2011, if not more recently? Tim Lincecum, Cliff Lee, Justin Verlander, and Roy Halladay, just to name a few. A pitcher can go from being one of the best to average (or worse) seemingly overnight and in a few of those cases, we can’t really point to an injury. So, pitchers have a pretty stiff fear of decline.

They also already lose out in the math arguments. As great as even the best are, they only play in about 20 percent of the team’s games. So, if you draft Clayton Kershaw in the first few rounds, or spend 20-25 percent of your auction budget on him, guess what? He can literally throw a perfect game in every outing and he’ll still be producing nothing for your fantasy team 80 percent of the time. If we go to six-man rotations, that number becomes 83-84 percent.

Now, the argument back is that no matter the size of the pitching rotations, pitching still accounts for half of the fantasy baseball stats in most leagues. True enough, but every team needs at least one catcher, right? I don’t think many people are going to be rushing to draft Jonathan Lucroy or Buster Posey in the first few rounds next year just because they’re the best catchers. Even the best sit a lot of games, and you need to use the early picks/high auction budgets on guys who will help your team every day.

Some of us already use that logic and avoid using the big draft picks on pitchers. If they’re pitching fewer games, more will. Sure, some will still load up on pitchers early to guarantee that they get Clayton Kershaw or Felix Hernandez and while they may well dominate pitching, it’ll be a lot easier for you to stay close to his elite pitching with your mid-late round guys than it will be for him to compete with your elite hitters on offense with his mid-late round guys.

As I said in Part 1, I don’t think this is exactly imminent, even the Cubs experiment is an unqualified success. It takes time for organizations to make drastic moves like that, so it’s still a few years away, but I do think it’s coming.

When it does, fantasy players will have to rely more on sleepers, fantasy free agents, or even streaming to really compete, at least for a while. The value of pitchers is not going to increase if they’re pitching less. Again, some people will still try to draft the stars early to dominate pitching but it won’t take long before it’s clear that strategy won’t work.

Fantasy baseball is already a game that takes a lot of attention to detail to win. If six-man rotations really are going to be commonplace in the future, it’s going to get even more intense.