NL Starting Pitchers Set to Bust in 2021

Matt Musico evaluates NL starting pitchers who could be draft busts for 2021 fantasy baseball. These SP may be overvalued based on current ADP.

We made it, you guys. It was touch-and-go there for a little bit, but February is actually here. Major League Baseball teams appear to be reporting to Spring Training within the next couple of weeks, and unless the world ends again right before Opening Day, the regular season is just two short months away. 

As the anticipation for pitchers and catchers reporting mounts, fantasy baseball draft prep season is in full swing. 

There are many approaches to drafting a playoff-caliber team, and one tried-and-true tactic is to load up with a stable full of elite starting pitchers. If that’s your strategy, it’s easy to get overzealous by taking that guy you think is about to break out a little earlier than usual. That can make things a bit tricky, so it’s important to have an idea of hurlers who are worth avoiding given their current NFBC ADP. Here are three National League starting pitchers who aren’t currently worth their price. 

Max Fried, Atlanta Braves

ADP: 62.01

In a rotation with a number of intriguing young arms, 27-year-old Max Fried took things to another level in 2020. Through 56 innings of work, he posted a spotless 7-0 record in 11 starts to go with a 2.25 ERA and 1.09 WHIP. He brought home a Gold Glove award, finished fifth in NL Cy Young voting, and even got down-ballot NL MVP votes (he finished 18th). Furthermore, this was on the heels of winning 17 games for the Braves in 2019. 

At his current ADP, though, many things must go right for him to provide that kind of value. With his sparkling 2.25 ERA came not-so-sparkling numbers, like a 4.32 SIERA and 4.05 xFIP. This likely happened for two reasons: he’s not a huge strikeout guy and his control of batted-ball events was on the other end of the spectrum compared to previous years. 

When at least half of his big-league appearances have come as a starter in any given year, Fried's strikeout rate has never crested above 24.6%. That happened in 2019, and this past season saw a small slide in that category (22.3%) while his walk rate jumped back up from 6.7% to 8.5%. With middling strikeout and walk rates, it was crucial for Fried to control the quality of contact opposing hitters made, which he did at an elite level. 

Fried’s 27.2% soft-hit rate and 23.8% hard-hit rate allowed ranked second and third, respectively, among starters with at least 50 innings pitched last season. This is a significant improvement from 2019’s numbers (17.9% soft-hit rate, 38.2% hard-hit rate). It remains to be seen how sustainable that is over the course of a full season, without the guarantee of racking up a bunch of strikeouts if he does indeed regress back to his career norms in the quality-of-contact department.

Dinelson Lamet, San Diego Padres

ADP: 74.96

Dinelson Lamet’s potential has never been in question. It’s just a matter of putting it all together while managing to remain healthy, which has been a problem. 

The Padres have sufficiently added to their starting pitching depth with the additions of Yu Darvish and Blake Snell and coming off yet another injury that prevented him from pitching in the postseason last October, it's undetermined how much work Lamet can actually get in 2021. Even if San Diego needs him out there every fifth day, Lament hasn’t thrown more than 73 innings in a single season since 2017, when he threw 114.1 frames. It’ll also be interesting to see how Lamet’s slider usage shakes out with a full season on tap. He led baseball in 2020 with a ridiculous 53.4% usage rate for that offering. 

To put this in perspective: Patrick Corbin came in a distant second with a 40.2% rate, and prior to 2020, the highest single-season slider usage rate between 2011 and 2019 was Chris Archer in 2017 (44.4%). Lament’s slider is clearly his out pitch (50.7% strikeout rate and -7 opponent wRC+ in 2020), but being essentially a two-pitch hurler, it may be hard to rely on it that heavily over a longer period of time. 

It was encouraging to see his homers allowed per nine innings rate drop from 1.48 to 0.65 between 2019 and 2020, but it’s not as if he’s still not a fly-ball pitcher. The right-hander’s fly-ball rate actually increased (36.3% to 42.3%) while his infield-fly rate decreased (11.5% to 4.8%), and his hard-hit rate essentially stayed the same (35.8% to 36.0%).

With other arms around him that have proven to be effective and typically more durable, like Sonny Gray, Carlos Carrasco, and Jose Berrios, taking Lamet this early is a risk you should want to leave for another opponent to take. 

Dustin May, Los Angeles Dodgers

ADP: 160.30

It’s easy to get hung up on Dustin May’s raw skills. After all, there aren’t many dudes in baseball who can throw a 99 mph two-seamer that looks like this:

That will never be fair. Manny Machado may never be the same, either. 

Outside of eye-popping highlights like this, though, there’s quite a bit of risk here. The Dodgers are notoriously conservative when it comes to their starting rotation, trying to limit the workload of their hurlers throughout the season. That’s proven to be a solid real-life baseball strategy for the defending World Series champs, but not so much for fantasy baseball owners. Although he compiled a 2.57 ERA through 56 innings, advanced ERA estimators show May overperformed by quite a bit for Los Angeles. His advanced numbers settled in at a 4.29 SIERA, 4.62 FIP, and 3.98 xFIP. 

Even with the young righty’s high velocity, he’s yet to record an elite strikeout rate during any singular season of professional ball. After posting a 22.7% strikeout rate and a 3.5% walk rate in 34.1 innings as a rookie in 2019, those numbers worsened to 19.6% and 7.1%, respectively. May’s 8.4% swinging-strike rate doesn’t tell us it should be much higher than that, either. 

According to Nick Mariano’s Expected Draft Values research, a starting pitcher getting drafted in May’s current slot needs to throw nearly 159 innings and win about 12 games, along with striking out 151 hitters with a 3.69 ERA and 1.19 WHIP. May’s current Steamer Projections on FanGraphs have him winning nine games with a 4.07 ERA, 1.29 WHIP, and 120 strikeouts in 131 innings. This should be a hard pass at his current ADP. We can still enjoy watching his two-seamer, though. 

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