Top 101 Starting Pitchers: Rest-Of-Season Rankings for Fantasy Baseball Week 20 (2024)

August 8, 2024

Nick Mariano's updated fantasy baseball starting pitcher rankings for Week 20 (2024). Baller Ranks is a weekly rankings list for the top-101 starting pitchers.

We're already digging into the meat of August so let's bite into another weekly rest-of-season piece that looks at my top 101 SP Baller Ranks breakdown. The trade deadline is gone, and most of your fantasy deadlines are also about to pass. Scroll along for the Week 20 edition of my weekly Starting Pitcher Baller Ranks!

This brings my SP thoughts with tiered ranks, complemented by a rest-of-season auction value ($), their Previous Week's Value (PV), the trend between the two, and a (+/-) column denoting the rank shift compared to last week. Pitchers will start to swing more as the remaining game tally shortens, especially if there are injury risks, inning walls, and so on. Any high-movement arm has a case to swing another 5-10 spots higher/lower at this time!

These ranks are geared toward traditional 5x5 roto leagues, and I typically exclude most injured SPs, lest a return is imminent. I know some of your brains are splitting as football season approaches but it'll behoove you to stick with us! You can do both and crush those who engage autopilot too early. Let's get to it.

Starting Pitcher Week 20 Rankings Analysis

-Paul Skenes is “mortal,” maybe? He’s avoided any true blow-up starts, giving up two runs in each of his last three outings, but struggled against a surging Arizona squad on Sunday. The young ace walked three hitters for the second time in a row after never doing so in his first 12 MLB outings. He’s “only” struck out six and four in his last two starts after nine straight with seven or more. But the D-backs do have one of the lowest team K rates going.

While I am still firmly in on Skenes, we can’t overlook that 86 high-stress MLB innings on top of 27 Triple-A frames are building. His average four-seam velocity was 99.3 mph in May and 99.1 mph in June, but that slid to 98.6 mph in July and was just 98 mph flat to kick off August. His in-zone swing-and-miss rate on it was 33.3% in June and fell to 12.5% in July, with the curveball being a bigger weapon. The sinker is down a full tick from the beginning.

It could be nothing beyond Houston and Arizona are tougher assignments but I want to be sure we appreciate how he’s come out firing in case this begins a relative step down for Skenes down the stretch. It’s easy to reset expectations near “perfection” for young phenoms so any sign of an iffy start causes people to wonder if the slide is on. We hold steady for now, but we’re not putting our heads in the sand.

-Blake Snell is firing. Congrats to those who held on through the early turbulence! Maybe I just need to widen that top tier next time.

-Hunter Greene’s July dominance has rolled into August with a season-high 11 strikeouts and just one hit and one walk sprinkled over six scoreless innings against the Giants. His 0.27 ERA since the beginning of July just edges Snell’s 0.55 ERA, with both running BABIPs near .100 and strand rates near 100% (or in Greene’s case, 100%!).

Being great gives you a better chance of being lucky. Snell, Greene, and a third arm we’ll get to are the only qualified arms to allow two or fewer barrels since July 1.

-Gerrit Cole just averaged a season-high 96.5 mph on his four-seamer despite early panic where he appeared to be grabbing at his right shoulder/trap/neck in the first inning.

Something appeared to be bothering Cole in the first inning pic.twitter.com/TrKDYpUsH0

— Talkin' Yanks (@TalkinYanks) August 4, 2024

He wound up limiting Toronto to two runs on six hits in a solid game, walking none for the first time in 2024. But this makes back-to-back outings with 5 ⅔ IP and only four strikeouts. We need those whiffs back. Hitters have a hard-hit rate of around 50% in each of those games as well, so let’s see what Cole’s next adjustment brings (and hope the “general body fatigue” isn’t a factor).

-Ryne Nelson is that third arm from the Snell/Greene barrel thought. He has only surrendered one barrel in his last 42 ⅓ IP, posting a 2.98 ERA with a 2.44 FIP in that span. At the beginning of the run, he only had 13 strikeouts in 18 ⅔ IP, which limited the upside despite good ratios. He also had been rather bad before that so he had to overwhelm to flip perception. However, Nelson has struck out at least seven in three of his last four starts for a 27:8 K:BB in those 23 ⅔ IP.

Don’t tell the Red Sox, but this surge has come with a jump in four-seam usage (~50% to ~60%) as he’s eased off the cutter. Nelson has also gone from throwing a harder slider around 86 mph to ~83 mph with a higher spin rate. Let’s have some fun here. Nelson, JP Sears, and Colin Rea feel like a mini-grouping of three “mid” arms who were unusable for so long that it’s tough for momentum to build.

-Speaking of the Red Sox, Tanner Houck and Kutter Crawford are running rough. Houck had only allowed more than three earned runs once in his first 16 starts of the season. He’s now done so three times in his last six. He hadn’t ever walked four hitters until it’s happened twice in his last five starts. The 18:16 K:BB in 26 ⅓ IP makes one feel lucky he “only” got tagged with a 4.78 ERA (5.10 FIP) in that window, but a constant groundball rate above 50% helps him wiggle out of it.

And Crawford has surrendered the most barrels since July began with 17. No other pitcher has given up more than 13 in that span as a starter. This comes as no surprise to those who have watched any of his last three trips to the hill. We’ve seen five Dodger homers on July 21, a trio of Bronx Bombs on July 27, and four Ranger blasts on August 2. It’s no surprise that 13 of the 17 barrels came in this stretch.

A trio of exciting youngin’s here:

-David Festa announced his arrival with nine strikeouts over five scoreless against the Cubs in Wrigley. After a gritty two-strikeout performance in his debut against Arizona (hmm, maybe just avoid them, yeah), Festa has struck out at least six in each game despite not going past five innings yet. Going back to his debut, he is one of 18 pitchers (min. 20 IP) with a K-BB% of 23% or higher.

-DJ Herz continues to make good on great peripherals. Festa’s 23.1% K-BB% is great, but Herz has a top-10 mark going back to late July thanks to a 25.5% rate. Like Festa, Hertz appears to be capped by workload management with each start. The gloves will come off in 2025 but we’re not going to turn our nose up at the appetizer this year.

For the third straight start, DJ Herz is pulled after 5 innings and under 80 pitches. He's been solid in all of them, but clearly they're being careful with his workload as they try to get him through the season.

— Mark Zuckerman (@MarkZuckerman) August 3, 2024

-Hayden Birdsong is finally back! Can he show the gains displayed against the Rockies in back-to-back games with other teams in the batter’s box? Or was he fueled by COL simply being that bad and whiff-happy? And we’d prefer if he didn’t walk multiple hitters in a start for the first time as well. Can he control the zone?

Update: To answer my previous questions: No and no. Birdsong only threw 38-of-66 pitches for strikes, walking three with just one strikeout. He gave up seven runs and lasted just two innings as Washington smacked him around. The 22-year-old sports plenty of potential but he must clean up that control if he’s going to climb.

-Tyler Mahle was impressive in his first start of 2024 after rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. He only struck out two but five innings of one-run ball against Houston is solid no matter how you slice it. The fastball averaged 92.3 mph and hit 94.2, with the splitter getting a 50% whiff rate on eight swings. It's not a bad first step back into the pool here.

-Max Meyer got shelled for six runs on eight hits and three walks over four innings, registering just two strikeouts against the Reds. This gives him 13 earned runs in 13 innings since being recalled. It won’t get any easier against the Padres in his next start. He’s only hanging around the bottom here because we know there’s an upside present versus the general streaming fringe.

-Grayson Rodriguez was scratched from Tuesday’s start with right lat/teres discomfort and is heading back to Baltimore for imaging. This will almost surely lead to an IL stint given the nature and location of the injury. He would’ve tumbled a bit anyway. The strikeouts are nice and Baltimore supplies wins, but the 5.14 ERA/1.32 WHIP over the last month reads like 2023’s GRod. Albert Suarez threw five shutout innings in his stead and now re-enters the deep-league waters.

Grayson Rodriguez is returning to Baltimore to be further evaluated and have imaging done on his injured lat, Brandon Hyde says. Injury cropped up while he was warming before tonight’s game.

— Matt Weyrich (@ByMattWeyrich) August 7, 2024

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