Top 100 Dynasty Starting Pitcher Rankings: August

This Wednesday, I posted my top 100 starting pitcher rankings for redraft leagues and now you get something even better—my top 100 dynasty  starting pitcher rankings! Unlike the redraft ranks, which will come out every week, these dynasty rankings are a bit more special, releasing every month.

Before I get into the rankings it’s important for me to point out that these ranks are best used in conjunction with my redraft rankings when making decisions on dropping or trading players in your dynasty league. For example, if you are a win-now team, you should be far less concerned with maximizing your future value than you are your present value. If that means that you trade a pitcher who is higher ranked on my dynasty list for one that is higher ranked on my redraft list, you do that every time. Flags fly forever and there are no prizes for best farm system.

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Top-100 Dynasty Starting Pitcher Rankings

There is a well-known adage created by Gary Huckabay, founder of Baseball Prospectus, which says, “There’s no such thing as a pitching prospect.” This phrase is often abbreviated to TINSTAAPP. Essentially, what Mr. Huckabay was getting at is that pitchers have high failure rates and it can be a fool’s errand to try and roster them as they toil through the minors. For every pitcher who fails due to lack of talent there are just as many that fail due to injury so avoiding them is the smart play. Over the long run, investing in position players and trading for pitchers when they are developed leads to a lot of success.

Despite the potential wisdom to be found by adhering to TINSTAAPP I have ranked over 30 prospects within my top 100 dynasty rankings. Although I agree that pitcher attrition rates are high, I also recognize that scouts, cross checkers, scouting directors, and all of the people involved in player development do a phenomenal job at identifying the players with the best chance of having an impact at the big-league level. For every Jacob deGrom, who was taken in the ninth round, there are many more like Gerrit Cole who have first-round credentials. If you want to develop aces on your fantasy team you need to roster ace level pitching talent.

My rankings are made in a vacuum, meaning I don’t take into account whatsoever the context of your dynasty team. These are made with standard 5×5 pitching categories in mind which include ERA, WHIP, W, SO, and saves, the last of which doesn’t apply here. When I rank one player higher than another in a sense what I’m saying is I would not trade player X for player Y that is ranked below him. As I said at the top of this article that should change for you when evaluating trades based on your own contention cycle.

You may notice that some players might be ranked higher on my redraft list than another player that is roughly the same age while the opposite may be true on my dynasty list. While that might look inconsistent what that says is that the current version of that pitcher is better than the current version of the other pitcher. I’ll use Dylan Cease and Logan Webb as an example. Webb is ranked 69^th on my redraft list and Cease is ranked 79^th. I like what Webb is now better than what Cease is now. Cease is ranked 88^th on my dynasty list while Webb isn’t in my top 100. Webb is 23 years old and Cease is 24 years old, but I like the top end potential of Cease much more than Webb if he can iron out some of his issues.

In a typical month, I will include risers and fallers as well as new additions to my dynasty starting pitcher rankings, but since this is the first version of this list I will let the list speak for itself. If you have any questions about the list don’t hesitate to hit me up on Twitter @devjake. Thanks for reading!

Other Prospects I really Like: Bryce Jarvis, Ethan Small, Blake Walston, Zack Thompson, Shane McClanahan, Kyle Muller, Matthew Allan, Mick Abel, Quinn Priester

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