Under-the-Hood Ranking of Cubs Starting Pitchers is Kinda Scary

An interesting angle at The Athletic from Eno Sarris, who takes a very under-the-hood approach to evaluating MLB starting pitchers.

In essence, Sarris blends advanced metrics on pitchers’ command, proprietary evaluations from Driveline on pitchers’ stuff, and the demonstrated results that go into next-year projections, in order to evaluate pitchers for fantasy purposes. Command, stuff, and demonstrated results. From there, he ranks the top 175 starting pitchers in baseball:

Now, obviously fantasy baseball is its own animal as it relates to player value in the real world, but the methodology Sarris uses to rank the pitchers is pretty interesting to me regardless of your specific ends.

So, it’s a little collar-tugging to see the Cubs’ five starters listed …

31. Yu Darvish

40. Kyle Hendricks

87. Jose Quintana

124. Jon Lester

175. Adbert Alzolay

To be sure, if the Cubs wound up getting performances in those ranges in 2020, the rotation would be solidly below average. Probably not horrible if everyone was healthy, but you can do the quick math on if every pitcher was evenly distributed throughout the league, then Darvish rates as right at the bottom for a number one, Hendricks a decent two, Quintana a bottom three, Lester a bottom four, and Alzolay a well below-average five.

To be sure, you need more than five starting pitchers to get through a season, so having five in the top 175 isn’t quite as bad as it might sound by the straight math, but what matters here are the under-the-hood signals.

I’d take the over on Darvish and Hendricks, but I’ll admit that the concerns after that are not new, and didn’t just arrive because of this list. There are reasons to think Quintana was better than his results last year, but he’s working through velocity decline. Lester is a horse who is fine in the back half of the rotation, but he’s getting long in the tooth and comes with the risk of severe fall-off and/or injury. Alzolay, who might not actually be the fifth starter, obviously has extremely high variance. You could swap in Tyler Chatwood, and again, high variance.

The Cubs’ on-paper rotation is scary. That’s just the reality. It could prove to be fine or even above-average, and some of the depth arms could prove to be better than number fives. But it’s crazy to think about how ugly things could get this year for the rotation after failing to add a sure-fire starter this offseason, and still being a little ways out from actually developing some of those guys internally.

Gonna have to stay healthy. And gonna have to get a whole lot of happy surprises from the bullpen. And gonna have to score a lot of runs.

written by

Brett Taylor is the Lead Cubs Writer at Bleacher Nation, and you can find him on Twitter at @BleacherNation and on LinkedIn here. Brett is also the founder of Bleacher Nation, which opened up shop in 2008 as an independent blog about the Chicago Cubs. Later growing to incorporate coverage of other Chicago sports, Bleacher Nation is now one of the largest regional sports blogs on the web.

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