With the top 150 fantasy baseball players reordered and re-ranked on the latest Big Board, it's time to continue rolling out the individual position rankings.
After providing some sequencing to the outfielders last time out, next up is starting pitchers, which is by far the deepest position. That's pretty much always been the case, but in this era of pitching domination, it's even more true now.
That depth and talent—and depth of talent—means owners will have no shortage of arms from which to choose at the draft. The suggested strategy is to try to grab one of the top 10 to 15 starters when the value feels right within the first, say, seven or eight rounds.
The very top names, like Clayton Kershaw, Yu Darvish (pictured) and Adam Wainwright, will be off the board fairly early, but studs like Justin Verlander, David Price and Madison Bumgarner should all be available in the range of picks Nos. 40-60.
Beyond that batch, well, it's really up to the individual owner to build a staff based on whatever skills and names are preferred. Just know that you can take only one or two starters by Round 10 or so and still have all sorts of choices from which to choose in the middle and late rounds to fill out the middle and back of your rotation.
Interested in seeing which arms populate those portions of the rankings? Well, here are the top 75 fantasy starting pitchers, as well as a bunch more worth watching.
These rankings consider three factors:
First, everything is based on 10- or 12-team mixed leagues with standard five-by-five rotisserie scoring (BA, R, HR, RBI, SB for hitters; W, ERA, WHIP, K, SV for pitchers).
Second, lineup construction accounts for 22 active roster positions consisting of: one each for catcher, first base, second base, third base, shortstop, corner infield, middle infield and utility; along with five outfielders and nine pitchers.
And third, to be eligible at a particular position, players either must have played at least 20 games there in 2013 or be in line to start there in 2014. Additionally, players are listed in the rankings at the position where their fantasy utility would be most useful.
Statistics courtesy of Baseball Reference and FanGraphs.
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