It's been said that pitching wins championships, but it takes a team effort to have a chance to be called World Series champions. With roughly two weeks left in the regular season, we've got a pretty good idea as to which teams are truly contenders and who should be focused on 2016 and beyond.
So what better time to start speculating about what those contending rotations might look like come the playoffs—and rank them?
For our purposes, any team that sits more than five games out of a playoff spot will be deemed a non-contender and won't appear on this list. The rotations that follow are comprised as I believe they'd be if the playoffs started tomorrow.
How will we rank them? We'll grade each rotation across four statistical categories: wins above replacement (WAR, based on FanGraphs' calculations), fielding independent pitching (FIP, a better gauge of pitcher success than ERA), strikeouts per nine innings of work (K/9) and strikeout-to-walk ratio (K/BB).
Rotations will receive a score in each category that is equal to their ranking among contending rotations. For example, if the New York Mets ranked 11th in FIP, they'd get a score of 11 in that category. As is the case with most pitching metrics, the lower the score, the better the rotation.
We'll add the scores up across all four categories and use that cumulative score as the basis for our ranking.
Keep in mind, these statistics are only for the four pitchers in the rotation—those not in the postseason mix were not included as to not skew the numbers one way or another.
Additionally, pitchers who were traded during the season, such as David Price, will only have their numbers with the contending club used. What Price did in Detroit, for our purposes, is irrelevant. We are only interested in how he's performed with Toronto. Again, this is done to not skew the numbers.
Got it? Good. Let's get started.
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