How do our starters rate?

You know that feeling when you put up somebody’s name for drafting, and everybody says “Pass”? You get him cheap, but you also get this feeling of impending doom, like everybody else sees disaster coming and you don’t see it.

This exercise is an attempt to quantify that feeling, for the starting pitchers. How do our starting fives rate, according to the saber-experts?

For each team, I took the five allocated starters (for those teams that have already done their allocations) or the five top-rated starters (according to Zips), and summed them up. Then, just for grins (or frowns, as it turns out) I got the Pecota ratings on each of the same starters.

Pecota is highly biased towards people with proven track records. Pitchers with one good year don’t get much respect, and it doesn’t like rookies at all. So for a youth-oriented league like ours, Pecota is really gloomy. Zips is much zippier.

But the ranks are pretty similar. Peshastin and Pittsburgh have the best starting fives in the league, by both systems.