The Best Pitchers of 2024 Are Historically Weird
This is shaping up to be one of strangest leaderboards we've ever seen.
Pitchers can be a difficult lot to predict. Long ago, Baseball Prospectus coined the acronym TINSTAAPP to express the fact that “there is no such thing as a pitching prospect” — young pitchers can turn out any number of which-ways, regardless of how brilliant they seem coming up.1 But even seemingly established hurlers aren’t much better in that regard. That’s why Bill James, no less an authority than the Godfather of Sabermetrics, used to refuse to be involved in projecting pitchers for his own eponymous Handbook, because “he doesn't believe it can be done”.
One glance at this season’s leaders in pitching Wins Above Replacement (WAR) lends credence to this thought. Aside from Zack Wheeler — long one of the top aces in the game — and maybe Tyler Anderson — who’s had a few decent seasons over the years — the rest of this season’s Top 10 has little in the way of previous track records suggesting ace status:
(Note: All stats in this story are as of Tuesday afternoon, June 4.)
Some names on the list have extenuating circumstances. Chicago’s Shota Imanaga, for instance, is an MLB rookie this season after spending the previous eight seasons pitching in his native Japan. (He also pitched part of the 2018-19 season with the with the Canberra Cavalry of the Australian Baseball League, leading the league in ERA with an insane 57-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio.) Imanaga could have held his own against MLB batters earlier, if he had been posted earlier.
But Seth Lugo? The leading pitcher in baseball this season only converted back to starting full-time a season ago, after spending most of the previous 7 seasons as a reliever with the Mets — where he was solid, known for his control and incredible curveball spin, but not regarded as having workhorse-starter potential given his low-90s fastball.
Others on the list include former hot prospects made good, fireballers who lacked control, solid starters who found another gear, and some who fit in with all of the above. The common thread is that most hadn’t done much before coming together at the top of the value rankings this season. Combined, this year’s Top 10 in pitching WAR had only produced 77.4 wins in their careers leading up to 2024, with nearly 40 percent of that belonging to 2021 NL Cy Young runner-up Wheeler alone.
If it holds — and admittedly, some of the names on the list will inevitably fall off by season’s end — this would be, by far, the most obscure Top 10 list in any MLB season since the Divisional Era began in 1969:
Some of these lists simply needed more time to mature. Tom Seaver and Vida Blue in 1971 still had plenty of future WAR to produce in their careers, as did Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens and Mike Mussina in 1992. Those were the two youngest Top 10 lists in our sample, so it’s not surprising that they would also rank among the least-accomplished of the bunch.
But this year’s list isn’t especially young. In terms of average age, it actually ranks 22nd-oldest since 1969. Garrett Crochet is the youngest member, at age 25, and he would have been the fifth-youngest pitcher on 1971’s list.
Instead, 2024’s list is just… weird. And some of that weirdness almost certainly owes to the many names that are missing, due to the proliferation of arm injuries early in the season. Of last year’s Top 10, No. 1 Gerrit Cole is rehabbing an elbow injury, while No. 2 Blake Snell, No. 6 Zac Gallen and No. 7 Kyle Bradish have been on and off the IL.
In their absence, somebody still has to pitch the innings… and our list of remaining guys have pitched them very well.
So maybe this year’s Top 10 arms will keep shutting down opposing hitters for the rest of 2024 and beyond, causing their presence to make more sense in retrospect. But for now, they’re not the aces we expected to see here, to put it mildly.
Filed under: Baseball
Usually, they just end up injured — a sad truth that has only gotten worse over the years.
I have actually been thinking the same thing lately. Never would have expected guys like Suarez, Lugo, and Houk to be the best pitchers in the league. Did you happen to look at this in terms of WAR/162 or WAR/Start rather than total WAR? Might help eliminate the effect of differing lengths of careers and/or outlier past seasons, and give a clearer comparison of the past versus the present. Really interesting topic though, thanks for writing!
The elevated age of these pitchers is certainly a curiosity. In Steve Jobs' famous Stanford commencement address (worth a read if you have not already), he noted that death is a crucial part of life because it clears out the old to make way for the new. Injuries in sports serve the same function. They force risk adverse front offices to look to younger and cheaper prospects earlier than they otherwise would and new stars are born from this invisible hand.
In this age of omnipresent arm injuries (see Houston's Javier and Urquidy today), it would seem that the churn, like that in life, would be greater and toward more youth - not less. But that seems for now not to be true. Why do we seem to have the older replacing the older? Why is age less of a change agent now than in years past?
Is that a function of earlier ages for TJS where there are fewer top prospects available at typical younger ages for an MLB debut? Is it a function of looking at a pitcher who has already had arm surgery as - real or imagined - embodying less risk than someone who has not? Is it a simple shortage of good young pitchers generally?
Beyond that, what this seems to suggest is that the traditional starter is quickly becoming an endangered species. This trend has of course been somewhat iterative, with the closer concept of a few years ago pushing the third time through the order penalty (TTOP) out for the second starter. The market has spoken in other ways too. Many now say that there is no longer such a thing as a "top pitching prospect" due to injuries, reduced usage and disappointing outcomes.
Still, this feels different not only from a supply standpoint with injuries, but also from a cost standpoint. Consider the total cost of Snell, Cole, Strider, Ohtani, Scherzer, Kershaw, Alcantara and others not pitching - it's mind boggling money and opportunity costs.
It feels like only a matter of time until someone decides to try what Bill James advocated for 45 years ago - and Tony LaRussa tried for a bit - a 3-3-3 rotation - where you have essentially three cheaper long relievers going for 3 innings (45-50 pitches) per game every fourth game. It can be modified to a 3-3-2-1 if you possess a great closer.
While James and LaRussa were both searching for a performance advantage from TTOP avoidance versus the (then) 7-1-1 rotation, today this makes more sense from a financial standpoint by driving down the cost of your increasingly injured and expensive pitching. This list seems to suggest that this approach is very appealing to a GM willing to blaze a trail.
What would be an interesting follow-up here is to look beyond age and prior performance and instead, track the dollars spent per WAR for the top 10 or 15. That sort of trend view over time can matter because if a front office can reduce the cost of its pitching and make replacements for the injured more fungible and less disruptive through a superior structure, they can invest more heavily on the more stable offensive side of the run differential equation.
From a risk standpoint, this sort of new rotation would reduce the concentration of pitching risk and the expense around the traditional starter paradigm. It makes a ton of sense...if anyone has the courage to try it.