An Opening Day Slate Short of Familiar Names, but Hardly Without Promise

If you were searching for evidence of the changing of the guard in the major leagues — or of the occupational hazards faced by starting pitchers — look no further than this year’s slate of Opening Day hurlers. As the 2024 season launches with what was supposed to be a full schedule on Thursday — the Brewers-Mets and Braves-Phillies games have both been postponed until Friday — the absences of so many of the game’s most renowned pitchers due to injuries and other issues loom large. If there’s good news, it’s that we still have plenty of top arms on tap.

Consider, for example, the fact that neither of last year’s two Cy Young Award winners, Gerrit Cole and Blake Snell, will be taking the hill on Thursday. After being diagnosed with nerve inflammation and edema earlier this month, Cole — one of just two pitchers to throw at least 200 innings in both 2022 and ’23 — will start the year on the injured list and won’t even begin throwing again until early or mid-April. A best-case scenario has him returning around the start of June; in his place, the Yankees will start Nestor Cortes. Snell, who reached free agency after winning his second Cy Young last year with the Padres, didn’t even sign with the Giants until March 19 and isn’t built up enough to be on the Opening Day roster, let alone take his turn. Instead, Logan Webb will get the call for San Francisco for the third straight season, though that might have been the case even if Snell had signed in a timely fashion.

This is more or less a once-every-couple-of-decades occurrence. According to ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian, the last time neither Cy Young winner started the following Opening Day was in 2005. That year, despite their hardware, both the Astros’ Roger Clemens and the Twins’ Johan Santana yielded to teammates with longer tenures with their respective clubs, namely Roy Oswalt and Brad Radke. Before that, you have to go back to 1982, when neither the Dodgers’ Fernando Valenzuela nor the Brewers’ Rollie Fingers (a reliever) started.

In fact, for the Thurdsay and Friday openers just two former Cy Young winners are scheduled to get the ball, with 2021 NL winner Corbin Burnes making his debut with the Orioles and 2020 AL winner Shane Bieber taking his fifth straight Opening Day start, the majors’ longest active streak. By comparison, last year eight former Cy Young winners started their teams’ openers, with Bieber and Burnes joined by Snell (who also won the AL Cy Young in 2018), 2009 AL winner Zack Greinke, two-time winners Jacob deGrom and Corey Kluber, three-time winner Max Scherzer, and ’22 NL winner Sandy Alcantara. In 2022, there were four past winners (Bieber, Burnes, Greinke, and 2021 AL winner Robbie Ray), and in ’21, five (Bieber, Greinke, deGrom, Scherzer, and three-time winner Clayton Kershaw) kicked things off.

The octet of former Cy Young winners who started last year’s openers has scattered to the four winds in unsettling fashion. Alcantara and deGrom are both recovering from Tommy John surgery, and Scherzer from back surgery; meanwhile, Kluber just retired and Greinke remains unsigned. The attrition from last year’s Opening Day set is even more acute when one considers less decorated pitchers. Germán Márquez and Shane McClanahan are both recovering from TJ as well, and Shohei Ohtani won’t pitch this season after undergoing some kind of UCL reconstruction about which his agent, Nez Balelo, said, “There’s no name for this surgery. It’s completely different than the last time.” But wait, there’s more (or less): Eduardo Rodriguez will start the year on the injured list due to a lat strain, and Julio Urías remains a free agent and the likely recipient of a substantial suspension due to domestic violence allegations. Throw in Cole and that’s 11 of last year’s Opening Day starters who are out of commission by one route or another.

That’s gonna shake things up, to say the least. Have I mentioned that the top two active pitchers in terms of Opening Day starts are on the shelf? Justin Verlander, whose 12 Opening Day starts is the most of any hurler in the Wild Card era but who hasn’t taken one since 2020 (his only one of the season before undergoing Tommy John surgery, as it turns out), is merely behind schedule this spring due to a shoulder issue. If all goes well in his recovery from Tuesday’s bullpen session, he’ll start the season on a minor league rehab assignment. Kershaw, who’s made nine Opening Day starts but just once since 2018, is recovering from shoulder surgery that could sideline him until August.

Given so many outages, 15 of the probable Opening Day pitchers are making their first such starts. While I can’t confirm whether that’s an all-time record, I’m reasonably confident that is, given that the previous Wild Card era high is just eight, set in 2013 and matched in ’18, ’20, and last year. If you throw out the combined total of six Opening Day starts made by the Padres’ Yu Darvish and the Dodgers’ Tyler Glasnow, both of whom opened the season for their respective teams on March 20 in Seoul, the other 28 starters have thrown a total of just 27 Opening Day starts, fewer than Verlander, Kershaw, and Scherzer combined.

Speaking of Darvish, he’s the only one of this year’s Opening Day starters with more than 100 career wins (103, to be exact). That’s yet another reminder of a perfect storm that’s combining generational change with the various forces that are increasingly working against starters already, both in terms of reduced workloads and injury-related attrition. Other than Kershaw and Greinke both being poised to surpass 3,000 strikeouts when they eventually pitch (they need 56 and 21, respectively), it’s going to be awhile before any active hurler reaches a major milestone — not just 300 wins, but 200 (Cole is next in line at 145).

Anyway, let’s meet our contestants:

It’s an interesting group, to say the least. You can see from the highlighted cells the nine players who started last year’s first game as well; all but Burnes did so for their current teams. From among the pitchers with previous Opening Day experience, Montas and Wood are both making their debuts with their new teams à la Burnes; Montas is doing so after being limited to just 1.1 innings for the Yankees last year due to shoulder surgery, and in the season’s penultimate game at that.

Among the first-timers, we have a couple of pitches who’ve come into big money this month in Wheeler and Bello. Wheeler — part of a three-headed Zack/Zach/Zac Attack for Opening Day — just inked a three-year, $126 million extension, the most lucrative ever in terms of average annual value. He got the nod instead of Aaron Nola, whose string of six straight Opening Day starts is ending. That total of half a dozen is still enough to place him fifth among active pitchers behind the four Hall of Fame-bound hurlers; don’t weep for him, as he’s coming off his own big pay day, having inked a seven-year, $172 million free agent deal last November.

As for Bello, he signed a six-year, $55 million extension, the second-largest ever for a pre-arbitration pitcher behind only that of Strider. Toward the end of last season, the Red Sox looked forward to Chris Sale starting the opener, but they traded him to the Braves, and earlier this month they lost another projected Opening Day starter in Lucas Giolito, who — stop me if you’ve heard this one — needed Tommy John surgery. Good grief.

On the subject of one pitcher’s misfortune being another’s opportunity, we have Cortes and Quintana, both of whom are coming back from injury-shortened seasons. Cortes, who was limited to 12 starts and a 4.97 ERA due to hamstring and rotator cuff strains, is among this year’s first timers. Quintana, who’s second among this year’s Opening Day starters with 92 wins, made 13 starts with a 3.57 ERA after returning from a stress fracture in his rib caused by a benign lesion that required surgery. He’s making his first Opening Day start since 2017 as a fill-in for Kodai Senga, who suffered a moderate posterior capsule strain in February and will likely miss the first six weeks of the season. Berríos, Eovaldi, and Mikolas are among those who owe their Opening Day roles to injuries as well. Berríos is filling in for a behind-schedule Kevin Gausman, while Eovaldi is starting instead of the sidelined deGrom and Scherzer, and Mikolas is subbing for Sonny Gray, the marquee offseason addition to the Cardinals’ rotation.

Despite the notable absences, this year’s crop of first-timers includes a great deal of promise. The 25-year-old Strider is coming off a monster season in which he led the majors in strikeouts (281), strikeout rate (36.8%), and wins (20); led the NL in FIP (2.85); made his first All-Star team; and placed fourth in the Cy Young balloting. Per our Depth Charts, he and Wheeler are tied for the highest projected WAR among pitchers at 5.0, and he’s our staff’s favorite to win this year’s NL Cy Young. The 26-year-old Skubal, who didn’t debut until July 4 last season following flexor tendon surgery, pitched like an ace in the second half, totaling 3.3 WAR in just 15 starts thanks to improvements to his four-seamer and changeup. The 29-year-old Eflin, 26-year-old Luzardo, and 28-year-old Steele are all coming off breakout seasons in which they set career bests in numerous categories including strikeouts and WAR (186 and 4.8 for Eflin, 208 and 3.7 for Luzardo, and 176 and 4.9 for Steele). All three are projected to rank among the top 20 starters in WAR according to our Depth Charts. The 27-year-old Peralta, who’s coming off a career-high 210 strikeouts, is projected to rank 22nd.

With the exceptions of Strider and Skubal, perhaps none of those first-time starters has as much buzz surrounding him as Ragans. Thanks to his upper-90s fastball, Bugs Bunny changeup, and a newly added slider, he put up a 2.64 ERA with a 31.1% strikeout rate in 12 starts after being traded by the Rangers, who had used him exclusively as a reliever in 2023, to the Royals.

Though he’s considerably less hyped, one other starter worth noting is Crochet, particularly amid the otherwise bleak outlook on Chicago’s South Side. The 11th pick of the 2020 draft has pitched exclusively out of the bullpen since reaching the majors later that year, both before and after his ’22 TJ. Thus, he’s making his first major league start on Opening Day. Per MLB.com’s Sarah Langs, he’s just the ninth pitcher in the past 110 years to do that, with Valenzuela (1981) and Tanner Scheppers (2014) the only ones to do so since the end of World War II.

Including the holdovers, 14 of the top 20 pitchers in our Depth Charts projections are getting the call on Opening Day, with four of the bypassed six (Nola, Max Fried, George Kirby, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto) ceding to teammates also ranked in this range. Another six of the scheduled starters rank in the 21–40 range. So while this group may be somewhat less familiar and decorated than we’re used to, they’re still anticipated to be the some of game’s very best, and they should leave us plenty to enjoy as the 2024 season gets underway. Happy baseball, everyone!