2024 Positional Power Rankings: Starting Rotation (No. 16-30)

Another FanGraphs article, another low Orioles ranking. But this one is a lot better than it would have been without Burnes, which is why we liked Baltimore’s decision to trade for him so much. Burnes is a staff anchor; you can expect a big chunk of high-quality innings from him, something the Orioles didn’t have the luxury of counting on last year. It’s one thing to have some arms work out, and quite another to come into the season expecting it; the latter is much more comforting from a roster-building standpoint.

It’s a good thing, too, because the team’s best pitcher from last year is already on the shelf. Bradish was magnificent in 2023, with pinpoint command and a nasty slider headlining his rise. This winter, he experienced elbow soreness and after receiving a PRP injection, he’s trying to use rest and recovery to avoid Tommy John surgery. We’re penciling him in for a 50% workload, but there’s certainly some volatility there.

Rodriguez could help pick up that slack. After a bumpy start to his debut season, the former top prospect buckled down and started fastballing his way to success. He might not be a 200-inning workhorse – he made 31 starts across all levels last year and only got to 163.1 innings – but you should expect the ones he does throw to be high quality.

That leaves a bevy of speculative options to fill out the rotation. Kremer and Means have a lot going for them; they’re prototypical mid-rotation starters, perfect for keeping the team in games until their high-powered offense can deliver a knockout blow. (Means is still working his way back from an elbow injury that kept him out of last year’s ALDS, but he’s expected to debut early in the first half of the season.) Irvin, Wells, and Zimmermann all profile as lesser versions of that player, and I like the odds of the Orioles turning at least one of those guys into a nice fourth starter. I’d even be willing to bet on two of them working out; Baltimore has done a good job with pitching development recently. With Burnes in the fold, I like how this staff looks a lot, and I think it’ll be a fearsome playoff operation if Bradish can return at full strength.

I mean, come on. How do they keep doing it? The Rays have a pretty solid pitching staff yet again, and that’s with Shane McClanahan injured and Tyler Glasnow in Hollywood. It’s also with Springs and Rasmussen on severe innings restrictions. Two years ago, these probably would have looked like random names picked out of a hat, not a good playoff-caliber rotation.

Eflin is pretty much an ace. He stopped walking people last year and started striking them out instead. Civale struck out 30% of opposing batters after coming over in trade from the Guardians. Littell is outrageously good for a converted middle reliever. None of these guys feels durable enough for a big innings projection, but Tampa Bay doesn’t need that from them, it merely needs competent volume.

That’s because the reinforcements are quite good, albeit injury prone. Bradley, Pepiot, and Baz all have huge strikeout potential, though Bradley and Baz have missed a good chunk of starts due to arm issues. Springs and Rasmussen will both return this year, and they were both incredible the last time they were healthy. The Rays have done a historically great job of helping pitchers achieve better-than-predicted outcomes, but they don’t even need that to happen here; this backup group has plenty of talent on its own merits. It’s just a matter of availability.

Combine that high-octane potential with a bunch of innings-eaters at the top, and the Rays are well set up to get through the season while building a terrifying October rotation. That’s just the way they set it up – even if they’d prefer to have one more elite arm at the top to make everyone else’s job easier.

This is an impressive ranking for a team that just traded their ace. Luckily for them, Peralta is an excellent pitcher as well, though a cut below the Burnes/Woodruff peak we’d become accustomed to. Peralta is less fastball-dominant every year, instead mixing in a lethal slider and ascendant changeup. The next step in his game is working deeper into starts to provide the bullpen savings that the previous generation of aces offered. The Milwaukee model involves heavy bullpen usage when the team’s top starters aren’t on the mound.

There Brewers weren’t blind to the risks of Peralta as a staff ace, though. They signed innings-eaters to back him in the rotation, so the bullpen can hopefully get some rest at least some of the time when the no. 2-4 starters go. Miley, Rea, Junis, and Ross are all theoretically capable of giving you six or seven acceptable innings from time to time, though only Miley has much success doing it recently. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the other three mix-and-match into the bullpen as the year wears on in multi-inning, medium-leverage roles. Ross in particular looked excellent when he threw shorter outings and added velo in minor league action last year.

Of course, those guys might end up in the bullpen because the next group of Brewers starters is knocking on the door. Gasser is a command-and-secondaries type with a cutter that will hopefully neutralize platoon splits. Hall is a stuff monster who could be a closer right now, but he has so many plus pitches that the Brewers are betting on him harnessing at least a few and turning into a Peralta-esque starter. I concur with that bet and think he might be their second-best arm by year’s end. Ashby had a similar projection before missing all of 2023, and I think Milwaukee will give him at least a decent shot at starting before turning him into a full-time reliever for health reasons. In a world free from budgets, you would never choose to lose Corbin Burnes, but I think the Brewers are set up quite nicely to weather his loss, a credit to their front office.

You’ve heard about Elf on the Shelf – what about Grumps on the Bump? The Cardinals assembled a roster of crotchety old men in an attempt to recover from last year’s pitching debacle. They won’t exactly be telling the other teams to get off their lawn or bulk buying Centrum Silver on road trips – Lynn, the oldest of the group, is 36 – but by baseball standards, this is a venerable group.

It might also be a pretty good group. Gray offers exactly what the Cardinals need – some strikeouts, some command, some grounders, and some length. The guys behind him offer at least one of these qualities. Mikolas still has impeccable command and volume, though opponents are getting better at putting the ball in the air against him. Gibson is Mikolas-esque, only with a few more strikeouts and a few more walks. Lynn had a nightmare 2023, but he’s generally a good bet for 150-180 huffing, puffing, mid-rotation innings. Matz has been a swingman in his Cardinals tenure, but he’s probably at his best eating more innings with the rest of the olds (he’s only 32 — baseball age is weird).

I’m not particularly enthused about Liberatore, who seems headed for life as a sinker/slider reliever, but the rest of the youth movement on this team is exciting. Thompson will start in the rotation with Gray injured, and while he’ll probably get bumped out shortly, his curveball is the kind of lights-out offering that can paper over some other so-so pitches if he refines his command. McGreevy looks like a future mid-rotation arm. Graceffo and Robberse have dynamite arsenals if they can gain some command. This is a sneakily exciting group considering the staid top of the rotation.

It’s easy to convince yourself that this is a solid rotation, even with Lucas Giolito’s absence making it a thin one. Bello looks like a mid-rotation mainstay after he markedly improved his command in 2023, and he’ll be in Boston for a long time after signing a six-year extension this winter. He’ll probably never run up huge strikeout totals, but his sinker/changeup approach leads to a ton of grounders and he’s not giving away free bases nearly as often as he used to. That’s a pitcher everyone would love to have in their rotation, though probably not as a number one on a playoff team.

Maybe that’ll be Pivetta, then. His newfound sweeper turned him into a dominant force in the second half of the year. A lot of that work came in relief, but he made five starts in September and compiled a 2.37 ERA with matching peripherals. Not every pitcher can simply add a sweeper and become great, but it certainly seems like that might be the case with him.

Any of Crawford, Houck, or Whitlock might be a nice complement to those top two. Heck, two or even three of them might be. Crawford’s cutter – delightful! – turned him into a menace last year, blowing away his previous major league results. Houck looked excellent before 2023 and is merely a bounce-back away from being a nice mid-rotation arm. Whitlock is right on the starter/reliever border for me, which explains his light innings projection (we have him down for 28 innings in relief). But the reason he’s on that borderline is because he’s capable of dominance, not because he’s flailing for relevance. The question isn’t whether he can blow the competition away; it’s whether he can do it multiple times through a lineup.

There’s a lot to like in that group, but there’s no truly bankable arm. No one is projected for an ERA below 4.00, excluding Whitlock’s 3.99 split projection (he’s really good as a reliever). No one looks likely to turn in a dominant season, which means no one can pick up the slack if holes open up elsewhere. You can make a rotation out of all average guys, but not if one of them falters. That puts a ton of pressure on health and consistency. The more that Criswell and company see the field, the worse this will go. Winckowski is probably the class of that group, but it’s a thin bunch. This is a rotation crying out for an ace.

Here’s one where we could be way off. Bieber is a suitable top-of-the-rotation arm if he’s right, but his peripherals took a sharp dive in 2023. His two fearsome breaking balls missed fewer bats, and that’s most of the game with Bieber. He could be an ace or a league-average starter this year and neither would surprise me.

The crop behind him, meanwhile, might be great. Bibee, McKenzie, Allen, and Williams all have a reasonable claim as the team’s next ace. They’re all between 24 and 26, and were all top 100 prospects before debuting in the majors. This isn’t a matter of hype over production, either; each has a career major league ERA below 4.00, and their projections are clustered together too.

Williams and McKenzie have the highest upside, in my mind. They have explosive stuff and the strikeout-laden track record to back it up. They’re hardly without risk, though. Williams had issues locating in 2023, while McKenzie missed nearly the entire season with an elbow sprain and looked diminished when he returned.

But if he can keep throwing his hellacious slider a quarter of the time without batters catching up to it, Bibee might leave them in the dust. I’m surprised his projections aren’t better, in fact; I think his median outcome is the best of this quartet. That leaves Allen, who throws an alien changeup that makes his whole arsenal play up. I really don’t know what to make of him, but the results in 2023 speak for themselves.

Carrasco, the next man up, is Cleveland’s previous ace, and he’ll get some starts early on because Williams will start the season on the IL with a (hopefully) minor injury. Carrasco had a pretty bad season with the Mets last year, and as nice a story as his return to the team is, I expect his leash to be quite short. That just leaves Curry, who looked acceptable as a long reliever last season. There isn’t a lot of depth, and Bieber’s uncertain future weighs down the team’s overall projection. But don’t sleep on the core four youngsters; Cleveland’s pitching machine seems to be churning out arms as well as ever.

This doesn’t feel like a bad rotation to me. Skubal is a borderline top 10 starter in baseball, and some of his rotation mates are pretty exciting too. That said, I can’t exactly understand the way the Tigers built their roster over the winter, so I won’t argue with their place on the list. They’ve combined a number of pitchers of uncertain health with a number of pitchers of uncertain skill. The result is that you might end up needing to backfill innings from hurt starters, only to end up with too little quality to do so.

Skubal was outrageous last year – in 80.1 innings. He’ll go as far as his health allows him, and we’re already projecting him for more innings than he’s ever thrown in six professional seasons. Mize has fallen a long way from being the first overall pick in 2018; he missed 2023 recovering from Tommy John surgery and hasn’t looked great even when available. Manning was ineffective and also injured last year, and his strikeout numbers have been poor in the majors, though he’s young enough that you can still hope for a breakout thanks to a few plus pitches. Maeda isn’t a prospect like the other names I’ve listed, but he’s been good for 100-ish innings in a good year recently, so I wouldn’t count on much more. Those four all feel like health risks, and two might be talent risks too.

Flaherty seems like a better bet to put up innings. The question is how good those innings will be, as he’s pitched to a mid-4.00s ERA and FIP across the four seasons since his dominant 2019. He might be suffering from throwing too many pitches with no overpowering options, but I’m not exactly sure which ones he should cut and which ones he should feature. Olson might be a better option than Flaherty at this point; he throws a kitchen sink pitch mix and even has a true out pitch in his changeup. Throw Gipson-Long into this mix, if you’d like; he’s a less-heralded prospect, but he looked good in 2023. The point is, some of these three will likely have to eat innings from some of the previous three, and I’m not sure how good those replacement innings will be. One caveat: If top prospect Jackson Jobe is ready sooner than expected, he’d add a dynamite arm to the rotation right away.

Honestly, I expected the post-Ohtani Angels to fare worse in these rankings. Detmers and Sandoval are both nice third starters, no doubt; you can pencil both in for 25-30 five-and-dive starts a year, with ERAs around 4.00 depending on batted ball luck. Pitchers like that are valuable these days, even if they aren’t aces. There are simply a lot of innings to fill, and having two guys who have done it for multiple years with stable results is nothing to sneeze at.

Canning missed all of 2022 with a stress fracture in his back, but looked effective last year. He might join that top group before long as a 150-inning mid-rotation standby. Anderson looked just like that a year ago, but he had a nightmare 2023 and is now 34, so there’s a decent chance that the end of the line is nigh. That would be a shame, because Anderson’s deception-based game is fun to watch when it’s working.

That would be a passable 2-5 for even a good rotation. Unfortunately, it’s 1-4 for the Angels and the depth behind them is a problem. Silseth is a miscast reliever whose fastball got crushed without the extra giddy-up he had in the bullpen. Plesac had a 7.55 FIP in 94.2 innings last year… in Triple-A. His big league results were also underwhelming. Rosenberg would be organizational depth for most teams. Suarez and Daniel look reliever-ish to me. This group feels unfinished, like they kept a spot warm for an ace and a sidekick, only to sign neither.

Oh boy, the innings projections here will make your head spin, until you consider that someone has to take the ball every day. Quintana getting 160 frames? Not very frequently of late, though I think he’s better on a rate basis than the projections here. How about 138 for Severino? He’s barely pitched since 2018 and looked 100% done last year with the Yankees. Senga hasn’t even started throwing yet thanks to a strained shoulder, so 130 innings feels optimistic. That’s a lot of the rotation to be unsettled before the season even starts, especially given how bad the group is projected to be even if they hit these innings totals.

Credit where credit is due, I like both Manaea and Houser as innings-eaters. Freed from his weird role with the Giants, I think Manaea is a league-average arm. Houser wore out his welcome in Milwaukee, but his results have been acceptable, and his innings were constrained more by available starts than by injury. They’ll both have to carry a lot of weight this year, which doesn’t leave the team much leeway for those injuries up above.

What’s worse, there are injury concerns among the replacements already. Peterson won’t be available until the summer, assuming no setbacks in his recovery from hip surgery. Megill is nothing more than a swingman, and he might be pressed into service far more than that this year; he split time between rotation and bullpen last year and put up a 4.70 ERA and 4.96 FIP. Lucchesi and Butto are no great shakes. I think there’s significant downside risk here, even from a low starting point.

Ragans hive, rise up! This ranking is going to be wrong. Our projections can’t possibly capture the transformation he made last year. A WAR total twice this high wouldn’t surprise me; so long as he’s healthy, he’s one of the best pitchers in baseball now, at least in my biased eyes. That alone would bump the Royals up to an average rotation if the rest of the group does as well as expected.

I feel good about Lugo and Wacha hitting those targets. They each turned in workmanlike seasons in San Diego last year, re-establishing themselves as solid starters, and signed similar deals in Kansas City. I’m more optimistic than our projections on both players, in fact, though I agree that they probably won’t hit 180-inning workloads.

That leaves Singer and Lynch as intriguing wild cards. Singer looked great in 2022, but his stuff took a big step backwards in 2023, and as a sinker/slider guy, he wasn’t exactly blowing hitters away in the first place. He got absolutely clobbered, walked too many batters, and couldn’t seem to buy a strikeout. I’m worried that his recent performance will continue. Lynch has been injured and ineffective in equal measure, and his slider hasn’t lived up to his prospect billing, but maybe a year of pitching next to Ragans will help him unlock something.

If one of those five falters, the alternatives aren’t good. Marsh looked overwhelmed in 74 big league innings last year, and though he’s starting the season ahead of Lynch in the pecking order I don’t expect that to last. Lyles is a replacement level innings-eater. If those guys pitch big innings, something has gone horribly wrong with a staff that has some real upside at the top.

I’m not ashamed to admit when I have to look someone up, and Jones is the first top-five starter on this list I had to go to the data for. He’s a fast-rising Top 100 prospect, which explains it at least a little bit, and I have to say, the more I see, the more I like. I have him as the second-best option in this rotation, never mind the projections. He has nasty stuff and throws hard, though he doesn’t really have a third pitch yet. He might be the next never-heard-of-this-guy rookie to excel.

I went right to Jones because the rest of the Pirates rotation does not excite me. That’s not an exclusively bad thing. Keller is the good kind of boring; he does everything pretty well and makes a ton of starts. Pérez and Gonzales verge on bad boring; neither of them has strikeout stuff, which means they’re letting batters put a ton of balls in play and hoping it works. It very much didn’t in 2023 for either of them. I have more faith in Pérez figuring things out, because he’s been good more recently and because Gonzales was hurt for most of 2023, but I also think that whatever happens, neither will be particularly exciting.

I may be giving short shrift to Ortiz, who’s interesting but might be a high-leverage reliever long-term. Skenes will be up at some point – I think he’s already good enough to pitch in the bigs – to raise the ceiling of this group. But that’s it for interesting reinforcements as far as I’m concerned. Let’s just say that if Priester were named “Jared Jones” instead of “Quinn Priester,” I think he would have gotten a lot less prospect buzz.

The last four teams on the list are a big step below everyone before them, but against my better judgment, I’m intrigued by this group. Fedde was the MVP of the KBO last year. Not his team MVP, not the KBO’s Cy Young equivalent – the MVP of the league. He has a new sweeping slider and seemingly improved command. He’s never been even an average pitcher stateside, but hey, maybe this new change is the real deal. Flexen also put in a stint in Korea, though in 2020, and he was downright atrocious in 2023. I think his best shot is a bullpen role, but look, the Sox aren’t a complete team, so guys will have to play out of position.

Soroka is hoping to get his career back on track, and while I’m fearful that it won’t pan out, the raw talent is still in there somewhere. I’m also irrationally excited about Thorpe, a soft tosser who carved up the minor leagues in his first professional work last year before flying around the league in trades this offseason. Is it a bad omen that he had a 0.00 ERA with the Padres this spring and a 27.00 mark with the Sox? Definitely maybe! Iriarte and Shuster also came over in trades this winter, but I think they’re a bit further off from attracting my interest in the bigs.

The prospects who were already in the org last year are also fun. Nastrini has big stuff and little command. Crochet is definitely not a prospect anymore, but injuries have limited him to just 73 innings and zero starts in his four years in the bigs, so he’s still new and shiny in that sense. Eder has hellacious stuff, but he’s barely pitched in the last three years. I’m very excited to see how he might look when the rust wears off. The White Sox rotation is a weird and mostly bad mix, but it might be a fun one at times.

This just isn’t a reasonable big league rotation. It’s full of fourth and fifth starter types, and with innings concerns to boot. I simply don’t buy Sears’ projection as the staff ace; he pitched a complete season last year and didn’t impress, posting a 4.54 ERA only thanks to an unsustainably low BABIP. The heady days of nasty stuff in the Yankees system seem a long way off now; he didn’t miss many bats with his tweener slider and his fastball got absolutely tattooed.

Blackburn, Stripling, and Wood would look right at home as the fifth starter on a contender, and I assume that at least one of them will have that role by season’s end. I think that’s smart business for Oakland, whose prospect hurlers aren’t quite ready for the big leagues yet. Even if two members of this trio are on the downslope of their careers, they’ll soak up innings in the process and might return a prospect or two in trade.

The upside in this rotation lives at the bottom. Medina is already injured and has reliever risk, but he has elite strikeout potential if he can put it all together. Boyle’s stuff is off the charts, it’s just that his command is often off the plate. Waldichuk is starting the season on the IL, but he’s shown three plus pitches at various times in his career, and he’ll get plenty of time to hone his skills with little competition incoming. I don’t think this rotation will be anywhere near good this year, but if the A’s trade one of the veterans and find one good starter out of the prospects, they can consider 2024 a rotation success story of a sort.

Checkmate, all you dopes who thought Gray would never be an ace. He’s starting for the Nats on Opening Day. Now sure, he’s projected for an ERA near 5.00, but he’s a no. 1 starter, at least technically. He’s also still intriguing, even if his big league results have been quite poor so far. I really like his curveball and cutter, I just don’t like his flat-plane fastball that’s been repeatedly torched throughout his career. Gray and the Nats surely agree, so hopefully they have some kind of adjustment planned.

Gore is another intriguing option, though I wouldn’t read too much into our projections here; his career has been wonky, full of complete delivery overhauls and mysterious shutdowns, so projecting based on his minor league record is difficult. He has great stuff, no doubt, it’s just a matter of command and repetition. He’ll get all the chances he can handle, so he’s got that going for him.

I won’t sugarcoat it: The rest of the rotation is not big league caliber. Everyone other than the deep minor league cuts is projected for an ERA over 5.00. Irvin and Rutledge don’t look ready for the majors. Corbin is living on borrowed time. Williams is just a warm body. The four of them are mainly on the staff because someone has to throw these innings. Cavalli is the most intriguing of the prospects. He’s recovering from TJ, so don’t expect many innings, but do expect a bodacious curveball and some Pitching Ninja GIFs that will cheer Nats fans up.

Don’t worry! Those ERAs are inflated by Coors, so it won’t be quite as bad as the numbers look. But also, do worry! The Rockies have the worst starting rotation in baseball, and I don’t see an obvious light at the end of the tunnel. Freeland is the headliner here, at least in theory, but his peripheral numbers tailed off alarmingly last year, and they weren’t gangbusters to begin with. His fastball dipped below 90 mph, he struck out just 13.9% of opposing hitters, and that’s no way to live at altitude.

Quantrill is cut from a similar cloth. He throws a little harder, but he doesn’t strike anyone out either, which means Rockies fielders are going to have their work cut out for them. Hudson makes a third strikeout-averse starter for the team, and I guess the idea here is to keep the ball on the ground, but he hasn’t even had good run prevention numbers at low elevation in front of the Cardinals defense. I don’t see this ending well.

I’ve been a Gomberhead since he was a prospect tearing up the Fall League, but he too has seen a disastrous decline in his strikeout rate, from 23.2% in 2021 to 14.4% last year. Feltner struck out a relatively robust 18.9% of hitters, the exact same mark as Lambert, who accomplished some of that as a reliever. Maybe those guys are the best options here! But they’re not good options, all the same. The thing I’m rooting for most in this mostly hopeless group is a return to form for Márquez. He had Tommy John surgery last May and won’t return until late in the year, but here’s hoping he comes back as strong as ever. The Rockies could use him.