Picking Pitching Staffs

Hi everyone, it's Zeus again, and today I will attempt to shed some light on how I go about picking my staffs, particularly on days when there isn't a clear cut choice.

Before we get to that, I want to state this one fact: On any given day in BBC, anything can happen, and the results of such a day shouldn't alter your strategy that you have to apply day in and day out. If you pick all the right matchups for your hitters, and you even choose the most obvious staff, sometimes it won't work out. No matter how bad a day ends up, you should still push through with your strategy, not go off the wall, give up and try something crazy.

With that being said, here's the logical step by step approach I try to use when picking the best pitching for a given day.

From most important priority to least:

1a) Stud
1b) Opponent
2) Streak
3) Strikeouts, Opponent Strikeout Potential
4) Home/Away
5) NL/AL
6) Righty / Lefty P

For now just ignore #'s 2 through 6. Let's look at how the caliber of the pitcher can be just as important as the caliber of the opposition. To illustrate this, think of Justin Verlander facing a strikeout prone team, at home, with how hot he's been lately. The team he's facing happens to be the Texas Rangers. Do you still take him? Probably not. The Yankees or Red Sox? Absolutely not. So while it's very obvious not to pick against very good teams, it should be just as obvious to take against very bad teams.

So at this point hopefully you've got a stud or at least a good pitcher against a bad team.
If you're not clear cut yet, you've obviously got it narrowed down to a few staffs.
The number one tiebreaker at this point should be how hot each starting pitcher has been. I look as far as the last five games to determine this. Keep a watchful eye for implosions too. A 2.2 IP start in the midst of a few good ones should raise some flags.

Sometimes your choices have been equally hot/cold, so move on to strikeout potential for both sides of the ball. As we all know, K's can go a long way towards a good score, and it is quite important for determining your pick. However it shouldn't fall higher or lower than at this point in the priority list. Also if one of your choices K's 4 per 9 inning, and the other K's 5 per 9, just ignore the strikeout factor. You should only consider this when the differential is high enough to make a difference.

As far as home and away staffs, people tend to give this a lot more importance than it truly holds. For me it falls after strikeouts as far as importance goes. Yes, a staff should feel more comfortable at home, and they do get the assured 9 innings instead of 8. But you can get into a lot of trouble ignoring other factors and going out of your way to pick a home staff. Be wary of home/road splits, but also be careful not to put too much importance into it.

The extra position batter (DH) in the American League should sway you sometimes to take an NL staff, but at an even rarer rate than home/away should. There's not much to say here, except that if you get to this point, just take solace in the fact that AL bests the NL in just about every offensive category (and even strikes out less, so far in 2009). GO NL over AL at this junction.

If you've reached the bottom of the barrel and you still can't make the decision, take the righty. Most hitters bat right and picking a lefty just gives them an added advantage. There should be almost no situation in which you would use L/R as a tiebreaker, although I personally have used it before.

To recap, consider the caliber of each pitcher and each opponent. This should be enough to guide you about half the time. Then in this order: K's, hot/cold, home/road, AL/NL, L/R; consider the other choices and make the right decision.

Hopefully, this will help you make better PS choices from this point forward. Thanks for reading and good luck!



** As a footnote, I'd like to point out this post comes on the day after I mostly ignored my own rules by picking Halladay over Lincecum to the tune of a -4. The Giants were facing a lesser opponent, and Timmy has a much higher K/9 than Roy. I also ignored AL/NL rules. My only defense is that Roy had been riding a much hotter streak than Timmy lately, and the fact that he did leave due to injury. **