2015 in the NL West: Aces high?

We move on to the starting pitchers in the NL West. Who has the best ace? Hint: it's not Arizona.

Introduction

I had to change up the method for the starting pitching a bit, though it's still based on the Fangraphs projections. Unlike the position players, there isn't such a clear demarcation of role e.g. primary and backup. If you lose your #2, say, then your #3 would become your #2, your #4 would become your #3, and so on. Life's way too short for that. Also, the Fangraph projections have a sharply-varying number of innings, which clearly plays into the total overall value for each starting pitcher.

So, what I did was, first, decide who were the five expected members of the rotation for each team in the majors, based on the innings thrown. I then re-scaled the WAR to be for 200 innings pitched across the board. Now, better pitchers will throw more innings, but this shouldn't affect the order much, since better pitchers will also be worth more "WAR per inning," which is basically what I'm using here. You can find the table of all 150 starting pitchers which resulted here, should you be interested. I ordered a rotation by this, so team's #1 pitcher may or may not who is generally regarded as that [translation: you wanna sit down before reading who our ace is gonna be!].

Note: the rankings and star ratings are based on this overall list: so players are being compared against all starting pitchers, not just, say, other #3 pitchers. If you're in the top 20% (thirty pitchers), you get five stars; the next 20% (31-60) get four stars, and so on all the way down. If talent was evenly distributed, then you would find each team with a five-star pitcher, a four-star pitcher and so on down to all 30 with a one-star pitcher. So you should look to see if a team has a pitcher with more or less stars than expected for his slot, to judge whether a team is strong or weak there. All clear?

#1. Dodgers: Clayton Kershaw (overall rank: #3, 4.8 WAR/200)

This is my unsurprised face. Kershaw ranks top in overall WAR, in part because he's projected to throw 214 innings this season, but in WAR per 200, he comes in fractionally behind both Chris Sale and Felix Hernandez. Kershaw is only 26, but has already won three Cy Young awards and an MVP. In the integrated era, less than a handful of players have piled up more WAR to his age, almost all throwing more innings - so barring injury, seems likely to become the most dominating pitcher of our generation. Of course, we can always hope for a Lincecum-like inexplicable ineffectiveness, like what we saw on one glorious night at Chase last year...

#2. Giants: Madison Bumgarner (#13, 3.4)

After his mildly-impressive performance in the 2014 World Series (though it was no Big Unit), Bumgarner returns to anchor the San Francisco rotation. There is some concern over what impact his heavy workload might have: He threw 217.1 regular season innings, then another 52.2 during the playoffs (the most ever in a single post-season), for a total of 270 innings. That's an awful lot - by recent standards, at least, since RJ threw a total of 291 in his World Series campaign. He did okay in 2002, as I recall - merely producing the best single season by a National League pitcher since 1973. Damn, the D-backs own the top five spots on that list.] I think Bumgarner will be okay.

#3. Padres: James Shields (#34, 2.7)

San Diego's shiny new acquisition, the jewel in their very active winter is... expected to be okay, I s'pose. But there are 33 pitchers in the majors predicted to be more effective over 200 IP this year, one of the reasons I'm glad we didn't put all our eggs in the Shields' basket. Pitching in Petco will help his raw ERA, and at least this year of his contract is fairly cheap ($10 million), so his production should be reasonable value. It's more the rest of the deal which I'd be concerned about if I was a Padres fan, since his salary more than doubles for 2016 and beyond. Still, a far cry from the time whee Shields was demanding a 'Zach Greinke deal'. Missed it by that much: only $72 million.

#4. Rockies: Jorge de la Rosa (#39, 2.6)

Signed to a two-year, $25 million deal in September last year, and you can't blame them for wanting to lock him up since, as our friends atPurple Rownoted, de la Rosa has pitched better at Coors than on the road over the past four seasons. They reckon it's due "to the way he controls his breaking ball and mixes up his pitches," but whatever the reason, he's an impressive 44-14 lifetime there. The contract covers his age 34 and 35 seasons, so I probably wouldn't have gone any longer than two seasons. My major concern might be durability: over the past five years, he has averaged only 19 starts per season, though much of the lost time was due to TJ surgery in June 2011.

#5. Diamondbacks: Trevor Cahill (#78, 1.7)

Whhaaaaaaatttt? I hope you took my advice above about sitting, or at least, that you didn't bang your head too hard on the way down. I can see where this comes from, as Cahill's K-rate soared last year: he fanned 8.5 per nine innings, compared to only 5.9 for his career to that point. So if he can maintain this and simply not walk 4.5 per nine, the potential is there. But there's more to it than dropping the word "simply" in a sentence. Given we're paying him $12 million regardless, I imagine he will start in the rotation, and hopefully his BABIP will regress from the hefty .356 figure shown last year. If not, I expect Dave Stewart to have a short leash, given the number of alternatives available.

Conclusions

There's nothing here we didn't know: the Diamondbacks don't have anyone who projects as remotely close to being an ace. In fact, they don't seem to have anyone who projects in the top half of major-league starters [there are a couple of candidates who might, except they weren't predicted to have enough innings to get into the rotation for this analysis. More on those later]. I think we have a fair amount of potential upside, whether through developing youth or bounceback (Cahill and Jeremy Hellickson), but the key word there is "potential", and that's by no means a sure thing. The rotation is clearly the biggest question-mark going into the season, and concerns are understandable.

	ARIZONA	COLORADO	LOS ANGELES	SAN DIEGO	SAN FRANCISCO
First base
Second base
Shortstop
Third base
Left field
Center field
Right field
Catcher	CENSORED
Starter #1
Starter #2
Starter #3
Starter #4
Starter #5
Closer
Bullpen