We’re now into the final month of the fantasy baseball season and that means we need to shift the way we manage our starting pitchers. In truth, we really should have been doing that for a few weeks now, but with most starters only set to make four or five more starts in the 2024 season, we need to be managing on more of a week-to-week mindset rather than a Rest of Season mindset.
To help you do that, I’m going to rank and break down my favorite streaming matchups each week from here until the end of the year. Below you’ll find multiple tables that rank streaming starting pitchers based on those I have a strong preference for, those I’m fairly confident in, those I have some hesitation about, and those I’d only stream if I’m desperate. Within the tiers, you can make some changes based on your own needs. If you need strikeouts more than ratios, you can bump up the two-start pitchers over the pitchers with one good matchup, etc.
Some of the rankings will also be influenced by future matchups. For example, if I have two starters really close for this upcoming week, but one of them gets an elite matchup the following week and the other is in a matchup I want to avoid, then I’d prefer to add the pitcher I’ll use for two straight weeks because that makes my team better in the long run. This is the time of year when we need to be ruthless. If you’re not going to start a pitcher for two weeks, move on. If a pitcher has been great for you but now has bad matchups (hello Bowden Francis), move on.
Your decisions will change based on your league type and settings, but I’ll do my best here to give you the information that will help in your formats. As is usual with my articles, a streaming starter pitcher is rostered in less than 50% of Yahoo formats, so just keep that in mind as we’re going through.
Offenses to Attack
Before we get into our rankings, just a quick note about the offenses we want to attack. I used FanGraphs team stats over the last month, searching for metrics like wRC+, strikeout rate, OPS, etc., and narrowed down the list of offenses to the ones that have struggled in those areas.
To stream starting pitching, we want to target pitchers going against the White Sox, Angels, Marlins, Pirates, Mariners, Rays, and Rockies on the road only. Think of these as HIGHWAY OFFENSES – not stopping at all.
I also am more than comfortable using pitchers against the Tigers, Giants, Cardinals, Nationals, and Reds when they’re on the road only. Think of these as GREEN…