Fantasy Baseball 2012: Top 6 Starting Pitchers to Target

If you’re looking to build a dominant fantasy baseball rotation, my best advice is to enter a league populated by the lobotomized and select Roy Halladay, Justin Verlander, CC Sabathia and Clayton Kershaw in the final four rounds.

If you prefer to play with sentient human beings, consult the above video containing undervalued starting pitchers.

Most of the players mentioned finished last year with dashboard statistics (ERA, Wins, etc.) below what their peripheral statistics (SO:BB ratio, Fielding Independent Pitching, Batting Average on Balls in Play) would project. The discrepancies between the two indicate that this bunch suffered from bad luck rather than poor performance.

Many of your competitors, however, will not detect a difference between the two.

They’ll note that Zack Greinke posted a 3.83 ERA last year and value him accordingly, never minding that his high BABIP suggests an inflated mark. They might even place a higher premium on, say, Kyle Lohse (3.39 ERA) despite the blinking, red statistical warning signs that say he should regress.

(OK, maybe not Kyle Lohse, but you get the bigger point.)

Lucky for you, those misconceptions are fantasy currency. Your competitors are the market. It doesn’t matter what stat nerds or front office people think—it’s what they think that determines value.

Identifying and exploiting prejudice is the crux of fantasy ownership.

With both pitching depth at an all-time high and statistical analysis reaching new levels of sophistication, those pursuits have never been more fruitful.