How To Stream Starting Pitchers To Win Fantasy Baseball Championships

Streaming starters is one of the more inexact sciences in fantasy baseball, but if you utilize this strategy to the fullest, you can end up winning a fantasy championship in nearly any league. What is streaming, and how exactly do you stream starters, you ask? Lucky for you, I will show you how to utilize this strategy to gain an (unfair?) advantage on your opponents.

Streaming starters starts out with understanding what is valuable in fantasy baseball. As you may or may not know, a good batting lineup in fantasy baseball is much more valuable than a good pitching staff, at least when you come out of your draft. One key principle to remember is that good pitching is ALWAYS available on your waiver wire. Knowing this, drafting solid hitting in the first six-twelve rounds of your draft is crucial (more on that in a future post). Streaming starters is taking advantage of this fact, and constantly moving starting pitching in and out of your lineup to improve in the pitching rotisserie categories.

First, open up your league and note an important rule: are there inning maximums or minimums in your league? If your league has innings maximums, there is a limit to how you can carry out this strategy. If there is no limit, then you are definitely in business. In addition, look to see if there is a “maximum roster moves” limit in your league.

After noting any innings minimums or maximums, go to your waiver wire and look at the quality of the starting pitchers available. Sort starting pitchers by the ratios (ERA, WHIP) if you can set the filters to a specific number of innings pitched. If not, you can sort starters by strikeouts.

Compare the pitchers available by a general overlook of the K-BB ratio. Are there some starters out there that have a good K-BB ratio? Make a note of these pitchers, only looking at the statistics from the entire current season.

Now, go and sort the pitchers by last three-five start statistics. Look at the pitchers that have pitched well as of late and make a note of these pitchers as well. Are their K-BB ratios at a good level? A 3-1 K/BB ratio is an ideal ratio.

Finally, return to your roster and identify the lowest level pitchers on your squad. Two to three mid-tier starting pitchers are a good number for streaming, but you can adjust and use more or less, depending on your needs.

Take a look at the probable pitchers for the next two or three days. Identify good values according to the list you made, or by recent statistics. Do not consider the team the prospective streamed starter is playing against. Instead, look at the opposing pitcher, and the prospective streamed starter’s recent statistics. If the K-BB ratio is solid, consider rostering that pitcher in place of one of your mid-tier pitchers on your team.

In a separate post, I will explain why the opposing team does not matter. Simply put, any starting pitcher can beat any opponent on any given night.

If you have any questions regarding this technique, please feel free to email me or leave a comment. Your comments are welcome anyway, so please leave one if you have an opinion on this post!

If this is your first visit to my blog, please subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!