Ranking Pitchers by Win Projections

Awesome reader Gavin emailed a question in today. He writes...

In a real simple season long pool. All it is, is u take 20 pitchers, u get 1 point per win and whoever has the most accumulated wins at the end wins.

Have you seen the Halladay/Ruiz ad?

Any suggestions on the 20 (particularly sleepers)?

People can own the same guy, so likely everyone will own CC, Halladay etc.

I'm not going to spend much time shouting about why predicting pitcher wins is such a crapshoot.

Briefly, it's so unpredictable because luck and unknown future circumstances are such key factors to pitching results, especially with Wins. Not only does a pitcher have to pitch relatively well, on average, but he must also receive enough support from the team's offense, defense, and bullpen to gain a Win.

He may not look like it
here, but Felix is the King

As a recent example, simply look at how well Felix Hernandez pitched in 2010 to win 13 games, compared with how much worse John Lackey or Jon Garland pitched winning 14.

To really do the work, it would be important to factor in a team's projected run support, and maybe assign some value to their team defense projections - if there are such things.

Keeping things simple, what I did for Gavin was averaged out the projected Win totals from Bill James, ZiPS, Marcel, RotoChamp, and Fangraphs fan crowd-sourcing.

Here are the results, remember this is just for pitcher Wins - not overall roto value, in a Top 50 format...

1. Roy Halladay: 18 wins
2. C.C. Sabathia
3. Jon Lester: 17 wins
4. Justin Verlander: 16 wins
5. Tim Lincecum
6. Cliff Lee
7. Ubaldo Jimenez: 15 wins
8. Felix Hernandez
9. David Price
10. Zack Greinke: 14 wins
11. Matt Cain
12. Dan Haren
13. Jered Weaver
14. Roy Oswalt
15. Tommy Hanson
16. Cole Hamels
17. John Danks: 13 wins
18. Clay Buchholz
19. Clayton Kershaw
20. Josh Johnson
21. Francisco Liriano
22. Tim Hudson
23. Ricky Romero
24. John Lackey
25. Yovani Gallardo
26. Chad Billingsley
27. Trevor Cahill
28. Max Scherzer
29. Colby Lewis: 12 wins
30. Ted Lilly
31. C.J. Wilson
32. Derek Lowe
33. Phil Hughes
34. Mark Buerhle
35. Carl Pavano
36. Ricky Nolasco
37. Matt Garza
38. Randy Wolf
39. Gavin Floyd
40. Gio Gonzalez
41. A.J. Burnett: 11 wins
42. Carlos Zambrano
43. Anibal Sanchez
44. Dallas Braden
45. Josh Beckett
46. Randy Wells
47. Wade Davis: 10 wins
48. Brett Myers
49. Clayton Richard
50. Brett Anderson

We purposefully omitted Mat Latos and Chris Carpenter due to future injury concerns. If you like one of them, feel free to consider them for yourselves.

We did not penalize Zack Greinke and expect him to have a very strong season after sitting out the first few weeks.

Thanks to Fangraphs and Baseball Think Factory for the statistics!