MLB Starting Pitchers Today

Daily MLB starting pitcher board

Every confirmed starter for the day with strikeout rate, earned run average, fielding independent pitching and expected fielding independent pitching, alongside how the opposing lineup has performed against that hand.

Why FIP and xFIP beat ERA for forecasting

Earned run average measures what happened, and a large share of what happened was the defence behind the pitcher and the sequence in which hits arrived. Neither of those is under the pitcher's control and neither carries forward reliably.

Fielding independent pitching strips that out and looks only at strikeouts, walks and home runs, which are the outcomes a pitcher actually controls. It predicts a pitcher's future earned run average better than his current earned run average does, which sounds strange the first time you hear it and holds up consistently.

Expected fielding independent pitching goes one step further by normalising home run rate, since the share of fly balls that leave the yard swings heavily year to year. A pitcher with a good version of that number and a poor earned run average is usually about to improve.

Matching a starter to a lineup

Strikeout rate is the most useful single number for props and for DFS, because strikeouts are the least dependent on the defence and the most stable across starts. Innings expectation is the constraint on it, since a pitcher pulled after five has a hard ceiling no matter how good he is.

Then read the opposing lineup against that hand rather than overall. A lineup that is average overall but poor against left-handed pitching is a strong matchup for a lefty, and that split is where most of the exploitable difference sits.

Frequently asked questions