MLB fans and media can’t help but start making projections for the upcoming MLB season.
The love for baseball is a really strong thing, what can we say?
The 2023 season just ended, but here we are, fantasizing about 2024 and thinking about potential outcomes and leaders in statistical categories.
Codify Baseball published the most recent Steamer projections for pitching WAR.
WAR means Wins Above Replacement, and it’s a useful stat for the baseball community to have an idea about how much a pitcher contributes to his team relative to the “replacement-level” player.
Here are Steamer’s pitching WAR projections:
Highest projected 2024 WAR, Pitchers (Steamer):
4.9 Strider
4.8 Wheeler
4.7
4.6
4.5
4.4 Gausman
4.3 Nola
4.2
4.1 Valdez, Webb, López
4.0 Skubal
3.9
3.8 Glasnow, Burnes
3.7
3.6 Gallen, Cole
3.5 Fried, Kirby, Peralta
3.4 Castillo, Eflin, Steele
3.3 Luzardo, Senga
3.2…— Codify (@CodifyBaseball) November 22, 2023
Atlanta Braves ace Spencer Strider is projected to lead the league next year with his 4.9 WAR.
Keep in mind that, to calculate pitching WAR, ERA is not used.
FanGraphs uses FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) as the foundation of their WAR stat for pitchers, and Baseball Reference uses RA9 (basically runs allowed per nine innings).
In the case of FanGraphs’ version, pitching WAR loves hurlers who can strike out a lot of hitters, and that’s Strider’s calling card.
This past season, the Braves ace struck out a whopping 281 hitters and led the majors in strikeouts per nine innings.
His strikeout prowess allowed him to finish second in pitching WAR (per FanGraphs) with a 5.5 mark, behind Philadelphia Phillies ace Zack Wheeler and his 5.9.
Strider had a rather elevated 3.86 ERA in 2023, but his 281 strikeouts are loved by FIP and that gave him a pretty nice WAR.
Steamer thinks that Strider will be the league leader in pitching WAR in 2024 by a razor-thin margin.
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