AL West Preview: The Starting Rotations

Injuries punctuate the starting rotations of two of the Mariners main rivals in the division.

The Mariners rotation is the best in the division, even after you account for all the injured pitchers on the Astros and Rangers. That gives them a distinct advantage as the season starts. A reminder: we’re comparing the three major player groups on each division rival to each other: the lineups, the starting rotations, and the bullpens.

Los Angeles Angels

Despite scooping up all the pitching prospects the draft has to offer like a sugar-crazed eight-year-old mowing down toddlers at the church Easter egg hunt, the Angels rotation won’t look much different from last year, with one glaring exception. The Haloes halfheartedly continued their six-man rotation after it was revealed that Shohei Ohtani wouldn’t pitch again in 2023, but are scrapping it entirely with Ohtani’s departure. Stepping into the #1 role as Opening Day starter will be lefty Patrick Sandoval, but he’ll need to improve on a subpar 2023 where his K-BB ratio took a big hit to maintain that ace status, nominal as it might be. His underlying metrics aren’t great and he’s a strong candidate for regression due to his meek fastball and struggles with commanding the zone. Fellow lefty curveball merchant Reid Detmers probably deserves the #2 spot, coming off a 2023 where he struck out over a quarter of batters faced, a career high, but 34-year-old Tyler Anderson has “veteran experience” going for him, so, you know, tough choices.

Chase Silseth and Griffin Canning bring up the rear, and are arguably more interesting than any of the pitchers at the top of the rotation. A 2021 draft pick, Silseth got bitten by a spiked HR/FB rate last season and will need to prove that was just a spate of bad luck; he’s also better off pitching out of the rotation rather than the bullpen, where he was less effective. Canning, after missing all of 2022 with a back injury, is a sleeper who could wind up as the WAR leader for this rotation; he finished the season as the Angels’ best pitcher down the stretch, and as his velocity has ticked back up, so have his strikeouts. The Angels also have Zach Plesac, Kenny Rosenberg and José Soriano as Triple-A depth options should injury or ineffectiveness strike any of the rotation members, which it probably will, because this is the Angels we’re talking about. —KP

Houston Astros

While the Astros lineup looks like it can go toe to toe with the best in baseball, the formerly formidable Astros rotation isn’t quite the dominant force it’s been in years past. At the top, Framber Valdez is a popular preseason Cy Young pick and for good reason. Last year Valdez upped the usage on his changeup and found significantly more whiffs on the pitch, helping him to a modest uptick in an already dominant strikeout percentage, but there is some concern with how often he got hit hard when batters did impact his pitches, although his ability to keep the ball on the ground helps mitigate some of that concern.

After Valdez, however, the rotation fills up with question marks quickly. Cristian Javier’s fastball lost a tick of velocity last year, but the real problem was his slider, which wasn’t at all the whiff-getter it was in 2022. Hunter Brown’s ERA of 5+ doesn’t match his underlying metrics, suggesting he got somewhat unlucky in his first full season, but there are still questions about how he’ll perform as a pro. J.P. France, aka The Lesser AL West J.P., has five pitches but none of them grade out super-highly and he got hit around pretty hard in his debut year after batters figured out how to pounce on his fastball. Shoulder inflammation slowed down his spring, and he just threw his first spring training start last week. Depending on health, the Astros might have to use depth options like Brandon Bielak or Ronel Blanco for spot starts early in the season.

The Astros should get some later-season reinforcements from the IL, starting with team ace Justin Verlander, who should be ready to go around April. Oft-injured hurler Lance McCullers Jr. is targeting a July return, and Luis García, who had TJ surgery last year, should also be back around the All-Star Break. José Urquidy was shut down with a forearm strain during spring training, and is yet to resume throwing. The Mariners have a real opportunity to gain some ground on the Astros in the division if they can take advantage of a weakened Houston staff early in the year and bank some wins in May. —KP

Oakland Athletics

The 2023 A’s lineup was bad in a run-of-the-mill kind of way; it was the pitching that turned them into a team so bad that you could only pity them because laughing felt too mean. Do you know how bad your rotation has to be to surrender 1.60 HR/9 while playing half your games in the Colosseum? That number is 16% higher than the second-most HR/9 from an Oakland rotation in the past three decades–a period that includes the steroid era and the juiced ball. The 2023 A’s rotation will single-handedly screw with the park-factor adjustments for the next three seasons. It was so bad that I honestly believe John Trupin would have been an improvement.

It had to sting extra hard to watch Jesús Luzardo flourish in Miami, after trading him for two months of Starling Marte in an unusually chips-in move at the 2021 deadline to try to make one last run with that core before selling them off. (Which didn’t work. (God, I miss Addie.))

After using 24 players to start games last season, the 2024 A’s rotation will at least have more stability. They brought in Alex Wood and Ross Stripling on one-year deals that combine for more than a third of the payroll. You wouldn’t traditionally consider either of them to be “good” exactly, but they’re both capable. Over the past three seasons, Wood has a pitcher slash line of 4.41/3.85/3.91 (ERA/FIP/SIERA). Last year saw an alarming decrease in strikeouts and increase in walks, but it looks a little fluky to me. Stripling has been neither as good nor as durable, and has a dinger problem to rival the ‘23 A’s. But things are just so miserable in Oakland right now that he’s still an upgrade.

Behind them you’ve got JP Sears and Paul Blackburn, the only parts of the ‘23 rotation that worked. Sears turned out not to be the strikeout machine we thought he was when we all got mad about the Mariners trading him for Nick Rumbelow. But he made some improvements after his rookie year, and if he could get his contact problem under control, he’d actually be good enough to be a starter on a team better than the A’s. Blackburn was acquired by Seattle in the same deal with the Cubs for Daniel Vogelbach, and then promptly traded to the A’s in exchange for Danny Valencia. This information isn’t strictly useful to understanding the A’s rotation, but it is funny. After he stopped throwing his fastball so much, Blackburn had the best season of his career last year. He’s doing kind of a poor man’s version of peak Marco Gonzales now, where he commands a lot of pitches well and insists on using a cutter that’s not actually that great, only Blackburn uses a slider instead of a change up as his out pitch. I think he’s likely to be worth 1-2 WAR again this year.

Whichever one of Luis Medina and Joe Boyle can get his command figured out first will be the fifth starter. (It’ll for sure be Boyle in April while Medina recovers from a knee injury.) The other will probably get just as many innings as the sixth starter, given the injury concerns with Wood and Stripling.

There’s not much help beyond that. Their shiniest prospect, such as it is, is Royber Salinas, but he’s probably at least another season away from seeing MLB time. Ken Waldichuk is still around if they need someone who can physically throw a baseball and knows the rules. After that, they really might give John a call. —ZAM

Texas Rangers

The Rangers’ starting rotation is an exercise in delayed gratification and patience. At their peak, they should have Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, Nathan Eovaldi, Tyler Mahle, and Jon Gray contributing high-quality innings; that’s assuredly a playoff caliber starting five. Of course, three of those five pitchers — deGrom, Scherzer, and Mahle — are currently slated to start the season on the Injured List and their various timelines to return to major league action currently point towards after the All-Star break. So Texas will head into the season with Andrew Heaney, Dane Dunning, and Cody Bradford filling out the rotation, hoping they can hold down the fort until the reinforcements arrive. And as this article was being written, the Rangers signed Michael Lorenzen to a one-year deal to provide some additional depth for both the rotation and the bullpen.

Eovaldi will be tasked with leading the rotation for now. His success has always hinged on his fastball velocity; early last season he was averaging around 96 on his heater but he wore down as the season progressed and ended up closer to 94 by the end of the year. The Rangers managed his workload down the stretch and he returned rejuvenated during their run to the World Series. Like Eovaldi, Gray’s season was a Jekil and Hyde affair; he was great during the first half of the season with a 3.29 ERA through the All-Star break, but he fell apart afterward and eventually succumbed to a forearm injury in September.

Heaney and Dunning are perfectly capable back-end starters who are probably a little out of their depth as mid-rotation stalwarts. The gains Heaney enjoyed during his half-season breakout back in 2022 with the Dodgers didn’t carry over into last year, though he did spend the entire season relatively healthy. His fastball-heavy pitch mix will always lead to an elevated home run rate, and without all those additional strikeouts from his time in Los Angeles, he was merely average on the mound. Dunning had the most successful season of his career last year, pitching more than 170 innings with an ERA under four. As an innings-eating starter who relies on his command over raw stuff, that’s probably the best the Rangers could ask for. Heaney, Dunning, and Bradford all have experience pitching out of the bullpen which should serve them well once the reinforcements return.

deGrom managed just six starts with the Rangers after signing his mega deal last offseason before going down with his second Tommy John surgery. There’s no questioning his talent when he’s on the mound but he hasn’t pitched in a full season since 2019. The recovery rate for pitchers with multiple elbow surgeries is spotty at best so getting him back on the mound would be a huge success. Scherzer lasted a little longer in a Rangers uniform after his midseason trade from the Mets last year; he made eight starts for Texas before hitting the IL with a herniated disk in his back. He had been struggling through one of the worst seasons of his career before he was sidelined. His strikeout rate was down two points, his walk rate up three, and his FIP was a career-high 4.32.

The Rangers strategy is filled with risk that could have plenty of rewards in October, but it puts tons of pressure on the pitching staff early in the season to put the team in position to make a postseason run during the summer. There’s no guarantee that their trio of injured pitchers will return to full effectiveness during the season. There are a few pitching prospects in the organization who could see some major league time this season should things go awry, chief among them being Jack Leiter, the first overall pick from the 2021 draft. —JM