Pitching 3D: Changing Hands

The first week of the baseball season is the most volatile in fantasy, with the curtain pulled on roster strategies, reliever pecking orders and last-minute swaps from the rotation to the bullpen. I'll never forget 2014, when I leaned on "sleepers" Jim Henderson and Nate Jones late in drafts with the intent to lock down my saves category, only to see both players' jobs get usurped as soon as the ball dropped on Opening Day, compiling a grand total of zero saves combined. We spend months poring over stats to establish just the right ranking system of players on our draft board, and then the world is turned upside down for a handful of players whose roles suddenly change as the starting gun goes off on the regular season.

This season was not without it's share of drama, from $95 million man Pablo Sandoval taking a rest with the other pandas on the BoSox bench to Tyler White winning the regular gig at first base for the Astros (as those in OBP leagues rejoice). Let's take a look at some of the pitching jobs that changed hands right out of the gate.

Astros Closer

Houston's big trade of the off-season was the one that brought Ken Giles to the Astros, a deal that cost a five-player package highlighted by Vincent Velasquez and Mark Appel. Giles had totaled just 16 saves with Philadelphia from 2013-14, but with a 1.56 ERA and 151 strikeouts against 36 walks, it was widely presumed that he was designed for the gig. When a non-contending team trades a shutdown reliever to a contender who lacks a closer, all the writing is on the wall.

Manager A.J. Hinch was coy about his closer situation coming out of spring training, and the implication that he would play each situation on a case-by-case basis threw fantasy managers into a minor panic for fear of dwindling save totals. Then Giles was brought into the eighth inning of the first game of the season, promptly gave up a home run to the first batter he faced, and watched from the bench as Gregerson registered the first save of 2016; panic heightened. Thursday night, Giles was tagged for a pair of runs including another homer, and one can feel his fantasy stock plummet to the pit of their stomach.

Winner: Luke Gregerson
Loser: Ken Giles

Blue Jays No. 3 Starter

Aaron Sanchez has been something of an enigma for the last couple of years. A former top prospect, he has gone through major mechanical changes and been yo-yo'd back and forth between the starting rotation and the bullpen. He spent the last two-and-a-half months of the 2015 season pitching in relief, and between starting and relieving he compiled a 3.22 ERA with an unimpressive 61:44 K:BB ratio in 92.1 innings.

For a team with title hopes, the Blue Jays have a Swiss-cheese rotation that is deeply reliant on a pitcher that threw fewer than 50 innings last season, regular season and postseason combined. The esteemed Marco Estrada is starting the season on the DL, though he is due to come back this weekend; R.A. Dickey is there to log innings and little else; and the Jays spent $36 million to find out if J.A. Happ can channel last year's Pirate curse for three more years. Gavin Floyd seems to have won the last seat in the Toronto rotation, but it remains to be seen if he has anything left in the tank.

At the end of the day, the decision to grow Sanchez's exposure couldn't have been too difficult, and by the time it all shook out he was starting the Jays' third game of the season. The hard-throwing Sanchez has a fastball that averaged 95 mph last season, a value that held relatively firm whether in short stints of relief or longer stretches as a starter. His secondaries will determine his longevity in the rotation, but the first test (Tuesday at Tampa Bay) went very well: 7.0 IP, 1 ER, 5 hits, 8 K, 0 BB.

Winner: Aaron Sanchez
Loser: Drew Hutchison, Jesse Chavez

A's Closer

Remember that part in Moneyball where the A's take some relievers off the scrapheap and turn them into gold for a bargain, a.k.a. the Chad Bradford paradigm? Yeah, they've abandoned all that. It started back in 2012, when $9 million of the team's $54 million budget was spent on the reliever duo of Brian Fuentes and Grant Balfour. Two years later, the A's shelled out $15 million (of an $82 million payroll) to add Jim Johnson and Luke Gregerson to their bullpen. They pulled the trick again this past offseason, though to a lesser degree, spending almost $11.5 million of their $87 million payroll on bullpen acquisitions Ryan Madson and John Axford. Rather than grow relievers on the farm or acquire rough diamonds on the cheap, the A's have been shelling out premium dollars to let other people's pitchers lock down their high-leverage innings for years.

Entering 2016, the closer situation in Oakland was tenuous at best, as reflected in the no. 27 ranking (among relievers) of leading Athletic Sean Doolittle on the composite rankings at RotoWire. A shoulder injury had limited Doolittle to just 13.2 innings in 2015, and as a one-trick pony who rides his mid-90s fastball more than 90 percent of the time, the southpaw represents significant risk. Both Axford and Madson have closing experience, though Madsen hadn't seen full-time work in the ninth-inning role since 2011, prior to his Tommy John surgery. The A's have never been shy about shaking things up at the back end of the bullpen, and sure enough the first Oakland save situation went to Madson. Doolittle had yielded a run in the ninth inning of a tie game the day before, and Madson didn't disappoint when given the keys to the ninth, allowing one hit and striking out a batter to preserve a 2-1 victory. Time will tell if Madson holds onto the job or if Bob Melvin chooses to ride the hot hand, but given the way that closer gigs tend to work, Madson will probably have to lose the job through poor performance.

Winner: Ryan Madson
Loser: Sean Doolittle

Indians No. 5 Starter

The Indians went into camp with their top four starters seemingly locked up while Cody Anderson and Josh Tomlin battled it out for the job of fifth starter. Both Tomlin and Anderson pitched very well in abbreviated time last season, but fantasy leaguers were hoping that Tomlin and his microscopic walk rate would win the competition over Anderson and his microscopic strikeout rate. Instead, the Indians shocked the baseball world by keeping both in the rotation and jettisoning Trevor Bauer to the bullpen.

This move has several ripple effects, the most damning of which is how it impacts Bauer's future as a starting pitcher. He threw 176.0 innings last season and was set to cross the 200-inning threshold, particularly if he could shave some pitches-per-inning and trim a walk rate that exceeded 4.0 BB/9 in his career. And there's the rub; Bauer might have a starter's repertoire with an overabundance of arrows in his quiver, but he is all stuff and no location, foregoing pitch command in the name of velocity and movement. Perhaps the Indians have decided that it's a profile that works better in smaller doses, with visions of Bauer as an elite reliever who excels in situations where he can go full bore and his vulnerabilities won't be exposed. If some team were brave enough to highlight a two-inning reliever, one who pitches the seventh and eighth innings in buckets of 35-50 pitches per outing, then Cleveland would be one of the teams to do it and Bauer is one of the top players to try it with. He still has a very intriguing future on the mound, but his fantasy value for 2016 took a serious hit.

Winners: Josh Tomlin, Cody Anderson
Loser: Trevor Bauer

Yankees Closer (temp)

When the 30-game suspension was handed down to Aroldis Chapman, it meant that another of the elite Yankee relievers would be collecting the saves for the first month of the season. The news added some certainty to Chapman's case, and for one of Andrew Miller or Dellin Betances - two pitchers worthy of a late-draft addition simply for Ks and ratios – there was suddenly going to be a handful of saves in the offing. It wasn't a surprise when Miller, who served as primary closer last season, was tabbed for the ninth-inning role, but then he broke his right (non-pitching) hand on a comebacker in spring training.

The initial thought was that Miller would be back in 4-to-6 weeks, knocking him out for the entire window of Yankee saves, so for a few days his draft stock took a hit while 130-K man Betances watched his own stock receive a boost. We all know the story by now: the sudden burst of value for Betances was fleeting, as Miller was deemed fit to pitch (if not field) and resumed his takeover of the ninth. It wouldn't be the Bronx without some drama.

Winner: Andrew Miller
Loser: Dellin Betances