Fantasy baseball roundtable – Who is the No. 1 pitcher?

We’ve still got about a week until spring training games get underway, but the planning for the fantasy baseball season has already officially begun!

With that in mind and with many a fantasy baseball manager starting the process of figuring out which players to target in their drafts, we posed yet another seemingly simple question to the intrepid duo of Tristan H. Cockcroft and Eric Karabell. Read on to find out what they had to say about it.

Who is the No. 1 pitcher for fantasy baseball in 2023?

Tristan H. Cockcroft: Here’s where Shohei Ohtani makes a more compelling case, but I find it tough to rank a pitcher who will probably still have his workload managed enough to fall short of 30 starts and 200 IP ahead of some of the other candidates.

In points leagues, I’ll take Gerrit Cole. Did you know that he’s not just the only pitcher to have made at least 30 starts and struck out at least 240 batters in each of the last four full seasons (2018-19, ’21-22), but he also has 22% (4-of-18) of the total such seasons in that time span? Points-league success is almost entirely about innings pitched and strikeouts — and track record is important when projecting those two categories.

Corbin Burnes did have 33 starts and 243 strikeouts in 2022, though, and that tempts me since he seems more proven now. Still, the New York Yankees are more likely to roll Cole out there every fifth day than the Milwaukee Brewers are with Burnes.

Eric Karabell: Fair points there, and Cole may be the safest ace for fantasy purposes, but it’s hard to simply ignore his rather elevated 3.39 ERA over the last two seasons. He wasn’t unlucky, either. Cole’s BABIP was .269 last season. Yeah, he wins and misses bats and he keeps runners off base (although home runs remain a problem) and, to be fair, I rank him No. 2 among pitchers, but I have shifted to Burnes as the top option.

Burnes has actually finished considerably ahead of Cole on the ESPN Player Rater in both of the last two…