Fantasy Baseball Week 3: Trade values for Rotisserie and H2H suggest patience with a struggling Gerrit Cole

The top of the starting pitching ranks looks kind of like a mess right now. With the obvious caveat that most starters aren’t even three appearances into their season, anyone who spent an early-round pick on the likes of Gerrit Cole, Shane Bieber, Julio Urias, Zack Wheeler, Lucas Giolito, Robbie Ray, or Aaron Nola probably isn’t thrilled about their early returns so far. And they aren’t alone.

It’s especially frustrating to watch your aces struggle when offense as a whole has been down around baseball. Entering play Wednesday, the league ERA is 3.83, compared to 4.27 last season; it’s even lower than the 3.99 mark we saw last April when we seemingly had a no-hitter every week. We’ve seen signs that, whether due to changes in the production of the ball or the introduction of the humidor across all 30 parks – or perhaps some other factor, like the weather – the ball isn’t traveling as well as it has in recent years. Watching your ace struggle in that context is even worse.

But I’m here to remind you that it isn’t time to panic just yet. That’s not necessarily equally true for every player, of course, but generally speaking, we just haven’t seen enough action so far to justify changing your opinion about any player dramatically. Take Cole, for example. Surely, plenty of Fantasy players had concerns about making him the No. 1 pitcher off the board after his struggles following the sticky-stuff crackdown last year, as he had a 4.15 ERA from June 1 on, when the crackdown started. Cole was, of course, still a very good pitcher in that stretch, but he failed to average six innings per start and was no help in ERA while sporting a 1.20 WHIP – solid numbers, but not difference-making stuff.

And now here he sits, with a 6.35 ERA and 1.412 WHIP through three starts. He has yet to get through six innings in a start, and the two runs he allowed in 1.2 innings in Tuesday’s start against the Tigers were actually the fewest he’s allowed in any of his first three starts. This has been a legitimately bad start to the season for Cole.

But trading him right now would probably be a mistake. I’ve dropped his value just a bit in the trade values ​​charts, pushing him down to where Max Scherzer and Corbin Burnes are rather than in a tier of his own among starters, but that doesn’t mean I’m abandoning ship.

What would cause me to? Well, you can look at someone like Ray or Bieber for a better example of a pitcher. I’m legitimately worried about. Velocity isn’t everything, but it’s often the most direct sign we get of something being wrong with a pitcher in a small sample size. And, while Ray and Bieber have both had very concerning starts in that regard, Cole is right where he usually is, sitting among the hardest throwing starters in the game.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to be concerned about with Cole. His struggles post-June last season might have been a bit overstated — you’ll hear some folks say he was bad, and that wasn’t the case at all — but he wasn’t a first-round caliber pitcher, either . He was more prone to command issues and homers after the crackdown last season, and we’ve seen similar trends early on. Which is why I’m less comfortable saying I’d definitely take him over Scherzer or Burnes than I was even three weeks ago.

But that’s not the same thing as saying I think you need to trade Cole before the bottom falls out, because I don’t think there’s much risk of that happening. Within the context of the other early-round pitchers, I’m still a lot more worried about Ray, Bieber, Urias, Wheeler, and Nola, none of whom have the same floor or ceiling as Cole. It’s actually kind of hard to find an early-round pitcher who has really helped their cause in the early going – Justin Verlander is one obvious example, and he’s arguably the fastest-rising player in my trade charts over the first few weeks.

Which is to say, as frustrated as you are with Cole, it could be worse. There are no injury red flags here; he just hasn’t pitched well. That’ll happen sometimes, and if Cole had a three-start stretch like this in August, you wouldn’t bat an eye. The track record here is long enough that you should still bet on him being among the best pitchers in the game. If not necessarily the best.

Here’s how I’m viewing the current landscape at starting pitcher and beyond for both H2H points and Roto leagues as of Week 3:

Week 3 Rotisserie Trade Value