Starting Pitcher Matchup Ratings

Find out which pitchers have the best (or worst) matchups each day of the fantasy baseball season.

What makes or breaks a SP's matchup?

Baseball's a wonderfully complex game of stats and confidence. If a starting pitcher does way better at home, it could be for a variety of reasons: heavy pitcher's park (eg, the dimensions and weather at Oracle Park), home bed advantage, mound tailored to his needs, fan/family support, etc. Fact is, it's nearly impossible to pinpoint the "why" (even if you asked the pitcher). However, for fantasy baseball purposes, identifying and playing those trends goes a LONG way towards a successful season.

In addition to the more subjective reasons mentioned above, tangible factors like pitcher vs batter stats, temperature, wind (direction), humidity and the umpire behind home plate all play a big role. Our SP matchup tool above consolidates all the key stats and trends... tosses it into our matchup model and generates a Confidence Score (0-100). Just like at school, 90 to 100 is an excellent matchup and so on.

Finally, if you're looking for a more batter-specific perspective, we have a separate daily matchup page that breaks down all the key stats for each batter in a starting lineup.

Icons and abbreviations explained...

• Sc Our Confidence Score for each starting pitcher (max of 100) - specific to the date/game being viewed.
• lineup click to see the BvP stats for each batter in the opposing starting lineup
• weather hasn't been collected yet
• weather forecast for first pitch (hover over for details)
• stadium has a fixed roof or is closed due to poor weather
• 0 wind direction and strength in mph (pointing up = center field)
• HRF HRForce (abbr HRF) is our weather index that predicts how many more (or less) HRs could be hit due to weather (temperature, rain, wind, direction, elevation, etc)
• qAB percentage of plate appearances that resulted in a hit, walk or deep count
• HH% percentage of plate appearances that resulted in a line drive (hit or out)
• more in the last column, the link to our full batter v pitcher page that includes our Ownage Chart, matchup ranks, at-bat logs, predictions and more

Do home plate umpires really make a difference?

Yes! Umpires are human and they develop tendencies over time. Maybe the way they position themselves behind the catcher or just how they perceive borderline pitches, some tend to call slightly more balls or strikes. Over time, that results in better or worse counts for batters... and changes the probabilities of outcomes (eg., OPS levels are way higher on a 3-1 count vs 2-2).

Monitoring who's calling pitches for your SP can help round out decisions. For example, if you're on the fence on whether to start a SP and a super pitcher-friendly ump is behind the dish, lean towards the start. Umpires are usually announced a few hours before first pitch - as that happens, they're added to the "Ump" column in the table above and incorporated into our Confidence Score. Check out all the umpire factors to familiarize yourself with their tendencies.

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