Corbin Burnes, Orioles
Okay, wait, now, all of a sudden, Burnes is starting to look like himself again. Burnes' cutter just hasn't been the same pitch for much of this season, and that's a problem for a pitch he throws as often as most pitchers throw their fastballs. In his words, speaking to TheBalimoreBanner.com, Burnes was "getting too efficient with how I was spinning it, which was making it a [expletive] four-seam fastball."
After a particularly rough August, Burnes made some mechanical adjustments to his cutter and has now gone five starts in a row in September, allowing two or fewer runs, including five one-run innings Thursday against the Yankees. He has 31 strikeouts to just eight walks in the month, and he generated a whopping nine whiffs on 22 swings with the cutter Thursday, one of his best results of the season.
I was pretty much ready to write Burnes off as an ace based on how this season has gone, and now I really have to rethink that. One month shouldn't fundamentally change how you view any player, of course, but in Burnes' case, it's a lot easier to buy into it when he's just mostly just looking like he has in the past. I will note that, prior to Thursday's start, his whiff rate with the cutter was 22.2% in September, better than it had been in any month this season but still an awfully far cry from where it was when he was at his best in Milwaukee when the pitch was typically in the 28-32% range. I don't think it's reasonable to expect him to get back to that level, but if he can be more like 2023? Well, that's definitely a top-five pitcher, though one whose looming free agency is a big question mark for his value.
At this point, I'm thinking he's a top-five pitcher again. Top-three? I'm going to need to see some more playoff dominance from that cutter before I get there.
Gerrit Cole, Yankees
We'll go to the other side of Thursday's matchup, as Cole outdueled Burnes, allowing just two hits and one walk over 6.2 shutout innings against the Orioles. That brings Cole to a 3.41 ERA and 1.13 WHIP for the season, which is even more impressive when you remember that he missed the first few months recovering from an elbow injury. So, why am I so skeptical of Cole?
Well, for one thing, despite increasingly good performances as the season has gone on, he still never quite looked like Gerrit Cole. Even in Thursday's game, he generated just five strikeouts and only eight swinging strikes, six of which came on his four-seamer. That means Cole's various secondaries generated just two whiffs combined, and that's really the concern here. Cole's fastball was actually about as good in 2024 as it was in 2023, but his slider, especially, wasn't even close. He had just a 27.3% whiff rate with the pitch, down from 32.7% in 2023 – which was already down from over 40% in three straight seasons prior.
We already saw some leakage in Cole's skill set in 2023 despite his Cy Young, and that's now two seasons in a row with a drop in strikeout rate. He's remained much better at preventing hard contact, which has helped him overcome it, but I just don't think you can expect a guy who will be 34 next season to bounce back. He can remain an effective pitcher, for sure, but with the recent elbow injury, you also have more red flags here with Cole than ever before.
He might end up a top-12 pitcher when I reveal my way-too-early 2025 rankings next week, but I also can't say I'm especially excited about the prospect of drafting Cole to anchor my rotation.
Luis Gil, Yankees
I haven't checked, but I'm pretty confident no pitcher has seen a bigger innings jump this season than Gil, who went from four innings pitched in 2023 to over 150 by the time he's through. It's not just a massive one-season jump, though; Gil hasn't thrown more than 26 innings since 2021 and has never thrown more than the 108.2 he threw in 2021. To his credit, Gil has remained remarkably effective despite injuries and the mounting innings totals, sporting a 3.50 ERA in the second half of the season with 48 strikeouts in 43.2 innings … albeit with just a 1.443 WHIP and a pretty massive 13.9% walk rate.
Gil is one of the toughest pitchers in baseball to hit, both in terms of quality and quantity of contact, which has helped him overcome his walk issues all season long. But we've got two pretty significant red flags in his profile to account for: The gigantic innings jump and the injury risk inherent to that, plus the worst-in-baseball control. He's mostly pitched like an ace this season, but his future feels pretty ominous. I might not rank him in my top-40 starting pitchers for 2025, as wild as that sounds.
Seth Lugo, Royals
Loyal readers of the Fantasy Baseball Today Newsletter know that I've been a Lugo skeptic all year long. And, for the most part, that's been to my detriment. Even when he has faltered a bit in the second half of the season, Lugo has still provided plenty of highlights – he has a middling 3.94 ERA in 12 second-half starts, but even then, he's had seven starts out of 12 with at least seven innings of work. Lugo's 3.73 xERA for the season suggests he's not nearly as good as his actual 3.03 mark, and I do expect some significant regression. But he's been one of the true workhorses in baseball, a rare thing in today's game, and maybe his kitchen-sink approach can help him continue to outrun his peripherals – for what it's worth, his ERA was nearly a run lower than his xERA in 2023, too. I'm not really sure I buy that as an explanation, but I've been wrong about Lugo all season long, why would that stop in 2025? He's at least a top-40 SP in points leagues.
Joe Musgrove, Padres
When Musgrove was coming back from his elbow injury this summer, I was pretty much writing him off as a Fantasy option. He was coming back from bone spurs, and while that isn't an inherently terrifying prospect on its own, he did acknowledge that he would have to change his mechanics to pitch through the injury, and that's always a scary thing for a pitcher to have to go through. It was perfectly reasonable to suspect that the 31-year-old Musgrove would struggle in his return.
So much for that. After 6.1 outstanding innings against the Dodgers Thursday, he now has a 2.15 ERA in nine starts since returning from the injury, with 57 strikeouts over 50.1 innings. He has, frankly, looked about as good as we've ever seen him before. Which really confuses his 2025 outlook. Because it sounds like Musgrove won't be having surgery on that elbow this offseason, which means there is probably just going to be heightened risk with his elbow – and there's already plenty of risk for every pitcher's elbow.
On the one hand, the fact that all pitchers carry a significant amount of risk of injury means you could argue that fading someone for injury risk doesn't really make a ton of sense if, basically, everyone's baseline level is high, at some point, does it really matter that Musgrove's is a little higher? Of course, that'll all depend on how he's value heading into 2025. From a talent standpoint, I think you can argue pretty convincingly that he could be a top-24 guy. So, downgrading him to the low-end SP3 range of the rankings seems like a fair choice. Will I actually have the guts to rank Musgrove that high, coming off consecutive seasons with less than 100 innings? No, I think I'll be more comfortable with him in the 40 range.
See that? I just talked myself into about a 15-spot drop in the rankings in the span of about 70 words. That kind of sums up Musgrove's outlook.