Navigating this era of limited starting-pitching workloads and bullpen specialization -- 2022's 32.9% quality start rate, by the way, is the third-worst since World War II, barely behind 2020's 29.0% and 2021's 32.6% -- alone presents challenges aplenty for fantasy managers. Sweating individual pitch counts in our daily planning is tough enough, but don't forget that seasonal workloads for starters is another key ingredient as we fine-tune our own rotations for the season's summer months.
Here's the painful truth: Of the top 13 starting pitchers in terms of fantasy points, eight find themselves on pace to exceed both their 2021 and previous pro career-high innings pitched totals by at least 50 frames. To extend that analysis, 10 of the top 17 and 13 of the top 29 find themselves in the same situation.
Not that that should come as a complete shock, as it's the game's most successful pitchers who typically garner the most usage, year after year. Pitch well and you'll keep pitching. It's the kind of thing that often works itself out over the 162-game, 183-or-so-day calendar, as slight slowing of hot streaks brings innings totals closer in line. But that doesn't cover every such hard-working pitcher, as others see their workloads fall into line as a result of untimely injuries, teams extending rotations or skipping their starts, or the pitchers getting shut down entirely by September -- the most critical time in a head-to-head fantasy league's season.
This season, it's especially difficult to gauge a potentially "overworked" pitcher. In the past, one could compare year-over-year innings totals, with every season running a generally traditional course. But then we had the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut spring training down just 23 days into 2020, an all-too-brief "Summer Camp" July warm-up leading into an abbreviated, 60-game campaign, and then this past winter's lockout delayed the start to 2022 spring training by nearly four weeks, but the regular season by only one week. Pitchers haven't been on a completely traditional schedule since 2019, so it makes sense that teams continue to lighten the load on their starters and that fantasy managers plan accordingly.
In this space in the past, I've listed the pitchers in descending order of their projected innings increases, along with a level of worry. This year, that's tougher to do, and it might be 2024 before we can again make a "normal" year-over-year such analysis. Still, here are some of the pitchers, along with their innings increases using current paces, who most and least worry me, as well as a handful of additional notes to tuck away.