Cleveland Indians: Projecting the starting rotation

Corey Kluber

After winning the American League Cy Young award yet again in 2017, Corey Kluber will look to become just the eleventh pitcher to win the award three times. He has a good shot at doing so as Fangraphs projects him to have the highest WAR of any pitcher in baseball and Pecota has him in third just behind Chris Sale and Clayton Kershaw. After four elite seasons in a row, there is no doubt that Kluber is now in the very top tier of starting pitchers in the game. If he can continue this run for a few more years, he may end up with a plaque in Cooperstown when it is all said and done.

All of the projections agree that he will be one of the best pitchers in baseball but to differing degrees. Kluber’s 3.45 DRA projection is pretty high, especially when he posted a league-leading 2.05 mark last season. Pecota is typically slow to adapt, so I would imagine he is still getting penalized for his early career struggles.

My projection using XRA, a stat I created from Statcast data, is the most bullish projection. At just 2.50 XRA Kluber projects to be one of the best starting pitchers in baseball once again. XRA only has three seasons of data thus far and doesn’t take into account Kluber’s first several seasons. This is probably the main reason for the discrepancy.