MLB Opening Day matchups, ranked

It’s quaint to look back at last year’s ranking of Opening Day matchups and see what we thought. Marco Estrada vs. Kevin Gausman? A real pip of a matchup between two pitchers who could help their teams reach the promised land. Julio Teheran vs. Noah Syndergaard? We’re probably talking about 30 wins, combined. Minimum.

So, yes, it’s probably easy to overrate the importance of the Opening Day pitching matchups. Still, this is the day when aces have a slap fight in front of 40,000 people, and it’s beautiful. In theory, every team got to pick their best pitcher and slot them against the other team’s best pitcher. It’s the Mountain fighting the Viper, but with sliders instead of messy phrenology exams. This is Opening Day. THIS IS OPENING DAY.

Which matchups are the best? We’ll just have to figure that out with an old-fashioned ranking.

Rain on Opening Day is like weird soupy chili poured on top of spaghetti.

Zimmermann used to be so good. He used to be so very good. When there was a bounty of starters on the free agent market — Johnny Cueto, David Price, Zack Greinke, Jeff Samardzija — it looked like the Tigers nabbed the best mix of risk vs. reward, paying less for Zimmermann than the Giants paid for Cueto, which meant paying half the price of a ... Price. It was an obvious win for the Tigers.

Zimmermann had a 6.08 ERA last year. Don’t worry, though. His FIP was only 5.18. Welcome to Opening Day.

Nova was fine enough last year, and he’s probably still underpaid. Still, if he’s the Pirates’ starter on Opening Day, they might be in trouble. You read it here, first.

Is this Clayton Richard’s fourth consecutive Opening Day start for the Padres? Don’t look it up. Just assume that it is.

This is a battle of ol’ NL West rival pitchers from back in the day. You surely remember sitting down to watch Chase Anderson vs. Clayton Richard when they were on the Diamondbacks and Padres, respectively. You remember this because you sat on the remote, and it switched to this game. “I do not want to watch this game!”, you would shout. Lucky for you, Law & Order is always on at least one channel. A Jerry Orbach-era episode. You were set.

But Anderson was excellent last year, so even though Richard led the National League in losses and hits allowed, there’s at least one starter who is crucial to his team’s hopes this year.

A classic Opening Day match-up, though, this is not.

Jon Lester’s 2017 season looked like an age-33 projection for Jon Lester that was made in 2012. Bunch of innings, a much higher ERA than normal, and home runs and walks trending in the wrong direction. He might be the fourth-best starter on the Cubs, really. But he’s a veteran who helped bring a World Series to Chicago, so get that Opening Day start, buddy.

Urena is a [frantically googles] right-handed ... starter, who, uh ... [still googling] was acquired in 2008 as an amateur free agent and ... [moving on to Bing] ... was strangely effective last year, with a 14-7 record despite a 5.20 FIP and one of the lower strikeout rates among qualifying starters?

At least you know he’ll get the same amount of run support this year, right?

[googles Marlins lineup]

when the hell did all this happen, what’s going on here

While digging into top-100 lists and comparing farm systems against each other, consider the plight of Dylan Bundy, Pretty Good Pitcher. He was supposed to be a Cy Young contender. He was the young ace the Orioles had been waiting for. In 2013, he was pretty close to the perfect pitching prospect.

Now he’s a Pretty Good Pitcher. He’s still young! Just 25 years old, somehow. He definitely has time to get much better, and his story is far from written. Think about where Corey Kluber was at this age, or Jake Arrieta.

Still, it’s a reminder that development isn’t always linear. Bundy can continue pitching like he did last year and carve out a fine career, but he doesn’t have to turn into the right-armed demigod that he was supposed to be. He might just be Pretty Good for a while.

Also, as long as you’re here, I figured I’d ruin your life.

There’s a huge debate about tanking these days, and the naysayers would like to remind you it’s not very sporting. This is true, but consider what trying just a little bit harder can do for a franchise.

Trying just a little bit harder can make it so that James Shields is your Opening Day starter and Fernando Tatis, Jr. is on another team.

Shields had the worst FIP in 2017 of any Opening Day starter this season, but the ERA still slipped in under Jordan Zimmermann’s. Success!

This is the last start that Danny Duffy will make for the Royals on Opening Day. This is not a controversial opinion. By August, he will be pitching for the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Brewers, Indians, Nationals, or Astros, and the Royals will be more prospect-rich than they were before.

But at least they’ll know that in 2018, their Opening Day starter was way better than a division rival’s Opening Day starter.

With any justice in the world, this would be the fifth consecutive Opening Day start for Garrett Richards. As is, this will be his 13th start in the last three seasons. If you’re going to root for one guy on the Angels, let it be him.

Or maybe that Ohtani guy.

There’s that center fielder, too. He seems fun.

But mostly Richards.

Also of note: Yu Darvish has made one Opening Day start in his career. This will be Kendall Graveman’s second.

If you’ve gotten over a pitcher named Aaron Nola pitching for LSU, we can’t be friends. I’m sorry, it’s an obvious litmus test. It’s impossible to get over that. That’s like the Giants having a pitcher named Sam Francisco, or the Dodgers having a pitcher named Pete Traffic. Sometimes the universe comes to you.

Also, Nola is pretty danged good, and he’s a huge part of the Phillies plans for 2018. No pressure.

Teheran is in that weird spot where he’s been iffy-great-iffy over the last three seasons, and our brains are torn between the great and iffy portions of that pattern. I think he’ll be fine, but only because I drafted him in the 15th round of my NL-only draft, and I could have picked Steven Matz or Jack Flaherty, so did I do the right thing? As always, tweet the answer to me, just so I can feel better about my fantasy team.

Real talk: If the Dodgers were a sporting team, and if they were interested in gamesmanship at all, they would have replaced Kershaw with a starter that had half the strikeout rate last year, too. When a rival shows up to the duel with a dull sword, you have to make it a fencing match. You can’t just whip out a pistol and start firing away.

It’s rude, is what it is.

This matchup ranks this high because of Kershaw and Kershaw alone. He is the most watchable pitcher in baseball, and I really don’t care if you want to well-actually me with Max Scherzer or Corey Kluber. They didn’t make the Hall of Fame before turning 30. Kershaw did. You should probably watch more Clayton Kershaw.

Ah, yes, the 2018 AL Cy Young winner vs. the guy who’s always much, much better than you think he is. In 11 seasons, Happ has never thrown more than 200 innings, and we’re only a couple of years into the idea that this mid-30s lefty suddenly morphed into a flamethrowing rotation stalwart. But he’s good. Quite good. Even in this weird offseason market, he would have made more than three years, $36 million.

It’s just that Severino is better. Much better. He’s the new velocity king in baseball, at least among starting pitchers, and it’s worth remembering that he was absolutely broken in 2016. The Yankees avoided a rebuild for a lot of reasons, from luck to financial might, but they mostly did it because they’re smart and talented enough to fix a talented player like Severino and make him better than ever before. I don’t know how they did it, specifically. I just know they sort of do this thing often.

It’s possible that if he pitched in any other NL West ballpark — including a humidorized Chase Field, perhaps — you would be very familiar with Jon Gray. As is, he has to carry the stink of Coors Field ERA around with him. A 3.67 ERA at Coors should get him Cy Young votes this year if he throws 200 innings.

Aye, there’s the rub. He wasn’t healthy last year, so he threw about half that, and we have to extrapolate. He’s a large manimal who throws baseballs hard and with purpose, though, so my guess is that this is a breakout year. He’s a worthy Opening Day starter.

Corbin is starting because of some Zack Greinke weirdness, and I’m guessing the Diamondbacks didn’t want to move Robbie Ray up and futz with the rotation. That makes sense. When you think about Corbin as a fifth starter instead of an Opening Day starter, you start to see the appeal of the Diamondbacks.

Ahhhh, this one is for us old-timers. A Verlander-Hamels matchup would have been must-see baseball since 2006. That’s a dozen years where you would see the names “Verlander” and “Hamels” together and think, oh, heck yeah, I’m watching this game. That’s counts for a lot in these rankings.

As is, Hamels isn’t as impressive as he used to be, so unless he has a Verlander-ish second act up his sleeve, this duo definitely benefits from nostalgia in these rankings. At least it gives me a chance to remind the world about Ted Berg’s collection of embarrassing Cole Hamels photos:

You know, that outfit and pose somehow seems more reasonable every year. Maybe it’s me who was wrong the whole time.

Ah, yes, the Screw You, I Still Like Watching Felix ranking. We know that Kluber is a marvel and a Cy Young machine, so it’s always appointment television when he’s pitching. The only question is with Hernandez.

His FIPs over the last four seasons:

Hrmm, by these calculations, it looks like he’s going to have an FIP in the 6.00s, which definitely isn’t ideal. The only way to feel optimistic is by grading on a Screw You, I Still Like Watching Felix scale.

Which is what I’ve done. There’s a strong chance that I’ll tune into this game, regardless of what else is on.

After cranking his fastball up to triple digits in his first start this spring, Noah Syndergaard gave a state-of-the-ace address to reporters, shirtless. One of these days, I would like to write the best piece I’ve ever written and do a Facebook Live Q&A without my shirt on and see if it’s as well-received.

My guess: Yeah, it’ll be pretty much the same thing.

But he’s throwing hard and he’s back, and you absolutely know that sitting out a year rankled the absolute hell out of him, so I would definitely take the under on the Vegas ERA line.

Martinez is one of those guys who was bit in the butt by the juiced ball, and it’s hard to know if it’s going to affect him indefinitely. Used to be that when a guy had a huge spike in his home run rate, it was safe to assume it was going to go down the next season. It’s not like that anymore.

That written, I’m pretty sure that Martinez is better than his career stats. He’s going to pull off his synthetic flesh and reveal the cyborg underneath one of these days, but he’s sure biding his time right now.

Prediction for this game: at least three fastballs that go really, really fast.

So this is Chris-mas
And what have you done?
Another year over
And a new one just begun

And so this is Chris-mas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The young and the ... also young

A very Merry Chris-mas
And a happy new year
Let’s hope it’s a good one
Without any fear
Or injuries
Seriously, cut that shit out

And so this is Chris-mas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong
And so happy Chris-mas
For black and for white
For sunburst yellow and red socks
Let’s FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

OPENING DAY, Y’ALL.

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT.