More than half the teams in baseball think they’re going to have a top-5 rotation

Pitching, pitching, pitching. Boy, the name of the game sure is pitching. They say that pitching is 90 percent of the game, except for the 90 percent that’s mental, which leaves just a sliver for hitting, unless you count hitting as part of the pitching percentage, just as an unseen component, which means that pitching is at least 50 percent of the game, unless it’s not quite so high. Yes, everyone agrees: pitching is very important.

It’s so important that Mike Leake is a multi-multi-millionaire, even though he might not be one of the 50 best pitchers in baseball. It’s so important that Jeff Samardzija can lead his league in earned runs and still get close to $100 million on the open market. Every offseason, teams scramble for available pitchers, sacrificing financial flexibility and farm system depth. And now that most of the dust of this offseason has settled, we get to look at the rotations around the league.

The rotations around the league are mostly an indistinguishable blob of talent and upside, with very few exceptions.

Over at ESPN, Buster Olney ranked rotations around baseball, and what struck me wasn’t the team at the top (the Mets, of course), but how interchangeable the rest of the teams were. To prove this point, I’ve arranged the rotations around baseball into groups, which I’ll explain below. This isn’t a definitive ranking, but a rough sorting. It gets the idea across, though. There’s an amorphous mass of pitching that spans from the fourth-best rotation to the 19th-best rotation, and any potential ranking is extremely volatile.

In this tier, we have the Mets. They have Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom, which is obscene. They follow that with Steven Matz, who is probably underrated because of the three long shadows of his rotation-mates. And then there is Bartolo Colon, the jolliest fifth starter of all.

Other teams have talented pitchers. No team is as deep with their front three or four.

The Mets aren’t that far ahead of these two teams, though. It depends on how you feel about Jason Hammel vs. Trevor Bauer vs. Steven Matz, or John Lackey vs. Carlos Carrasco vs. Whichever Mets pitcher you like least. Maybe you give a huge advantage to the Mets, or maybe they get a slight advantage.

Regardless, it felt unfair lumping the Cubs and Indians in at the top, just as it felt unfair lumping them in with the hoi polloi below.

And we get to the thesis of the article. Half of the teams in baseball are candidates to have one of the best rotations in baseball. Half of them are candidates to be in the bottom half. Injuries will ravage some of them. Surprising prospects, fifth starters and minor-league free agents will propel them to the top. There will be disappointment and heartbreak, encouragement and jubilation.

One of these teams will probably win the World Series, you know.

It’s like they all follow the same pattern. The Dodgers have CLAYTON KERSHAW, who’s followed by Other Pretty Good Guy, who’s followed by Maybe This Guy? The White Sox have CHRIS SALE, followed by Jose Quintana, followed by capable pitchers. The Marlins have Jose Fernandez; the Mariners have Felix Hernandez; The Red Sox have David Price. This goes on and on.

Maybe you give extra credit to the Rangers for the impending return of Yu Darvish. Maybe you bump the Giants up because you still believe in Johnny Cueto, or maybe you think that the Shelby Miller trade put the Diamondbacks into the tier above this. You might not believe in the Tigers or Justin Verlander’s resurgence. It’s all fluid, you see.

The league is basically one big Harrison Bergeron experiment now that the Dodgers don’t have Zack Greinke. If you’re thinking that the pitching talent should follow a bell curve, this is a huge lump on the “generally talented” side of the X axis.

Should these teams stop looking for an ace? No. Can they win without a clear #1? Considering the Royals are defending world’s champions, it doesn’t seem like an obstacle that’s impossible to overcome. And a lot of pundits are expecting big things from the Blue Jays (who have the offense to make up for quite a bit) and Royals (who have the defense and team speed). The Angels are an Andrew Heaney or Garrett Richards breakout from moving up a tier, and Dylan Bundy is in that quiet, attention-free zone of lowered expectations, which is probably a good thing for him. Marcus Stroman might be a future star, and that could start this year.

Most of these teams still have dreams of contending, four of them seriously. The Padres might make some trades and drop down a rung, but it’s important to note this group isn’t hopeless. With a break or three, they could be right up there with the amorphous blob of second-tier pitching talent.

The Ervin Santana and Ricky Nolasco deals still irk me years later, and Phil Hughes wasn’t nearly as magical last year. Still, the Twins could have an average rotation with good health, and they have enough potential in the lineup to make an average rotation play way up.

The A’s almost joined the amorphous blob because they have Sonny Gray, but without seeing a healthy Jesse Hahn first -- and without a full month of Rich Hill, much less a full season -- that’s just too much of a leap.

We know these teams. They’re the five rebuilding teams, all of them in the National League for some reason. One of them will threaten .500 for reasons we can’t possibly understand right now. And if they threaten .500, they’ll have a chance for run-differential chicanery. Which means one of them will get to July with a chance, which means they might trade for that pitcher to get them in the amorphous blob of talent.

Maybe this doesn’t surprise you, and you’re wondering what in the hell you’ve just read. Remember, you can follow me on Twitter @mccoveychron for links to newly published articles. But just like the AL parity, I don’t remember more than half of the teams in baseball featuring an ace, a solid No. 2 and several reasonable options after that, adding up to staffs of interchangeable potential. The mastiffs will have gotten to these tiers by July and they’ll be unrecognizable.

Until then, though, take a gander at the pitching parity around baseball.