The ace on the best rotation in the game. Photo: talksportsphilly.com
Last year, with my excitement over Washington’s Dan Haren signing and my supposition that Washington had the best rotation in the game, I ranked all 30 team’s rotations ahead of the 2013 season. Then, after the season was done, I revisited these pre-season rankings with a post-mortem to see how close (or, more appropriately, how far off) my rankings turned out to be.
Here’s the 2014 version of this same post: Pre-season rankings of the MLB’s rotations; 1 through 30. Warning; this is another huge post. I guess I’m just verbose. At this point midway through Spring Training there’s just a couple of possible FAs left that could have altered these rankings (Ervin Santana being the important name unsigned right now), so I thought it was time to publish.
The top teams are easy to guess; once you get into the 20s, it becomes pretty difficult to distinguish between these teams. Nonetheless, here we go (I heavily depended on baseball-reference.com and mlbdepthcharts.com for this post, along with ESPN’s transaction list per team and Baseball Prospectus’ injury reports for individual players).