2021 Fantasy Baseball Draft Prep: Strategies for starting pitcher ...

If you've followed me for the past year or so, you know I've come to value high-end starting pitchers above everything else, to the point I consider them to be the only real currency in Fantasy Baseball (apart from maybe base-stealers in a 5x5 league).I'm going even further with it this year. The difference this year is that so many pitchers are afflicted all at once, to the point that maybe some teams will have no choice but to bend their rules just to make sure all the innings are covered. Given that starting pitcher is the most consequential position, leaving no clear path to victory if you mess it up, I see no other choice than to hedge my bet, to gather up maybe six hurlers with stud potential instead of last year's four so that I have alternatives in place when things inevitably go wrong.Hopefully, at least two of those six will come from this first group:There's a Big Three here, as you may already know. Kenta Maeda kept getting shifted to the bullpen by the Dodgers in his years before joining the Twins, so we don't really know how he'll hold up as a starter.Let's just say I'm reading between the lines for these pitchers, taking my cues from how deep they're allowed to go into games, where they slot in the starting rotation, and what their career high in innings looks like. My intuition tells me that all of these pitchers will have a long leash, even coming off an pandemic-shortened season.This next group not so much ...^2019 statsWalker Buehler probably stands out here given that he's a second-round pick on average, but the Dodgers have always handled him so cautiously, having him more or less skip spring training the past two years and instead build up in-season.