Spring training camps are underway, which means it is time to look at the state of baseball. As part of our 2025 MLB season preview, ESPN's Buster Olney is bringing back his positional ranking series, in which he surveyed those around the industry to help him rank the top 10 players at every position.
Today, we rank the best of the best at one of the most important positions in baseball: starting pitcher.
The objective of this exercise is to identify the best players for the 2025 season, not who might be best in five years or over their career. We will roll out a position per installment. Here are the lists so far and the rest of the schedule: catchers, first basemen, second basemen, third basemen, shortstops, corner outfielders, center fielders, designated hitters and relievers (Friday).
Philadelphia Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto provided a window into the personality of Zack Wheeler in a recent interview with MLB.com, describing Wheeler's responses when Realmuto and pitching coach Caleb Cotham visit the mound. "Zack does not want anybody on the mound, ever," Realmuto said, grinning. "I do everything I can to not have to go talk to him."
Sometimes, Realmuto said, Cotham will reach the mound and ask the pitcher what he wants to throw next. Wheeler will reply, "'I don't know,' and stare right through his soul. Caleb will turn around and go back to the dugout."
When he's on the mound, Wheeler does not like to complicate his work. In games, he just follows Realmuto's lead: The catcher drops the sign, Wheeler agrees -- he'll shake off a sign maybe once or twice a game, maybe less than that on some days -- and works to execute the assigned pitch. If anybody goes to the mound, he'll do little more than grunt in acknowledgment, instead focusing on what he needs to do next.
The heavy lifting for Wheeler happens between starts, when he and Cotham -- who have an excellent working relationship -- will talk about grips and pitch shape, pitch sequences, game plans. "He's always tinkering, really," Cotham wrote in a text. "But that's why he's so good."
Last season, Wheeler used his sinker more effectively than he has in any season of his career, according to data on FanGraphs, sometimes throwing it inside to left-handed hitters as a finishing pitch, with the ball running back over the inside corner. "He just got even more strategic on who to use it against, when to use it," Cotham wrote, "and he got better with getting it to his glove side for a ball-to-strike pitch."
In 2024, he allowed just 139 hits in 200 innings, an NL-best 6.3 hits per nine innings, with opposing batters mustering a .192 average against him -- the lowest of his career. His strikeout rate of 10.1 per nine innings was the second best of his career.
During games that he does not pitch, Wheeler watches on monitors inside the clubhouse, or he stands next to the staff in the dugout, as close as you can get to the action from that boundary. And Cotham sometimes is at home when he'll receive a text from Wheeler with a thought about the next game -- as if Wheeler saw something, mulled it over and generated feedback.
He finished second to Chris Sale for the National League Cy Young Award last season. Evaluators were asked this question in an informal poll: Which pitcher would you pick to throw a decisive game in the World Series? Wheeler's name was mentioned more than any other.
The top 10 starting pitchers in the big leagues right now: