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:
Top 10 starting pitchers
1. Zack Wheeler, Philadelphia Phillies
He got four of 30 first-place votes and 25 second-place votes in finishing behind Sale for the Cy Young, the second time in his career he's been the runner-up for the award. He has made 122 starts over the past four seasons, and in that span, he has a 2.92 ERA, while averaging more than six innings per start, with an ERA+ of 141.
2. Tarik Skubal, Detroit Tigers
Managers and coaching staffs anticipate regression in starting pitchers as they are exposed to opposing hitters a third or fourth time in a game, and generally, the resulting numbers fully support decisions to preemptively summon relievers.
Skubal's excellence, however, continues even as he sees hitters repeatedly, with the left-hander holding hitters to a .215 average the third time through the lineup.
First time through the lineup: .193/.230/.296
Second time through the lineup: .199/.245/.303
Third time through the lineup: .215/.277/.343
"He's really become incredible as he has gotten more confident in using all of his stuff," Tigers manager A.J. Hinch wrote in a text. "His power fastball is one thing, but his changeup is impactful. And he can steal strikes with his breaking ball."
Skubal, 28, is two years from reaching free agency. He is a client of Scott Boras, who almost always takes his clients into the open market.
3. Paul Skenes, Pittsburgh Pirates
Skenes went into last season amid ridiculous expectations and yet he exceeded all of them, striking out 170 batters in 133 innings, generating an ERA+ of 214. To put that number into perspective: Clayton Kershaw, who should be elected unanimously into the Hall of Fame someday, has achieved that only once, in 2016. Chris Sale (174) and Tarik Skubal (170) did not reach that while winning Cy Young Awards last season.
Now the innings limits will be mostly behind him, and it'll be interesting to see what he does over the six-month season. One sample of the nearly total dominance he demonstrated last year: No. 3 hitters in opposing lineups -- often the best or second-best hitters -- batted .115 against him, with one extra-base hit and 21 strikeouts in 63 plate appearances.
4. Chris Sale, Atlanta Braves
Skubal recently told a story about meeting Sale at an awards dinner over the offseason. Sale asked his fellow Cy Young Award winner to pose for a picture together. Skubal's internal response: Given Sale's accomplishments, it was Skubal who should be asking for the photo.
Even after those lost seasons in Boston, Sale is building a strong case for the Hall of Fame, given his dominance. He's had seven seasons in which he finished in the top five of the Cy Young balloting, and this year, he'll surpass 2,500 career strikeouts and 2,000 innings. He has an ERA+ of 140 -- higher than Christy Mathewson, Randy Johnson, Whitey Ford, Roy Halladay, Sandy Koufax and many other Hall of Famers.
5. Blake Snell, Los Angeles Dodgers
Snell signed late last spring with the San Francisco Giants, made only three starts before May 22 and really struggled in his first outings; he had a 9.51 ERA on June 2, and landed on the injured list again. What happened after he came back in July was pitching art: He allowed 11 earned runs in 14 starts, holding hitters to a .123 batting average and a .171 slugging percentage. He's in the middle of the Top 10, but now that he's signed to a long-term deal with the Dodgers and is fully prepared for this season, he is capable of running away with his third Cy Young Award.
6. Logan Gilbert, Seattle Mariners
Gilbert led all pitchers last season with 208⅔ innings, and he struck out 220 while posting the fifth-best walk rate among all starters who threw at least 162 innings. He also had the lowest WHIP, at 0.89.
7. Max Fried, New York Yankees
Since the start of the 2020 season, Fried has an ERA+ of 151, with a 2.81 ERA, and for that, he was rewarded with an eight-year, $218 million contract. The Yankees loved Juan Soto and offered him $760 million, but the instant they learned he chose the Mets, GM Brian Cashman pivoted quickly to a market containing a lot of unsigned stars -- and Fried was his priority.
8. Corbin Burnes, Arizona Diamondbacks
When he reached free agency in the fall, there was talk among some evaluators that his pure stuff had regressed somewhat last year. But the Diamondbacks bought into his future in a big way, signing him to a six-year, $210 million deal.
9. Logan Webb, San Francisco Giants
He has made 98 starts and thrown 612 innings over the past three seasons, establishing himself as one of baseball's foremost metronome starters. He's signed through 2028.
10. Garrett Crochet, Boston Red Sox
In the first days of spring training, he has looked exactly how he did for the White Sox last year -- totally overpowering. He struck out 209 batters in 146 innings for Chicago in 2024 -- the highest strikeout rate (12.88 per nine innings) of any pitcher with 100 or more innings -- and he and Walker Buehler give the Red Sox bona fide aces at the top of their rotation. Crochet has made it clear that the innings restriction of last year, when he was in the midst of the biggest workload of his career, is no longer in place. He'll pitch when the Red Sox need him to pitch.
Honorable mentions
Seth Lugo, Kansas City Royals: Maybe this list is another example of how Lugo, 35, is underrated. He was second in innings last season and 10th in ERA. For years, he wanted to be a starting pitcher, and since the Padres gave him that chance two seasons ago, he has thrived.
Spencer Strider, Atlanta Braves: It felt wrong to leave him off this list, because before his elbow problem and his reconstructive surgery last spring, he might've been baseball's No. 1 starting pitcher. The Braves hope he'll be back relatively early in the season.
Cole Ragans, Kansas City Royals: Kansas City's swap of Aroldis Chapman to Texas for Ragans in the midst of the 2023 season is one of the best deals executed by any front office in the last decade. In 44 starts for the Royals since that deal, Ragans has a 3.00 ERA.
Jacob deGrom, Texas Rangers: When he pitches, he dominates, and this season -- two years removed from his second Tommy John surgery -- he might pitch more than in any year since 2019, when he made 32 starts for the Mets. In his first three starts last year after he was activated from the injured list, deGrom struck out 14, walked one and allowed two runs in 10⅔ innings.
Dylan Cease, San Diego Padres: He'll hit free agency next fall, and could be in line for a deal somewhere close to what Burnes got from the Diamondbacks, as a veteran right-hander.
Shohei Ohtani, Los Angeles Dodgers: He is among the 10 most skilled pitchers. But in his first season back after another major elbow procedure and at a time when the Dodgers' rotation is saturated with options, we just don't know how much he's going to pitch. Actually, check that: He's going to pitch as often as he'd like to pitch. His career high is 166 innings, but he could scale back to 120-130 innings.
Gerrit Cole, New York Yankees: His eventual induction into the Hall of Fame is a done deal at this point, in light of his six top-five finishes in the Cy Young Award voting, including 2023, when he was baseball's best pitcher. He had a 3.41 ERA in 17 starts last season after going down with a sore elbow.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Los Angeles Dodgers: He lived up to the hype in the first year of his record-setting deal, and he established footing at the front of the L.A. rotation.
Shota Imanaga, Chicago Cubs: He had a strong rookie season last year, and he was especially good at Wrigley Field, where he issued just 12 walks in 96 innings, with 110 strikeouts; in fact, he surrendered fewer walks than home runs in his home starts last year.
Luis Castillo, Seattle Mariners: The trade interest in him seemed to be affected by some of his diminished underlying numbers last season, but he's still a front-line starting pitcher and part of the reason the Mariners could win the AL West.
Cristopher Sanchez, Philadelphia Phillies: In a rotation of established stars like Wheeler and Aaron Nola, he doesn't get a lot of attention -- except from the Phillies, who saw how well he was pitching early last season and immediately locked him up to a long-term deal. Only Framber Valdez had a better groundball rate than Sanchez's 2.67.