I’m going by the rotations as listed on Roster Resource, which of course may change during spring training. As for the order, I’ve organized them by their WARP projections.

Rotations

Red Sox:

1. Chris Sale (6.1)
2. David Price (2.1)
3. Drew Pomeranz (2.1)
4. Rick Porcello (1.2)
5. Eduardo Rodriguez (1.2)

(12.7 total WARP)

versus

Yankees:

1. Luis Severino (4.1)
2. Sonny Gray (2.5)
3. Masahiro Tanaka (2.4)
4. Jordan Montgomery (1.0)
5. CC Sabathia (0.6)

(10.6 total WARP)

Not unlike the two team’s lineups, their rotations aren’t too far apart in overall talent. Perhaps the Red Sox enjoy a bit more at the top of the rotation, whereas the Yankees have more overall depth. But the end result is roughly the same, as you can see from their respective WARP totals.

Is Luis Severino as good as Chris Sale? No, probably not, but he’s not wholly far off. Sale is the best player of either group and the one who the Red Sox hope can put them over the top, both during the regular season and in the playoffs. Severino has the potential to be that guy for the Yankees. Still, the advantage is with Sale.

The thing about PECOTA and really all projection systems is its innate pessimism. It’s not really even pessimism though because players get hurt all the time and age gets everyone at some point and then there’s the guys who just have bad seasons because of who knows what. That all said, it’s not difficult to expect more than PECOTA projects from a few guys on each team, and not coincidentally the two I’d expect more from are the same guys I’d point to when discussing the most pivotal pitchers of the rotation. That would be Price for the Red Sox and Gray for the Yankees. Both have been top pitchers before, as recently as 2016. In Gray’s four seasons he’s been above 4 WARP in three of them including last season, so his 2.5 projection seems a tad short. But there it is just the same.

Price likely has a similar issue to Gray, namely injuries. Price spent a significant number of days on the DL last season, the first time he did that in his career. The result was a one-win season after averaging six wins per over the three seasons before that. Still, the Red Sox are depending on Price this season in a way that I’m not sure fans have fully grasped. If Price gives the team 75 innings of 4.50 run ball and then exits stage left, the Red Sox are going to need a lot of quality innings from Steven Wright and/or Brian Johnson. To paraphrase the words of a former Yankee manager, that’s not what you want.

But if Price is healthy, he’s Boston’s second ace, and he changes the completion of the team completely. The same thing could be said for Gray, whose reputation took a hit during an injured and ineffective 2016 season. Peak Gray probably isn’t the equal of peak Price, though it seems that Gray reaching his previous heights is the more likely possibility of the two (though as of this writing both claim to be fully healthy).

Past the top two guys, the Yankees need Tanaka’s arm to remain attached to his shoulder, possibly a difficult ask considering his previous medical history. If he’s healthy though, a caveat that should probably be applied to all pitchers, Tanaka offers what any team would look for in a third starter: namely quality and dependability. The Red Sox are more on the first of those attributes and less on the second with their third starters (yes, two) in Pomeranz and Porcello. Porcello can’t be as bad as he was last season (can he?), but he’s probably not going to win another Cy Young either. As such, sure, two wins seems perfectly adequate, even if you maybe would hope for more given his $20 million salary. Pomeranz is hitting his stride as a starter after a late start to his career, but he’s always been on the fragile side. Together they’re probably in the five-win range, which is what the Yankees will likely get out of the combination of Gray and Tanaka.

The back end of the Yankees rotation is C.C. Sabathia and Jordan Montgomery, both of who had stronger seasons in 2017 than you’d have guessed given their respective ages and, in Sabathia’s case, everything else about him. And yet here he is again. Note that PECOTA is as unimpressed with him as you are. The Red Sox back end features the aforementioned Wright and Johnson unless, and this is the key, Eduardo Rodriguez gets healthy. Say what you will about Montgomery, but the Yankees don’t have a pitcher of Rodriguez’s quality in the back half of their rotation. If Rodriguez comes back healthy with no knee troubles, he gives the Sox rotation depth few teams can match.

If there is one place where New York has a step on Boston, it’s in previous injuries. Why are they important? A wise person once said the greatest predictor of future pitcher injuries is past pitcher injuries. With that as a background, the Red Sox are at greater risk with Price, Rodriguez, and deeper down, Wright and Johnson all having missed significant time in recent seasons. Only Gray fits that description with the Yankees (though Sabathia has pitched through injuries, he’s not particularly injury prone).

Bullpens

Predicting what will happen with bullpens is the greatest of impossibilities, like jumping across the country using only trampolines, or drinking an entire bottle of Gatorade without your tongue jumping from your mouth and running screaming down the street. The Red Sox have one of the two or three best relievers in baseball in Craig Kimbrel. That’s a good start. After that, they could have a very deep pen with Carson Smith and Tyler Thornburg splitting eighth inning duties and Matt Barnes and Joe Kelly covering the sixth and seventh. Or all those guys could spontaneously explode like Spinal Tap drummers.

Like the rotations, the Red Sox have that one top guy, but the Yankees have quality and more depth in their pen. And yet, Aroldis Chapman wasn’t so hot last season, and Dellin Betances wasn’t either. Both were fine overall, and very good at times, but showed real moments of shakiness. Tommy Kahnle was less than spectacular after putting up an amazing first half in Chicago, and David Robertson was good, but not amazing either. Still, those guys have track records of (mostly) excellence, so few are likely to flame out. It could easily turn into the Craig Kimbrel And That’s It Show in Boston, whereas the Yankees have too much depth and not enough Craig Kimbrel for that to occur to them.

Where things stand now, the Red Sox have a slight advantage in the rotation, but when you factor in the bullpens, that lead dwindles. Like their offenses, and like the teams of 2003 and 2004, picking which one is truly better is likely a fool’s errand (thus these articles). We never know what will happen over the course of a baseball season, but often times we kinda know, right? Here I legitimately have no idea. Except to say this: even after 162 games it’ll probably be quite close.

Also, the Houston Astros are better than both teams.

Photo by Noah K. Murray — USA TODAY Sports

We can start with the easy part which is figuring out the top two contenders are Chris Sale (the reason this article is appearing on this website) and Corey Kluber of the Indians. You could, should you want to do such a thing, make a case for Luis Severino of the Yankees, Justin Verlander of the Tigers/Astros or even our own Craig Kimbrel, but realistically none of those guys are likely to get any first place votes. Relievers don’t typically win the Cy Young in seasons when there is an outstanding and thus deserving starter unless they do something insane like not allowing a run all year. And even then, they usually don’t win. Kimbrel has been fantastic this season but he has given up 10 runs so, even with a strikeout percentage over 50 percent, it’s not happening for him. Verlander has been fantastic in the second half and had he put together two halves like like it he’d be among the frontrunners to win, but he didn’t, and in fact his first half was pretty mediocre. Throwing 104 innings of 4.73 ERA ball, even when you follow it up with excellence, isn’t going to get it done. So Kimbrel and Verlander are out. We’ll leave Severino in for now and move on to the next paragraph.

Let’s now take a step into the weeds for a moment and mention that defining “best” is, at best (see what I did there?) difficult, and at worst problematic and impossible. If you’re of the sabermetric sort, we could agree that Wins Above Replacement is the way to go, but then which one? There are three and they’re all calculated differently. On the other end of the spectrum there are pitcher wins, which to me are statistical garbage, but to others have varying relevance. This is why this kind of thing is never as clear cut as we’d like it to be. Sometimes there isn’t an answer to the question we ask, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t spend time trying to learn the answer. So here we are.

This is Baseball Prospectus so let’s start there. By WARP, Chris Sale is the leader by about a half win (8.09 WARP to 7.67 for Kluber). Severino is fourth in the AL with 5.45 behind the two above and the Rays’ Chris Archer. Archer has had a pretty impressive season but two things are holding him back from being a finalist here. His ERA is four point who cares that’s too high to win the Cy Young Award, and he’s 9-11. Pitcher wins are, as previously noted, statistical garbage, but a losing record is going to be a tough hurdle to overcome especially in comparison to his competition. But back to BP. So Sale has a half WARP lead over Kluber, but you could make a counter argument for Kluber which is this: Sale has thrown 18.1 more innings. That’s typically cited as a reason to vote for Sale, but with their WAR figures so close, it’s Kluber who has been more valuable on a per-inning basis.

So there’s that. But this actually gets more interesting as we move on to other forms of WAR. Over at FanGraphs they have Sale leading Kluber and Severino 8.2 to 6.9 and 5.6, respectively. So by their math, Sale has been worth over a win more than Kluber and at that point we get beyond the vagaries of the formulas and start to have a real difference in value. But then we get to Baseball Reference. They have Kluber ahead of Sale, 7.6 to 6.2, with Severino down at 5.2 so that tells us two things. First, Severino ain’t winning this so enough about of him. Second, huh? I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of how these stats are calculated, so instead, let’s do something that we probably shouldn’t do and add all the WAR numbers up. When you do that, Sale gets to 22.5 and Kluber gets to 22.2. With that little math mistake buried 800 words deep, let’s just say that the totality of the WAR numbers have Kluber and Sale as extremely close in value, too close to make any kind of decision on who is better.

So let’s go more mainstream and see if that helps. Both pitchers have 17 wins (as of this writing), both are striking out right around 35 percent of the hitters they face (Sale is at 36.3 percent, Kluber at 34.6 percent) and walking about five percent (Sale is at five percent, Kluber at 4.7 percent). Both have given up 20 homers, three wild pitches, and neither has balked. To this point it seems like a draw, but there are two separators. The first is Sale has 300 strikeouts (Kluber is at 252). Even if it did happen in this era of increased strikeouts, reaching 300 strikeouts is a serious and notable accomplishment. Unfortunately for Sale, that pretty neat accomplishment doesn’t necessarily mean he’s better than Kluber. Still, voters (to the extent we can know what they’ll do) might think it does. That is, if they can get over the second thing, which is the difference in ERA. Kluber’s ERA is 2.35 which leads the American League by a lot, 0.40 over the second place pitcher who happens to be Chris Sale.

It feels bizarre to pin the outcome of this on two starts after about 30 have already elapsed for each pitcher, but that’s how close it is. It’s close enough that two starts matter, one way or the other.

That’s a monumental advantage for Kluber. Voters will probably see it and vote for Kluber, but here’s the thing: by FIP it’s Sale who has the huge advantage, 2.19 to Kluber’s 2.46! But by DRA, it’s Kluber who is up, 2.00 to 2.12!

[head explodes]

Taking this all in as much as I can with an exploded head, it seems to me that while he’s been on the mound, Kluber has probably been the incrementally better pitcher. So the answer to all of this depends in part on how you value the extra 18.1 innings that Sale has thrown and in part on what we don’t yet know, namely what happens in the next two starts that each pitcher has before the season ends. It feels bizarre to pin the outcome of this on two starts after about 30 have already elapsed for each pitcher, but that’s how close it is. It’s close enough that two starts matter, one way or the other.

Kluber’s next two will be in Seattle on Sunday and at home against the Chicago White Sox, though the Indians might hold him out in preparation for the playoffs. Sale’s next two scheduled starts are at home against the Blue Jays and Astros, though like Kluber, Sale may not take the hill at all for the second one. So maybe it isn’t two starts at all, but one more start.

For now, if forced to vote, I’d pick Sale because of the extra innings he’s thrown, the lower FIP, and, I’ll admit, because I think the 300 Ks is pretty darn cool. I had hoped to finish this piece off by making a definitive statement. I had hoped to show who was really the better pitcher. But it’s close. It’s extremely close! It’s so close that there really isn’t a correct answer. At least not right now, and with likely only one or two starts remaining for each pitcher, probably forever.

Photo by Patrick McDermott – USA TODAY Sports