AJ Mass, ESPN Staff Writer 7y

Points leagues breakdown: How to verify true pitcher value

Fantasy MLB, Fantasy, MLB

Tyler Anderson had his first quality start of the season on Saturday, striking out 10 Arizona hitters in a 9-1 Rockies win. The outing came just one week after Anderson imploded against those same Diamondbacks, allowing six earned runs on seven hits in just five innings.

From a points league standpoint, while Saturday's good game earned you 24 points, Anderson's clunker, while certainly bad, wasn't actually all that disastrous all things considered, costing his fantasy owners only five points. Still, after Saturday's strong showing, which accounts for a good 83 percent of Anderson's overall points for the season in ESPN standard leagues, the Colorado hurler ranks just 130th overall among starting pitchers.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, Anderson ranks 136th among all starting pitchers (minimum three starts) in a statistic called average game score (GmScA). Game Score is a Bill James creation that, essentially, evaluates the relative strength of any individual start. It awards points for outs recorded and strikeouts while deducting points for hits, runs and walks allowed. As such, while it's not a one-to-one match with most points-league scoring systems, it's a fairly close mirror.

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