Fantasy Baseball: 5 Low-Cost Starters Who Are Innings-Pitched Assets in Rotisserie Formats

Ian Kennedy, Kansas City Royals

The promise of Ian Kennedy's utterly filthy 2011 season (where he submitted 222 innings of 2.88-ERA ball while winning 21 games for the Arizona Diamondbacks) is well in the rear view, with the former top prospect becoming increasingly homer-prone in the five seasons since, culminating in a 1.6 homer-per-nine rate over the last two.

And it's worth noting that Kennedy struggled with the long ball even while pitching for two teams with some of the most homer-suppressing home parks in the majors, namely the San Diego Padres and the Kansas City Royals, his current squad.

No, Kennedy has not emerged as the consistently stifling hurler of that 2011 vintage. But what he has been is a cheap source of strikeouts through sheer force of volume, with the veteran righty averaging north of 195 innings over each of his last six major league seasons. His career 8.33 strikeout-per-nine rate doesn't exactly jump off the page, but over such a large volume of innings, the numbers are bound to pile up.

And perhaps there's still a smidgen of upside with Kennedy, who did manage a 3.15 ERA over his final 15 starts last year while limiting hitters to a .705 OPS. That could be a case of selective sampling (and batted-ball luck-- his xFIP over that span was 5.01, with his perennially outsized fly-ball rate still just shy of 47 percent, even as his homer-per-nine dropped below one), but it does show that Kennedy is not incapable of some sustained excellence.

Naturally, the deeper your roto league, the less excellent you will need Kennedy to be to make him worth a late-round flier. Barely scratching the overall top 300 in ADP, Kennedy makes for a solid back-end starter speculation pick in any roto leagues deeper than standard, with just a pinch of ace upside sprinkled in for good measure.