Wins and losses are often out of a starting pitcher’s control, but the good ones deliver quality starts on a regular basis.
By Major League Baseball standards, the quality start is still a relatively new statistic, as well as a bit of a controversial one.
The idea was conceived by Philadelphia Inquirer sportswriter John Lowe in 1985, its intended purpose to “show exactly how many times a baseball pitcher has done his job — pitched well enough for his team to have a chance to win.”
We’ll get into the specifics of what a quality start is shortly, but the general idea was that we needed something better than wins to gauge the value of a starting pitcher, as wins are inherently dependent upon how much damage the pitcher’s bat-wielding teammates are able to do.
Quality starts have never been universally accepted, though. Baseball Reference tracks them, but you need to dig into a team’s “Detailed Stats” or a player’s “Advanced Stats” to find them. FanGraphs doesn’t have QS data prior to 1974. Moreover, many have scoffed at the baseline for what constitutes a quality start, as it amounts to a 4.50 ERA that isn’t special at all.
But while we now have all sorts of advanced statistics and sabermetrics to tell us how good a starting pitcher is, quality starts remain better than wins, a valuable data point and a crucial category in a lot of fantasy leagues.
So, what is a quality start? Who’s good at getting them? And how do they impact your fantasy baseball approach?
What Is a Quality Start in Baseball?
The “calculation” of a quality start is quite simple, as you only need to know two data points: innings pitched and earned runs allowed. If the starting pitcher lasted at least six full innings and allowed three or fewer earned runs, that’s a quality start.
It’s worth mentioning up front that a quality start can turn into not a quality start, as it is not official until the proverbial book is closed on that pitcher.
One of the most extreme examples of this came in July 2022. Shohei Ohtani absolutely mowed down the Atlanta Braves for six innings, to the tune of 11 strikeouts and just one baserunner allowed. For those six innings, it was an extremely quality start.
But then all hell broke loose in the seventh inning, with Ohtani allowing a walk, three singles and two home runs before departing with six earned runs charged against him. In the span of a few minutes, what would have been a quality start unraveled into a disaster.
If the starter’s final line features at least six innings pitched and three or fewer earned runs allowed, though, that’s a quality start.
Whether the pitcher’s team wins or loses does not matter for quality starts. Nor does it matter how many hits, walks or strikeouts were recorded, beyond how those statistics impact innings pitched and earned runs allowed.
While most baseball fans would agree that quality starts is a vastly superior statistic to wins when judging the effectiveness of a starting pitcher, it’s still not a great stat.
Like, come on, it counts a perfect game the same as it would a six inning struggle with no strikeouts, 10 batters reaching base and three of them scoring.
Translation: not all quality starts are created equal. And to that end, both Game Score on Baseball Reference and GSv2 (Game Score version 2.0) on FanGraphs do a good job of cluing you in on how impressive a particular quality start may have been.
However, six innings pitched with three or fewer runs allowed is more or less what you’re hoping to get out of a starting pitcher in the modern era of Major League Baseball. Anything above and beyond that is gravy, and it’d be swell to also start tracking “super quality starts” when a pitcher goes at least seven innings and allows two or fewer earned runs. But anyone who posts 20 or more quality starts in a season is just about guaranteed to get some consideration for a Cy Young vote.
Players with Most Quality Start Totals in Recent MLB Seasons
Thus far in the 2020s, the king of quality starts in a single season almost certainly isn’t who you’d guess.
Close to a dozen players get to 20 quality starts in each season, and we’ve been averaging about one instance per year of pitchers getting to 25.
The best to do it in recent seasons, however, was Walker Buehler with 27 QS for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2021.
Buehler did not once go eight full innings (let alone a complete game) in a start that season, but he was Mr. Reliable in completing at least six innings in 29 of his 33 starts.
(Despite a 2.47 ERA, 0.97 WHIP, an average of better than one strikeout per inning pitched and an MLB-best 171 ERA+, though, Buehler only placed fourth in the NL Cy Young vote that year, behind the more well-established Corbin Burnes, Zack Wheeler and Max Scherzer.)
Most quality starts (single-season) from 2021-24:
27 - Walker Buehler, LAD, 2021
26 - Framber Valdez, HOU, 2022; Zack Wheeler, PHI, 2024
25 - Yu Darvish, SDP, 2022; Alek Manoah, TOR, 2022
24 - Sandy Alcantara, MIA, 2022; Gerrit Cole, NYY, 2023; Logan Webb, SFG, 2023
Over the entirety of that four-season stretch, the most quality of starters was Zack Wheeler with 83 quality starts for the Philadelphia Phillies.
Wheeler almost won the NL Cy Young in both 2021 and 2024, finishing in second place each year. He also placed sixth in 2023 and has been probably the best pitcher in the majors over the past half-decade—as evidenced by the three-year, $126M extension the Phillies gave him for what will be his age 35 through age 37 seasons.
Most quality starts (total) from 2021-24:
83 - Zack Wheeler
80 - Corbin Burnes
77 - Logan Webb
76 - Framber Valdez
73 - Kevin Gausman
71 - Gerrit Cole, Luis Castillo
70 - Jose Berrios
One final note before we move on: 2021 Sandy Alcantara (23 QS, 9-15 record), 2023 Logan Webb (24 QS, 11-13 record) and 2024 Logan Gilbert (22 QS, 9-12 record) are the poster boys of the “Kill the Win” campaign, each tallying at least 13 more quality starts than wins in a recent season.
That’s not quite as drastic as Jacob deGrom going 10-9 with 28 quality starts in 2018 or Felix Hernandez going 13-12 with 30 quality starts in 2010. But if you take nothing else away from this article, please at least recognize that quality starts are better than wins.
Tips and Strategies for Pitchers to Achieve Quality Starts
First and foremost, you have to be good at pitching to get quality starts on any sort of regular basis. It’s not easy to hold a team to three or fewer runs while recording at least 18 outs.
Beyond that, though, the biggest key is pitch efficiency, as these days you basically never see a pitcher (unless he’s chasing a no-hitter or is one inning away from a shutout) go back out for a fresh inning with a pitch count already at 95 or greater.
Thus, if it’s routinely taking 20 pitches to make it through an inning, the math isn’t going to math when trying to last six or more innings.
That’s exactly why guys like Dylan Cease and Blake Snell were nowhere to be found on the lists above. Even though they are both excellent pitchers, they hunt strikeouts, they live with issuing more than their fair share of walks and they’re often running on fumes by the fifth inning because of that approach.
Cease and Snell do each record a quality start in around 41-45 percent of their appearances, but that’s a far cry from the best who are more in the 65-69 percent range.
That isn’t to say you can’t strike guys out if you want quality starts. Zack Wheeler averaged better than a strikeout per inning and better than 200 strikeouts per season en route to his 83 quality starts from 2021-24.
However, there’s a fine line between averaging a combined 12 strikeouts and walks per 9 IP as Wheeler does and averaging 15 like Cease does or 16.5 like Snell does. And that fine line is a substantial difference in quality start potential.
How Quality Starts Affect Fantasy Baseball
Well, in a lot of fantasy leagues now — whether head-to-head, roto, points, DFS, etc. — quality starts simply is a scoring category.
Even if it’s not explicitly a data point you’re chasing, though, surely earned runs allowed and some form of innings pitched — be it wins or straight up points per out recorded — are major scoring categories for pitchers in your league/pool, in which case you’re still pretty well searching for quality starts.
As previously noted, though, not all quality starts are created equal. For instance, Kyle Gibson with a 4.43 ERA tallied 64 quality starts from 2021-24 to Blake Snell’s 48, and there’s probably not a baseball fan on earth outside of maybe Gibson’s own mother who would rate him as a better (fantasy) pitcher than Snell.
Namely, getting strikeouts and keeping both ERA and WHIP to a minimum is a major consideration when chasing quality starts in fantasy — especially if you’re in a K/9 league where you’re hurting yourself to some extent if you deploy a starter who’s probably going to go six innings while not tallying five strikeouts.
By and large, though, quality starts equal quality fantasy pitchers, and vice versa.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the all-time Quality Start records?
Officially, Don Sutton has the most quality starts in a career with 483, narrowly ahead of both Nolan Ryan at 481 and Greg Maddux at 480.
However, Cy Young would almost certainly hold the record if we had more complete game log data for him. He made 815 starts and pitched a complete game in 749, finishing his career with a 2.63 ERA. There is mostly complete data for four of his seasons (1901-04), during which he tallied a quality start in 132 of 160 games started. And if he came anywhere close to maintaining that 82.5 percent rate for his 22-year career, he would’ve been well north of 600 quality starts.
Alas, Sutton is the official career QS king at 483, while Grover Alexander holds the single-season record with 40 quality starts in 1916. He also had 39 QS in each of 1915 and 1917 for what was just an outrageous three-year peak of dominance.
What percentage of games started result in quality starts?
The ratio certainly isn’t what it used to be.
From 1974-1993, the league-wide quality start rate was pretty consistently north of 50 percent. It randomly dipped to 46.9 percent in 1987, but then spiked back to 56.4 percent the following year.
It dipped below 50 percent for much of 1994-2009, but quality starts were back with a vengeance from 2010-14, 52.9 percent of all starts producing a quality start during that five-year stretch.
But pitching deep into games is becoming a lost art. From 54.0 percent in 2014, that rate trickled to 50.0, 46.6, 43.6, 41.1 and 36.9 over the next five seasons. It really bottomed out to 29.0 percent in 2020, but 2020 data will forever be weird. And from 2021-24, the QS% has ranged from 32.6-36.5 percent.
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