By Ray Flowers, Special to SI.com

In fantasy terms, Mariano Rivera is the most valuable member of the Yankees' pitching staff. Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Draft day approaches, you spend all your free time studying and you can't sleep at night because the cold sweats hit you after waking up from a nightmare screaming, "How could I have picked Jeff Suppan over Shingo Takatsu?" It would be a pity to put all that effort in to fantasy baseball and not know what you're doing.

To that end we will help to illuminate the fantasy baseball world for those of you who might be new to it, and possibly even provide some info that those of you who have been playing for a few years might not have envisioned.

The save is "the" stat as far as pitchers go when people show up on draft day looking to snuff out the competition. The reason for this should be fairly obvious: Saves are hard to come by. The men who record saves are extremely valuable to your team's chance of bringing home that beautiful chrome-plated, I mean gold, trophy that you'd love to place on your fireplace mantle right next to your vacation pictures of Johnny at Disneyland.

Why are save men valuable, you ask? Let's take a look.

THE STATS

Here are the stats for the 2004 season:

In a previous discussion, we determined that the stolen base was twice as valuable as a homer, we can see that saves are about twice as valuable as wins. We determine this by taking the win total and dividing it by our save total.

2428 wins / 1230 saves = 1.97

What this means is that there were 1.97 wins for every save earned in 2004 (as compared to our 2.11 ratio of HR/SB). Practically speaking this means that saves are twice as hard to come by as wins. Or you could look at it this way:

Last year there were 87 players who won 10 games or more, but only 34 men with 10-plus saves.

This means that Estaban Loaiza's 10 wins are worth half as much as Rocky Biddle's 11 saves in the fantasy universe (remember our 1.97 to 1 ratio from above). Or to state it yet another way, Loaiza's 10 wins are roughly equal to David Riske's five saves.

Starting to catch our drift?

THE COMPARATIVE VALUE OF SAVES

Having conclusively shown that the save is twice as scarce as the win, let's look at the other stats that pitchers accumulate to determine if our position that the save is more valuable than the win is worth your consideration.

First off, it's obvious that the relievers will win the save category and the starters will win the win category, so let's move on. How about we compare ERA/WHIP and K's. The following stats are for all pitchers who won 10-plus games in 2004 and all relievers who saved 10-plus games.

Starters' ERA: 4.15
Relievers' ERA: 3.28
A definitive victory for the relievers.

Starters' WHIP: 1.33
Relievers' WHIP: 1.21
Close, but over a full season 1/10th of a point in WHIP could mean six or seven spots in your league rankings.

For the strikeout category we have to judge things a bit differently. Since the average starting pitcher (SP) in our study pitched 176 innings, while our average relief pitcher (RP) pitched only 67 innings, it's clear that the SP's will have a higher total of overall K's. But is that what's really important? It's not as obvious as you might first think.

In fantasy baseball there is usually an upper limit as well as a lower limit of Innings Pitched (IP). The reason for this is that you can't just pitch Randy Johnson with his 245.2 IP and Jason Schmidt with his 225 IP and win the league ERA title, which just wouldn't be fair. Conversely, you also can't just pick four relievers and win the ERA title even though they only pitch 225 innings total. The way that this situation is remedied is that many leagues set an upper and lower limit for IP (usually between 1,000 and 1,250 for most standard leagues). This means that you have to pitch at least the minimum to be eligible to win any of the categories. On the upper end of the scale, if you exceed the IP limit, your pitchers stats no longer count. Therefore it is extremely important to keep an eye on your IP totals since you don't want to pitch Suppan all season and run out of innings if you have Johan Santana on the bench with three starts left!

Therefore, we will list strikeouts by their total per inning (K/IP). This will show us how many K we can expect per IP.

Starters K per IP: 0.72
Relievers K per IP: 0.93
Again the relievers come out ahead, this time by roughly 20 percent, a sizable victory.

So let's review what we just said in a table:

CONCLUSION

The relievers "win" all three of the above categories as well as the save category we have been discussing. Therefore we can conclude the following:

• Relievers will have a better ERA than starters.
• Relievers will have a better WHIP than starters.
• Relievers will have a better strikeout to IP ratio than the starters.
• Relievers will also win the save category which, as we have shown, is worth twice as much as wins in their overall value to fantasy baseball.

Relievers come out ahead in four of the five standard categories used in fantasy baseball (ERA, WHIP, K [per IP] and SV, they only lose in the W column). When everything else is equal, a top-notch closer is worth more to your fantasy team than a top-flight starter. The numbers don't lie.

Ray Flowers is the statistical guru for FantasyBaseball.com. His work has appeared on numerous Web sites and will be found exclusively at the ALL-NEW FantasyBaseball.com starting later this month. FantasyBaseball.com will be the "Official Site for Fantasy Baseball" and feature in-depth analysis, message boards, live chats and much, much more. You can also visit Ray's blog at for a full review of all of his recent articles.