What's the best way to approach starting pitching in your Fantasy Baseball draft? It's one of the thorniest questions for Fantasy analysts every season, and everyone's got their own approach.
For a long time, nobody would ever take a starting pitcher in the early rounds of drafts. Then, for a few years, the "pocket aces" strategy had its devotees willing to spend their first two picks on the position to get an edge on the competition. Here at CBSSports.com, discussions about starting pitcher were defined last year by "The Glob," while this year's conversations have mostly focused on the sudden, newfound depth of the position.
Well, I'm a data guy, so I want to see what the data tells us about how to approach the position. I pulled data from the past 10 years of drafts (not including 2020, because that was a short, weird, noisy year that we are, thankfully, moving further away from every year), and looked at how starting pitchers drated in every round fared in that time span. The data used here comes from NFBC's historical ADP and FanGraphs' Auction Calculator tool, and this is geared toward players in 12-team formats.
And … well ... yeah, pitchers don't tend to be great investments, especially when compared to hitters:
Here's the average value of pitchers and hitters drafted in the first 10 rounds from 2015-2024:
— Chris Towers has a house boat docked at the Himbo Dome (@cptowers.bsky.social) January 29, 2025 at 5:49 PM
[image or embed]
However, I do think it's worth pointing out that, while hitters return more value (and bust significantly less often) than pitchers at every point in the draft, that gap is significantly less pronounced in the early rounds, where pitchers tend to be pretty good investments.
From 2015-24, there were 14 pitchers drafted in the first round on average, and seven of them returned at least $20 in value, while 12 returned at least $10. In the second round, nine of 21 returned at least $20, while 14 returned at least $10 – which is to say, 74% of pitchers drafted in the first two rounds were at least must-start players, while only four out of 35 returned negative value. That gets worse in the third-round range (16/33 were worth at least $10, 8/33 at least $20), but it's in the fourth round where the collapse of pitching value happens:
Here's the same chart but with average and median value for each round: (I capped negative values at -$5 across the board to account for the fact that at some point you're just dropping the worst of these guys) Similar story: Linear value for first three rounds and then basically chaos.
— Chris Towers has a house boat docked at the Himbo Dome (@cptowers.bsky.social) January 29, 2025 at 5:12 PM
[image or embed]
And the thing to note here is how flat the value returned is from the fourth round until basically the 10th. Beginning in the fourth round, the average pitcher picked returns about $5 in value, and that stays between $8 and $4 for almost every round until the 10th (the exception being the seventh round, where pitchers returned on average just $2 in value).
We're not dealing with gigantic sample sizes here, so the data is somewhat noisy – no more than 34 starting pitchers were drafted on average in any of the rounds we are talking about. But the trends are, I think, fairly clear and straightforward to understand: Early-round pitchers can be worth the investment, but after the first few rounds, you're looking at increasingly diminishing returns. From the fourth round through around the 10th, there just doesn't seem to be much difference in the average quality of the pitchers being taken.
The SP Dead Zone
That's the SP Dead Zone right there. I'm borrowing a term that has caught on in Fantasy Football circles in part thanks to research Ben Gretch did for CBSSports.com back in 2019 to refer to the way elite running back seasons tend to overwhelmingly come from the first couple of rounds in drafts. It's actually kind of incredible how well SP values and RB values reflect each other – the first three rounds are where the overwhelming majority of elite SP and RB seasons come from, and values tend to collapse around the same point in drafts, right in the fourth round. And then, in both cases, return on investment tends to be remarkably flat from the fourth round to about the 10th.
$20 and $30 seasons from SPs are fairly common in the first two (maybe three) rounds of ADP, and then they happen extremely rarely after that!
— Chris Towers has a house boat docked at the Himbo Dome (@cptowers.bsky.social) January 30, 2025 at 3:05 PM
[image or embed]
What's the takeaway here?
Well, it should be that, if you're going to spend an early-round pick on a starting pitcher, you probably need to make it count. And historically, that means in the first two (maybe three) rounds. And then it probably doesn't make a ton of sense to hit the position again for another few rounds – if the values in the fourth round aren't much better than in the eighth, ninth, or 10th, then you should just wait to take your SP2 and SP3 until then. This allows you to mostly focus your most valuable picks on hitters, who provide the best return on investment, while still giving yourself the best chance possible of ending up with at least one ace.
It is, to borrow another Fantasy Football term, the "Hero-SP" strategy, and it's the one I've adopted with plenty of success over the past few seasons since doing a similar analysis back in 2021. You build your pitching staff around one of those aces who is a better bet to give you both the elite workload and production, and then you focus more on finding pitchers with traits you like as the draft goes on. It usually works out to one pitcher in the first three rounds, another one or two by the 10th, and then hitting the position hard in the double-digit rounds once I have my hitting core built up.
How do I put it into action in 2025?
Of course, every season is different, because every crop of pitchers is different. From 2015 through 2017, for example, Clayton Kershaw was a first-round pick every season, and he returned at least $35 in each season in the midst of one of the best runs any starting pitcher had. Betting on Kershaw with a first-round pick in 2018 didn't exactly work out – in his age-30 season, he was still very good, but his strikeout rate dipped below 9.0 per nine for the first time since 2013 – but it's hard to look at it as a "mistake" when he led the NL in ERA in five of the previous seven seasons while running an almost unbelievable 2.10 ERA ERA over 1,452 innings in those seven seasons.
That's quite a bit different from drafting Spencer Strider in the first round last year coming off his first ever season with more than 131.2 innings – especially since it was a season where he had an inflated 3.86 ERA. Not all first-round pitchers are created equal, is what I'm saying, and when you look through the history of first-round pitchers, we're mostly talking about guys with multi-year track records of ace production:
First-round SPs | ADP | Value |
2015 Clayton Kershaw | 3.9 | $42 |
2018 Max Scherzer | 10.0 | $38 |
2017 Clayton Kershaw | 3.8 | $35 |
2016 Clayton Kershaw | 4.0 | $35 |
2021 Jacob deGrom | 5.2 | $32 |
2018 Chris Sale | 12.0 | $32 |
2019 Jacob deGrom | 11.0 | $28 |
2022 Corbin Burnes | 10.8 | $19 |
2019 Max Scherzer | 5.4 | $19 |
2021 Gerrit Cole | 7.2 | $18 |
2018 Clayton Kershaw | 7.4 | $13 |
2022 Gerrit Cole | 7.8 | $11 |
2021 Shane Bieber | 10.4 | $2 |
2024 Spencer Strider | 8.3 | -$5 |
The two first-round SPs who didn't return at least $10 in value both got hurt, which is no surprise – hey, pitchers get hurt! – but they were also two of just three on the list without multiple seasons of both ace production and ace workload – the other being Corbin Burnes in 2022, who was coming off consecutive sub-2.50 ERA seasons, one of which came during the shortened 2020 season.
Pitchers with multi-year track records of ace production tend to dominate the early rounds of drafts, which makes sense – if you've proven you can handle the workload while remaining effective, you should be worth a premium in drafts. What's interesting about the 2025 crop of pitchers is that the most expensive pitchers by and large haven't proven it. Among the five starters being drafted in the first three rounds on average in NFBC drafts, Zack Wheeler is the only one who has finished as a top-10 starter more than once – his worst finish since 2021 is SP23 – while Logan Gilbert is the only other one of the five to have even thrown more than 130 innings in consecutive seasons – Paul Skenes got to 129.1 between college and the pros in 2023, while Tarik Skubal threw just 85 in 2023 and Garrett Crochet managed just 25 in 2023 (and didn't pitch at all in 2022).
Now, because of attrition at the position, multi-year runs of ace production are becoming harder and harder to find. Which could maybe be a sign that these early-round pitchers are just being overvalued this season. And maybe history won't be the guide it should be. Maybe the early-round pitchers this year aren't worth the investment they have been in years past. Every season is different, after all.
That being said, if you are going to pick one of the early-round pitchers this season, Zack Wheeler is clearly the one who fits the bill of previous early-round pitchers best. That he's going 10 picks later than Skenes and seven picks later than Skubal only helps his case. Things could, of course, go wrong for Wheeler. But he has the proven track record of elite production and workload that we're looking for here, and it's one nobody else at the pitcher position can really touch.
