The fantasy baseball season is among us, and it’s a glorious time. This is the truest fantasy sport in a lot of ways. It demands the most decisions and knowledge of the most players, and it’s tied to the longest season. For those reasons, the winner of a fantasy baseball league is mostly determined by skill. Six months is an awfully long time for flukes and bad bounces to even out and iron out.
That said, the preparation for a fantasy baseball season can be intimidating. So many decisions, so many options. Paradox of choice can be a pesky thing in modern society — it’s possible to be frozen by so many alternatives staring back at us.
[Join or create a Yahoo Fantasy Baseball league for the 2025 MLB season]
So today, I’ll try to help you out with this planning, make it less scary. Of course, you’re welcome to adopt any piece of my strategy and player takes, as small a slice of it you want. You can even ignore all of it completely. At the end of the day, you’re the one who has to be satisfied with your team, and heck, any strategy will work if you pick the right players (and sadly, the converse of that is also true).
Let’s start with broad strokes, and then we’ll get into specifics. As always, season this to taste, factoring in your league shape and the managerial styles you’re competing against.
(Although most of what’s below would apply to any league in general, please assume we are assembling a mixed-league roster in this exercise.)
My goal entering any draft is to attack hitting and blend in pitching. Hitting is more stable year over year, more projectable. Pitching is more variable. It’s also likely that your hitting preference list is more similar to the market, while your pitching preference list is more different than the market. Thus, you might be surprised when you land more of your pitching sleepers and values than you initially thought.
I definitely won’t take a starting pitcher in the first round and probably not in the second, either. And I’m never going to be the first manager to tab a closer. But this does not mean we’re ignoring those spots, or punting them. I want to shoot for very good players who have a chance to be great.
Jump to
In other words, I favor a Hero-Driven pitching strategy.
Think back to fantasy football, where the Hero RB strategy is a common one (I called it Anchors Aweigh many years ago, but no one else did; branding has never…