We’re entering the final weekend of fantasy baseball drafts, which means there is still time to identify some draft values. However, it also means that the initial waiver wire runs are going to happen in many leagues and there could still be hitters out there who will provide you value for the 2025 season.
In order to find those hitters, I created a custom leaderboard on FanGraphs of some of my favorite process-oriented stats: barrel rate, max exit velocity, swinging strike rate, overall contact rate, and O-Swing% (or chase rate). To me, these are the most important stats when looking at a hitter’s process because we can see who is forcing pitchers to throw them pitches in the strike zone, who is doing a good job of making contact on those pitches, and who is making authoritative contact when they do swing. All that should line up to produce hitters who are more likely to give you solid results.
After creating the leaderboard, I took the 2024 league average marks in all the categories and removed any hitter who wasn’t better than the league average in each one. Those marks were 7.6% barrel rate, 28.6% chase rate, 11.1% SwStr%, and a 76.8% contact rate. I then removed hitters who are consistently drafted inside the top 200 picks in fantasy baseball drafts. That left us with a list of 20 hitters who were average to above in my favorite hitter stats, regardless of their surface-level results
So let’s see which ones I’m really targeting in my drafts or early waiver wire runs.
2025 Fantasy Baseball Draft Prep: Rankings, strategy, sleepers, mock draft results
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