We are under a week away from MLB’s Tokyo Series between the Dodgers and the Cubs and two weeks away from the domestic opening day, so fantasy baseball draft season is kicking into high gear. I’ve spent a lot of the off-season writing about my favorite starting pitcher targets and updating my top 180 starting pitcher rankings, but I felt that it was time to be specific about my strategy when it comes to drafting starting pitchers.
In this article, I’ll talk you through HOW I approach drafting starting pitchers in 2025 fantasy baseball drafts and also WHY this is my approach. My hope is not just to give you some roadmap to copy but to have us think through the position together so that you can enter your drafts with a strategy for drafting starting pitchers that you feel confident in. If we’re just going into drafts and “winging it,” we’re already starting on the backfoot.
Starting Pitcher Landscape
A big part of my approach to starting pitching is in response to the general landscape. We have moved on from the days when there were a few clear-cut aces at the top of the rankings and then a slew of definitively worse pitchers. The consensus top two starting pitchers this season (Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes) are both young pitchers with limited MLB track records. Corbin Burnes and Zack Wheeler are both over 30 years old with potential workload concerns, Garrett Crochet has only one year as an MLB starting pitcher, Jacob deGrom has had a long history of injuries, and the list can go on and on.
The number of potential “safe” aces also diminished with the injuries to Gerrit Cole and George Kirby. I believe we’ve learned over the years that starting pitchers are either “risky” or “riskier,” and there is no such thing as a “safe” option. While we do need to factor injuries and risk into our draft plan, I am also comfortable accepting some level of risk with my starting pitchers and am more focused on drafting guys who are producing at strong levels when they’re on the mound. Even if that’s for 140 innings.
Aside from there being no clearly differentiated top tier, in my opinion, we have an even larger “glob” of pitchers who could be fantasy aces. In recent seasons, we have seen ace upside from Michael King, Chris Sale, Pablo Lopez, Logan Webb, and Shane McClanahan, to name a few, and that range of pitchers often falls outside of the top 100 overall picks.
As a result, my general approach to drafting pitching in a 12-team league (and this article will specifically…