2025 Fantasy Baseball Starting Pitcher Preview: Ranking the top 24, sleepers, breakouts, busts, ADP data, more

There are a few things to know about the starting pitcher position as we look ahead to 2025. The first is that, though it’s important to get to know the player pool ahead of your draft, you also need to constantly remind yourself that attrition is going to be a bigger factor here than at any other position. 

I half-jokingly considered adding “… if he stays healthy” at the end of every single one of the blurbs I wrote for the rest of this article because that will ultimately be the biggest determinant of whether a pitcher ended up being worth drafting in any given season. It also means that a lot of what you’re about to read here will be rendered totally meaningless midway through the season; many of the pitchers here will be off the table during Spring Training.

That’s just the nature of the position, and it might be getting even more true. It used to be that the first few pitchers drafted in any given season in Fantasy were just about as sure a thing as you could find. Aces with multiple years of high-volume and high-quality production. Now? The No. 1 pitcher in nearly all Fantasy leagues is going to be last year’s NL Rookie of the Year, a guy who has never reached even 170 innings in a season; if it’s not him, it’ll be last year’s AL Cy Young winner, who eclipsed 180 innings for the first time ever. 

The days of 220 innings are basically over, and even 200-inning pitchers number in the handful in any given season. Increasingly, we’re forced to bet on pitchers who would have been viewed as long-shot risks even five years ago to anchor our staffs. And I do wonder how that’s going to change our strategies for Fantasy Baseball in the long run.

Earlier in the offseason, I did a deep dive into the past 10 years of drafts to try to identify the best approach for drafting starting pitchers. I found that the first three rounds or so in a 12-team league see a steady, linear decline in return on investment at the position, with pitchers in the third round returning a bit less, on average than those in the second, who return a bit less than those in the first. But starting in the fourth round, pitcher values have historically collapsed, creating a marketplace in which pitchers in the fourth round are barely a better bet than pitchers in the 10th round. That’s the “SP Dead Zone,” as I’ve taken to calling it. 

And now I’m wondering if we won’t look back on things five years from now and think that it’s just all one big dead zone. With the reliable aces fewer and farther between, is every pitcher at the top of drafts just going to be a bad bet? Was the Max Scherzer/Justin Verlander/Clayton Kershaw class of pitchers the last generation of true aces, worthy of a first-round value year in and year out? 

I don’t think we’re there yet. I would still take any one of Paul Skenes, Tarik Skubal, or Zack Wheeler in the second round happily this year. But if Skubal and Skenes bust, I also wouldn’t really be surprised at all – they both have either a one or one-and-a-half year track record of ace-level production. Five years ago, we were never drafting those guys in the first two rounds, and you can ask Spencer Strider drafters a year ago how good it felt betting on that profile.

Which is all to say, the best-laid plans of Fantasy analysts and players oft go awry in the fact of the attrition of the starting pitcher position. And we may be on the precipice of a sea change in how we approach the position, where early-round SPs become even more rare than they have been. Again, we’re not there now. But I can see it coming. Here’s how I’m approaching the position in 2025: 

1. Roki Sasaki, SP, Dodgers

Age (on opening day): 23
Where he played in 2024: Japan
NPB stats: 10-5, 2.35 ERA, 1.04 WHIP, 111 IP, 32 BB, 129 K
Sasaki isn’t arriving as the finished product Yoshinobu Yamamoto was, but at 23, that’s to be expected. He was thought to be a prodigy in Japan, reaching triple digits with his fastball while dominating with what may be the world’s best splitter, a true 80 grade offering that simply vanishes as it crosses the plate. While it’s possible to overrate him in redraft leagues, that’s less the case in Dynasty.
Scott’s 2025 Fantasy impact: pencil him in

Age (on opening day): 21
Where he played in 2024: did not play — Tommy John surgery
2022 stats (minors): 6-2, 1.56 ERA, 0.89 WHIP, 103 2/3 IP, 25 BB, 155 K
Painter had one of the all-time great minor-league pitching seasons in 2022, positioning himself to win a spot in the Phillies rotation as a 19-year-old before Tommy John came to call. His return came this offseason in the Arizona Fall League, which he dominated to the tune of a 2.30 ERA, 0.89 WHIP and 10.3 K/9 across six starts, offering hope that he can pick up where he left off once the Phillies fire him up in June (as is their reported plan).
Scott’s 2025 Fantasy impact: midseason hopeful

Age (on opening day): 22
Where he played in 2024: High-A, Double-A, Triple-A, majors
Minor-league stats: 5-3, 2.36 ERA, 1.12 WHIP, 91 2/3 IP, 45 BB, 96 K
Major-league stats: 4 IP, 1 H, 0 ER, 1 BB, 2 K
By the sum of his parts, Jobe is the model pitching prospect, standing out most for the the incredible spin rates on his pitches — four of which grade as 60 or better, according to Baseball America. But he’s struggled to stay healthy since the Tigers picked him third overall in 2021, having yet to throw even 100 innings in a season, and also underwhelmed with his strikeout and walk numbers prior to his promotion last year.
Scott’s 2025 Fantasy impact: fighting this spring

Age (on opening day): 21
Where he played in 2024: High-A, Double-A
Minor-league stats: 0-4, 2.24 ERA, 0.99 WHIP, 88 1/3 IP, 24 BB, 115 K
Anytime a tall (in this case, 6-foot-9) and lanky left-hander makes his way through the White Sox system, he’s sure to invite Chris Sale comparisons, but that comparison may be particularly apt in this instance since Schultz throws from a low three-quarters delivery and has control that’s almost too good to believe. If the deceptive arm angle wasn’t devastating enough, he added a couple miles per hour to both his fastball and slider in 2024.
Scott’s 2025 Fantasy impact: midseason hopeful

Age (on opening day): 22
Where he played in 2024: Double-A, Triple-A
Minor-league stats: 10-7, 3.08 ERA, 1.02 WHIP, 119 2/3 IP, 41 BB, 148 K
The molding of Chandler into a frontline starter has been yeoman’s work for the Pirates, who drafted him as a two-way player in 2021, but it’s on the cusp of paying off after a year in which he improved as a strike-thrower and fleshed out his arsenal with a ready-for-prime-time changeup and slider. Chandler figures to follow in the footsteps of Paul Skenes and Jared Jones this year, and my guess is he lands somewhere between the two in terms of effectiveness.
Scott’s 2025 Fantasy impact: fighting this spring