2025 Fantasy Baseball Draft Prep: 30 burning questions for the new season as pitchers and catchers report

Perhaps you’ve heard that pitchers and catchers are reporting this week, and perhaps you’ve taken that as your cue to tune back into baseball again. You’re going to be drafting again before too long, after all.

So what is it you should be thinking about? What are the big questions for 2025?

I have 30 of them for you right here.

1) Will there be any ill effects from Shohei Ohtani’s elbow and shoulder surgeries?

The elbow surgery — which isn’t Tommy John but some unspecified procedure having to do with his right UCL — is the headliner but of less concern for our purposes. Ohtani was able to DH while recovering from it last year and turned in arguably the best Fantasy season of any hitter ever. Obviously, his pitching is superfluous at this point (at least for Fantasy), but his attempt to return to it this year does throw a wrench into the machinery. You may prefer that he not mess with a good thing.

But again, that’s the smaller concern for Fantasy. The bigger one is that he’s also returning from surgery to repair a torn labrum in his left shoulder — i.e., the more important shoulder for a left-handed hitter — which was an injury he suffered while stealing a base in the World Series. A torn labrum can sometimes hamper a player’s power production the following year, and because of how it happened, it stands to reason that Ohtani may not push so hard for stolen bases this year, particularly with pitching also on the itinerary. So far, the two-way player has responded to every moment of adversity with even better results, so it’s certainly reasonable just to bet on him again. But in light of the potential complications, I may be inclined to take Bobby Witt or Aaron Judge over him.

Acuna was the top hitter drafted in Fantasy last year. Strider was the top pitcher. Both wound up missing most of the season, Acuna for a torn ACL and Strider for an elbow procedure having to do with his UCL … sort of. (A bone spur was putting pressure on it, and rather than simply remove the bone spur, Dr. Keith Meister also fortified the elbow with a bracing procedure.) Both players have prior experience with that sort of injury, so the Braves are exercising extra caution, targeting a late-April return for both.

But a target is only a target. How much are you willing to risk on the possibility of a prolonged absence? And how can you be sure what you’re getting when they do return? Acuna’s return from his first torn ACL in 2022 led to career-worst numbers. Strider’s game depends on him getting peak ride and velocity on his fastball. Anything less leads to trouble. Of course, the Braves know this, which is why they’re taking their time with both, but clearly, there are no guarantees here. Personally, I’ve found the 11th-round price tag for Strider easier to pay than the second-round price tag for Acuna, but any developments for either this spring could move things.

3) Can Paul Skenes handle an ace workload?

One of the most hyped pitching prospects of all time went on to have one of the most dominant rookie seasons of all time, so you might just presume it’s all smooth sailing for Skenes. But part of what makes him so special is that he’s the hardest-throwing starting pitcher in the game, averaging 98.8 mph on his four-seamer last year, and one thing we’ve learned during this era of max-effort pitching is you can’t presume anything workload-wise.

Not every hard-thrower can hold up over 180-plus innings, which is the sort of workload you expect from a first- or second-round pitcher, so until I see Skenes do it, I’m not just going to presume he can. He’s a big, strong kid with a deep enough arsenal that he doesn’t have to rely on the fastball so much, making an increase of 20-plus innings this year a reasonable enough bet, but I might hesitate just enough to take Zack Wheeler over him in Round 2 (though truthfully, I don’t want any pitcher that early).

4) Was Chris Sale’s good health just a one-off?

“If only” was a common refrain for drafters of Sale from 2020 through 2023, during which he initially missed time due to Tommy John surgery but, subsequently, a fractured rib cage, a fractured pinky, a fractured wrist, and shoulder inflammation. Well, he finally ended the four-your trend last year, and “if only” turned out to be an NL pitching Triple Crown and Cy Young award.

Sale proved that he could be just as much of an ace at age 35 as he was at 30, and naturally, he’s being drafted with greater enthusiasm this year. But is he any more durable, really? While he was healthy for the bulk of 2024, he was repeatedly unavailable during the stretch run and postseason — must-win games for the Braves, obviously — due to back spasms. It was a new malady for him, yet somehow all too familiar, and now that you’re paying the premium for him, you have to ask yourself if you can live with the downside.

5) What kind of ball are we working with?

This question has unfortunately become boilerplate heading into a new season, and part of me wonders if it was always a factor. Has our improved understanding of how much the physical characteristics of the ball can influence the game made us hyper-aware, leading to a collective neurosis over something that can’t realistically be controlled? The balls are all manufactured by hand, after all, meaning the human element comes into play for each and every one.

But alas, we’ve seen considerable fluctuations in the way the ball carries over the past few seasons, often even changing in season, and well, last season was the second-most difficult in the past nine for a batter to put the ball in the bleachers (as measured by home run-to-fly ball rate). It especially impacts those hitters who’ve tailored their swings for home runs even though their raw power is rather fringy, with Ozzie Albies being a prominent example. Yes, his worst two seasons (last year included) were plagued by injuries, but they also happened to be the two in which the ball was carrying the worst.

6) Was Lawrence Butler’s midseason breakthrough legit?

This question may be the top-of-mind for every Fantasy prognosticator, and where they land on it will determine whether they regard Butler as a breakout or a bust for 2025. He’s not exactly coming at a discount, being about the 75th player drafted on average … unless you do take his midseason breakthrough at face value, in which case his production rivals that of a first-rounder.

Specifically, Butler worked with director of hitting Darren Bush to quiet his swing, cut his strikeout rate by one-third, and hit .302 with 20 homers, 14 steals, and a .943 OPS from July 1 on, which amounts to roughly half a season. That’s the kind of production that moves mountains. Still, the 24-year-old was more of a curiosity than a prospect coming up through the minors, and it’s possible he slips back into old habits after a long offseason. A good three months is only a good three months, after all, and he was already showing signs of slowing down in September. I tend to see the glass half full with him, but the truth is nobody knows.

7) How much can we reasonably expect from Jacob deGrom?

A whole lot of people are putting a whole lot of faith in a 36-year-old coming back from Tommy John surgery. That’s a problem in its own right, but of course, deGrom is no ordinary 36-year-old. He was a Cy Young winner in both 2018 and 2019 and has only improved his game in the five years since then, putting together a 2.10 ERA, 0.75 WHIP, and 13.9 K/9. Unfortunately, in exactly none of those five years has he thrown even 100 innings.

You see, the improved performance coincided with an increase in average fastball velocity, by about 2 mph, and there have been nothing but shoulder, forearm, and elbow problems ever since. I suspect his body simply can’t handle the increased torque that comes with the added velocity, so unless he comes back throwing softer (and to be fair, for the three starts we saw him late last season, he was), I wouldn’t expect him to last long. He’s not even a top-100 player for me, but he’s often drafted inside the top 50

8) Do we have any clue who Gerrit Cole is anymore?

I don’t see how we can, which is what makes him the most perplexing player to rank in 2025. He missed nearly half of last season with an elbow injury (nerve inflammation and edema) that’s not part of the normal baseball vernacular, and when he returned, he wasn’t quite himself. He was still good enough to start in Fantasy — delivering a 3.41 ERA, 1.13 WHIP, and 9.4 K/9 across 17 starts — but he wasn’t the ace we were used to seeing. More troubling than the results was the process. His slider lacked its usual bite, and he wasn’t throwing it as much. The way I see it, the three likeliest scenarios are as follows:

1. An offseason of rest restores Cole’s slider and returns him to ace standing, making him a bargain as the 13th starting pitcher off the board.
2. Cole continues in his diminished form, making him perhaps slightly overdrafted as the 13th starting pitcher but still a worthwhile contributor.
3. Turns out Cole was reluctant to throw his slider because he was still favoring his elbow, and even more troubles are in store for 2025.

I don’t find any of those scenarios to be particularly more likely than any other, but I’ve found Cole’s cost to be a little high for my liking.

9) Was September a sign of things to come for Wyatt Langford?

Drafted fourth overall in 2023, Langford was thought to be a baseball prodigy when he hit .360 with 10 homers and a 1.157 OPS in 44 minor-league games that year. He was thought to be a Fantasy savior when he hit .365 with six homers and a 1.13 OPS in 21 games the following spring. The actual returns in his rookie season were underwhelming, to put it mildly, but it all changed in September when he hit .300 with eight homers, seven steals, and a .996 OPS. That’s the Langford we expected to see all along, and that’s the Langford we were left with.

For those who want details, I’ll note that he adopted a more upright stance to make his swing more adaptable, helping him adjust to major-league velocity and movement, however, it happened, and growth seemed inevitable. We got a glimpse of it early enough to renew our enthusiasm, and by the looks of his ADP, that’s exactly what’s happened.

10) Can Garrett Crochet keep it going for a full season?

Because the White Sox, in their hapless state, rightfully decided that their only goal for the second half of 2024 should be to preserve Crochet’s trade value, we were robbed of a full breakthrough for the 25-year-old left-hander (who was also coming back from Tommy John surgery and needed his innings curtailed to some degree anyway). But even more than what his surface-level stats tell us, we can see his SP1 upside from his strikeout rate, strikeout-minus-walk rate, swinging-strike rate, xFIP, and SIERA, all of which ranked first or second among pitchers with at least 100 innings.

But can he live up to those numbers over a full workload? As with Skenes, I’m not going to presume it until I see it, and that goes double for a pitcher with Crochet’s injury history. The Red Sox are certainly betting on it, giving up a massive prospect haul for him in the offseason, and Fantasy Baseballers are buying in completely as well, making him one of the top 10 starting pitchers off the board.

11) What does Roki Sasaki have to offer?

We know he has a killer splitter to offer — the best in all the world, some scouts have said — but we don’t know what else. His fastball is straighter than ideal. At one point in time, it averaged 98.8 mph, giving it a whiff rate in line with Chris Sale’s, but last year, it averaged 96.8 mph, giving it a whiff rate in line with Chris Flexen’s. The Dodgers’ ability to recapture that velocity, or perhaps further develop his slider as compensation, will go a long way toward determining how good Sasaki is.

Unfortunately, the fact he signed with the Dodgers makes preservation the top priority. They’re making the playoffs even if he doesn’t throw a single pitch for them, so they won’t let him throw an amount that compromises his playoff availability. I suspect he’ll be good — not an ace, but good — but if it’s only over 120 innings, it won’t justify his ADP.

12) How will the Dodgers pitching staff shake out in general?

But of course, Sasaki will throw a pitch for the Dodgers this season, and so will (we can only assume) Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, Shohei Ohtani, Clayton Kershaw, Tony Gonsolin, Dustin May, Bobby Miller, Landon Knack and Justin Wrobleski, among others. That’s a lot of pitching talent for one organization, and you might say it’s necessary given the injury concerns for … all of them, but particularly the top five (or six if you count Sasaki). Finding enough innings for all of them and working around whatever injuries pop up will be a herculean task for manager Dave Roberts, leading to plenty of headaches for those of us playing Fantasy Baseball.

Ohtani’s presence will require the Dodgers to go with a six-man rotation, which could also help to keep Snell, Yamamoto, and Glasnow healthy, but it does mean their starts will be spread further apart, which has its downsides. And as with Sasaki, the biggest priority for all of these pitchers will be preservation, meaning it’s unlikely the Dodgers will push the envelope with any. What I’m trying to say is that there are institutional disadvantages to drafting any Dodgers pitcher, regardless of how talented, and each one’s draft stock should be suppressed because of it.

13) How will the two minor-league ballparks play?

There’s a tendency to lump together the Rays’ new home (George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa) and the Athletics’ new home (Sutter Health Park in Sacramento) because they’re both minor-league ballparks and by virtue of asking this question, I’m guilty of it, too. But minor-league ballparks have their own characteristics just like major-league ballparks do. They don’t all favor hitters or pitchers as a general rule.

The Rays’ new home, without a doubt, will favor hitters. It’s part of the Yankees’ minor-league system and has the exact same dimensions as Yankee Stadium, only with Florida humidity. That short right-field porch will play even shorter in those conditions, and it’s a big reason why I call Ryan Pepiot and Taj Bradley busts for this season.

The impact of the Athletics’ venue change isn’t as clear. Sutter Health Park has similar dimensions to Oakland Coliseum, which is generally regarded as a pitcher’s park, but removed from the permanent chilliness of the Bay Area, the ball should carry better. It’ll be more hitter-friendly than where the Athletics used to play, but I’m not confident it’ll be hitter-friendly in general, and haven’t let it impact my thinking about Athletics players too much.

14) Is Camden Yards back to normal?

The Orioles moved back the entire length of their left field fence 30 feet prior to the 2022 season, which predictably made it a millstone for right-handed power hitters. They apparently learned the error of their ways, moving that fence back in part of the way — specifically, 13 feet in some places and 26 feet in others — which won’t restore Camden Yards to its former hitter-friendly glory but should help it to reach a happy medium. This is particularly welcome news for Jordan Westburg and Ryan Mountcastle, two right-handed hitters who generate premium exit velocities but haven’t delivered the power numbers to match … yet. I’ve marked the former as a breakout for this year and the latter as a sleeper.

From the very start of last season, we heard rumblings about Rafael Devers’ shoulders, which were apparently inflamed, both of them, but didn’t seem to impact him apart from requiring the occasional maintenance day. In fact, through the end of July, he was on a career-best pace, batting .302 with a .979 OPS. But that’s when the shoulders really became an issue. The velocity on both his swings and his throws cratered, and he wound up hitting .205 with a .624 OPS over the final two months.

An MRI late in the season cleared him of anything more serious, but the diagnosis was so vague and the effect so detrimental (eventually, anyway) that I can’t help but wonder if there’s another shoe to drop. I’m presuming an offseason of rest will be enough to cure him and am drafting him as I normally would, but any talk of continued soreness this spring could change that.

Both were aces prior to having Tommy John surgery, and both are expected back for the start of 2025. Normally, pitchers of their standing would be given great deference coming off that procedure, but it doesn’t seem to be happening in their case. Why? For one thing, McClanahan is coming back from a second Tommy John surgery, which has a lower rate of success than a first Tommy John surgery. Those who presumed Walker Buehler would be immediately back to form following a second Tommy John got burned last year.

As for Alcantara, he was always an unconventional ace for Fantasy, averaging less than a strikeout per inning. Mainly, his ability to accumulate innings drove his value, but you can’t expect him to be a workhorse fresh off Tommy John surgery. You can’t expect too many wins for him either, not pitching for the Marlins.

Holliday was the top pick in the draft three years ago and the top prospect in baseball a year ago. At age 21, he remains a strong bet to live up to that pedigree someday. The question is what day? It wasn’t yesterday (er, last year), when he looked overmatched in two separate major-league stints, striking out 33 percent of the time. He still excels at working the count and produces good exit velocities for his age, but he won’t be handed anything this spring and doesn’t make for a comfortable pick at about the same point he was being drafted last year.

18) How long before Roman Anthony and Kristian Campbell arrive?

The Red Sox have three of the top five prospects in the game, and two are on the verge of contributing to the big club already. Anthony is the higher-regarded of the two and has spent about twice as much time at Triple-A, but there isn’t as clear of an opening for him as there is for Campbell, who Red Sox beat writers have confirmed is part of a second base competition with Vaughn Grissom and David Hamilton this spring. Even if Campbell loses out, it’s just a matter of time before the 22-year-old takes over, and I feel like he should be drafted on about the same level as Jackson Holliday now.

Anthony is behind Wilyer Abreu and Ceddanne Rafaela on the depth chart for now, but neither is an obstacle so great that he can’t overtake one or the other within the first quarter of the season — or perhaps sooner if there’s an injury. He makes for an optimal stash after Pick 250 or so.

19) Did Bo Bichette simply have an off year?

Bichette hit .225 in a year when he twice went on the IL for a calf injury. Coincidence? Well, I can’t say for sure. But seeing as he hadn’t hit less than .290 in any of his first five seasons and remains a career .290 hitter even now, I’m inclined to think he was never feeling quite right and had one of those seasons that we’re better off just forgetting. It wouldn’t seem like a controversial opinion except that his draft stock has tanked, taking him from about the 35th player off the board last year to about the 125th player this year. That’s too big of a slide for an early-round mainstay going into his age-27 season.

20) Can Yankee Stadium salvage Cody Bellinger’s power?

If there’s one venue that can salvage a left-handed slugger whose exit velocities have gone down the drain, it’s Yankee Stadium, home to the most famous short porch in baseball. Bellinger managed to overcome those exit velocities (his aEV ranking in the bottom quarter of the league) to hit 26 home runs for the Cubs in 2023, but last year was more of a struggle. Statcast projects he would have had six more home runs playing every game at Yankee Stadium, though, taking advantage of that short right-field porch. A return to the 25-30 range this year isn’t unrealistic.

21) Will the Dodgers settle on a single closer?

The Dodgers already had multiple relievers capable of filling the role before bringing in Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates this offseason, and manager Dave Roberts hasn’t been one to commit to any particular pitcher in any particular role since Kenley Jansen left the team in 2022. He has at least said that he’s leaning toward Scott to begin the season, but I suspect if a murderer’s row of lefties is due up in the eighth inning, he would use Scott then rather than preserve him for the ninth. Roberts’ preferences are also quick to change when a reliever endures a rough patch, and Scott’s shaky control makes such a stretch likely to happen at some point. Don’t let Yates or even Blake Treinen slip too far out of your sights in leagues where saves are scarce.

22) Is it time to move on from Mike Trout?

The price has never been lower for a player who had a long run as the best in Fantasy Baseball, but that’s to be expected with him having missed 59 percent of his team’s games over the past four seasons. Last year, Trout was off to a brilliant start, even recapturing some of his past enthusiasm for stolen bases, when he tore the meniscus in his left knee. He would re-tear it while on a rehab assignment and wound up missing the rest of the season. The deeper the league, the weaker the alternatives, and the less likely I am to sink even a top-100 pick into Trout. But at that price, he’s a potential league-winner if he can reverse the injury trend, making him a worthy gamble in shallower leagues.

23) How much hope should we have for Luis Robert?

Robert followed up his most productive year — one in which he hit .264 with 38 homers, 20 steals, and an .857 OPS — with his least productive, batting .224 with a .657 OPS, and naturally, people are wondering what went wrong. He did miss the first two months with a strained hip flexor, off-footing him right away, but the way his strikeout rate spiked to 33 percent makes me wonder if his heart was fully in it during a 121-loss season for the White Sox. That’s some armchair psychology, I know, but when you consider that he’s a perpetual injury risk as well, I’m reluctant to buy in even at the reduced cost of a top-90 pick.

24) Is Sean Manaea’s new delivery enough to sustain him?

Because Manaea is 33 and has an extensive major-league track record, there may be a tendency to dismiss his career-best 2024 as just some fluky thing that happened, but the story behind it is a particularly compelling one. Through July 25, Sean Manaea had a 3.74 ERA, 1.25 WHIP and 8.6 K/9. That’s when he got a chance to see Chris Sale pitch live in person, and he came away so impressed that he decided he should throw from a low three-quarters arm slot as well, going on to deliver a 3.09 ERA, 0.85 WHIP, and 9.9 K/9 over his final 12 starts. The transformation was evident in his swinging-strike rate as well, which went from 11 percent before the change to 14 percent after the change. If it proves to be a durable one once the element of surprise is gone, he’ll be one of the top pitching bargains in the draft.

25) Will Matt McLain pick up where he left off as a rookie?

There was no stifling the enthusiasm for McLain after he hit .290 with 16 homers, 14 steals, and an .864 OPS in 89 games as a rookie in 2023 even though some of the underlying numbers were suspect. His exit velocities were middling, he wasn’t particularly skilled at pulling the ball, and his strikeout rate was verging on 30 percent. A lost 2024 (shoulder) has given us a chance to sober up a little, but his cost is still fairly optimistic, putting him just outside of the top 100. With second base being as weak as it is, you can understand the glass-half-full approach, though keep in mind he won’t actually gain second base eligibility until he plays five games there in-season.

26) Where will Mookie Betts be spending most of his time?

If it’s second base, Betts will be picking up eligibility there in short order, thus becoming the top player at the weakest position. That knowledge would be useful in its own right. But even more so, knowing where Betts will spend his time would give us some insight into the rest of the Dodgers lineup — and of course, anyone in that lineup will be of interest in Fantasy.

Presently, Betts is penciled in at shortstop, but that presumes Hye Seong Kim, who the Dodgers just signed out of the Korean league, will hit enough to hold down second base full-time, which would be fine. He’ll be useful in stolen bases and perhaps batting average in that scenario. But if not, Betts probably slides over to second base, moving Tommy Edman from center field to shortstop and freeing up Andy Pages to play center field. He’s a higher-upside choice than Kim for Fantasy.

27) Can James Wood optimize his swing for power?

The 22-year-old made great strides with his plate coverage last year, patching up the holes inherent to a player who stands 6-feet-7, and went on to deliver bonkers numbers in 52 games at Triple-A Rochester, batting .353 with 10 homers, 10 steals, and an 1.058 OPS. He did this despite having a ground-ball rate over 50 percent and a pull rate below 40 percent.

He then came up to the majors and put up respectable numbers in 79 games, batting .264 with nine homers, 14 steals, and a .781 OPS, but his ground-ball and pull rates got even worse. In fact, if he had the at-bats to qualify, Wood’s ground-ball rate would have been the second-highest and his pull rate the 10th-lowest. His batted-ball profile was so backward that seven of his nine major-league home runs went to the opposite field. And yet he still delivered respectable numbers for Fantasy. Just imagine when he begins turning on pitches the way a proper major-league hitter should.

28) Do we really know who Royce Lewis is?

We thought we had a stud on our hands when he hit .303 with a .945 OPS over the first 94 games of his career. The problem is that it was spread across three seasons, interrupted by ACL surgery for one, but also separate IL stints for a strained hamstring, strained quad, and strained adductor. We never got a lengthy, uninterrupted sample, which in some ways was encouraging. “If he’s like this every time we see him, imagine if he ever stays healthy,” so we thought. Well, he ended last season with the healthiest stretch of his career, 58 games, and in them … he hit .207 with a .620 OPS.

In all, he’s played about a full season’s worth of games (152) and hit .268 with 33 homers and an .825 OPS, so maybe that’s how we should think of him. But with all the fits and starts and highs and lows, I can’t help but feel like we really don’t have a clue what we’re getting into with Lewis. And then, of course, there’s the injury risk on top of it all.

29) What version of Christian Yelich are we getting?

I feel confident saying we won’t be getting the one who competed for NL MVP in 2018 and 2019, hitting better than .325 with at least 35 homers and an OPS over 1.000, but the reason I bring up that version of Yelich is to remind everyone that back issues are what brought him down in the first place. And back issues are what he finally had surgery to correct last August.

Interestingly, at the time he succumbed to surgery, he was having his best season since that 2018-19 prime, doubling down on his stolen base gains from the year before and cutting down on his strikeouts to get his batting average back over .300. That version of Yelich, while not quite the best version of Yelich, averaged more Head-to-Head points per game in 2024 (3.78) than Mookie Betts (3.75). Could he at least get back to that following back surgery? Ask anyone who’s had back surgery, and they’ll tell you the recovery is anything but straightforward. Perhaps the talk of Yelich potentially not being ready for the season is an early warning sign. Still, it’s clear that the range of outcomes for him includes some particularly high-end ones.

30) Is there a chance Xavier Edwards is legit?

You have to go back 15-20 years to find a time when the high-average, zero-power speedster was a viable profile at the major-league level. I’m thinking of Michael Bourn specifically, but even more memorable than him were a couple of Marlins, Juan Pierre and Luis Castillo, in the early 2000s. So it’s fitting that another Marlin, Xavier Edwards, reintroduced us to that profile last year, taking over midseason to bat .328 with 31 steals (and just one homer) in 70 games.

Modern defensive alignments and pitcher traits normally prevent those sorts of slap hitters from gaining a foothold, and fittingly, the expected stats paint an unflattering picture for Edwards. But he also hit .347 at Triple-A Jacksonville over the past two seasons, and I can’t help but think, as we enter Year 3 of the shift ban and stolen base resurgence, that the league might allow for such players again, if only in the most exceptional cases. If so, Edwards would be a true unicorn for 5×5 leagues and promising for points leagues as well, having averaged more per game (3.46) than Trea Turner last year.