2025 Position Previews: Starting Pitcher, Part 1
The position previews series continues with a look at my first five tiers of starting pitchers
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Strategy
There is less to consider strategy-wise with pitchers compared to hitters. There aren’t really “category-specific” pitchers like there are with hitters. My rankings pretty much apply to all league types.
If you’re in a categories-based league, my advice is to start your draft with hitters. There are more studs to be found in the middle rounds in pitching than in hitting, as a general rule. There are also a handful of breakout SPs that pop up in April. You can usually find an SP or two for free in the first weeks of the season that makes a big impact on your team. That’s not as true for hitters. And that isn’t to mention the injury risk. Starting pitchers get hurt at a higher rate than hitters, so you should prefer your best players to be hitters.
As I’ve written about before, I am really targeting WHIP this year. I laid out the full case and a bunch of SP targets for that strategy here. Long story short, WHIP has less randomness in it than ERA, which makes it easier to project. That makes you more successful in building out a staff with hopes of leading the league in WHIP rather than ERA. There are also plenty of later-round SPs that give you a real shot at a very strong WHIP. The simplest way to build out that strategy would just be to avoid the high walk rate pitchers. Load up your pitching staff with projected walk rates under 7.5%, and then hope for the best in ERA.
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The most important piece of advice I can give you at SP is to tell you to leave yourself a roster spot or two for early-season additions. You want to be the guy grabbing whoever turns out to be this year’s Garrett Crochet, Jack Flaherty, or Reynaldo Lopez. If you draft so many solid SPs that you don’t feel like you can drop one, your hands are tied and someone else will get those breakout starters. It’s okay to have a poor back-end of your rotation, you’ll be able to patch it up in April-May.
Points Leagues Thoughts
Volume is king in points leagues. Things get really simple there. Move up the veteran workhorses like Logan Webb, Framber Valdez, Corbin Burnes, Aaron Nola, Seth Lugo, Mitch Keller, and the like. Jam in as many innings as you can in the draft and with your in-season management and you’re likely to do just fine.
You should also probably draft a pitcher or two pretty early on in a points league, because you have the case of some guys really running away with it in those types of leagues. If Skenes or Skubal throws 200 innings, for example, they’re going to be way ahead of the most of the rest of the guys at the position, so there’s a case to be made for being aggressive at SP in points leagues.
My advice there would be get 2-3 names from my top three tiers below and then prioritize getting those cheaper guys that project to throw a bunch of innings this year.
The Landscape
I’ve repeated some of this below, but the position feels a little bit shakier at the top this year. It seemed like we had 6-10 true aces in recent years, but this year I’m really only seeing four guys that I don’t have any worries about. And that’s not even with me worrying about all of the injuries to high-velo starters we saw last year. That could very well derail the top of this list again in 2025.
I like the guys at the top, of course, but I haven’t found myself drafting a ton of tiers 3-4 this year. It feels like the names at the top are riskier than before, and that has had me waiting even more than usual at SP.
That said, you do not want to let the rest of your league grab the top 25 SPs before you get one. Being patient doesn’t mean ending up with Aaron Nola as your ace. In a standard league situation, my best advice for you, as far as the names in this post go, would be to start your draft with two or three hitters, and then grab someone from tier two or three. After that, wait a bit, and jump into tiers five and six aggressively.
My favorite price-considered tiers below are tiers two, five and six. There are 33 pitchers below. Say you’re in a 12-team league, I’d like to keep pace with your league, meaning that I’d want at least three of the first 36 pitchers. I’d be pretty happy to start my pitching staff with something like
Logan Gilbert
Shane McClanahan
Spencer Schwellenbach
Zac Gallen
I’m not saying those are my four favorite names, but it’s just to say that I can be pretty reserved at SP while piling up stud hitters, and still feel very good about my staff. The place to really beat your opponents at this position are in the later rounds and on the waiver wire early in the year.
Tier One
Tarik Skubal (ADP Rank #2)
Paul Skenes (ADP Rank #1)
The nice thing about having written up all these players already is that I don't feel the need or desire to do it again here. If you want my full thoughts, click those links. They will take you to the player preview I’ve already written on them, provided that the team has been published already. That works best if you’re viewing this on a browser where you’ve logged in to Substack already.
I will also include each guy's ADP rank as I list them. This shows where they get drafted compared to other starting pitchers. It’s a better way to view the draft than raw ADP since every draft is different in terms of where hitters go versus pitchers.
These two guys stand above the rest of the position mostly because of their age and elite strikeout rate. There are no holes I can find to poke in them, while I could somewhat criticize the rest of the names that we’ll get to.
I don’t typically want to consider injury risk when drafting outside of those obvious situations like Byron Buxton, Jacob deGrom, etc. That said, I can understand the case that some will make about these two guys being higher risks of elbow injury because of the velocity they throw with. There does seem to be a correlation between velocity and elbow injury, and these are two of the hardest throwers in the league. That’s not enough to keep them away from my top tier, obviously, but it does push me even more into the camp of drafting hitters first.
Tier Two
Logan Gilbert (ADP Rank #4)
Zack Wheeler (ADP Rank #3)
Update: I flipped these two a couple of days after publishing this
The only somewhat legitimate criticism of Wheeler would be the age (34) and the fact that his strikeout rate doesn’t quite rival that of Skubal and Skenes. The reason to like him would be that he’s now at four straight seasons of 150+ innings, and that does inspire some more confidence about his durability.
As for Gilbert, it’s a “buy high” situation, which I tend to avoid. He threw 208.2 innings with a 0.89 WHIP last year. Neither of those things is repeatable, and this is his highest ADP by far. But he feels extremely safe, and he really did take things to a new level in strikeout rate (27.4%) and SwStr% (15.9%) last year while keeping his walk rate below 5%.
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