With most teams having played a least 60 games this season, we’re now more than one-third of the way through the MLB season. That means you have a good idea which of your teams will be competitive and which you’ll have to fight to keep alive. You have a good understanding of which of your early-season moves paid off and which seemed to be missteps. That means it’s the perfect time to take stock of things we’ve learned.
In this article, I’m going to go over the lessons that I personally learned this season while playing fantasy baseball. Some of them are lessons I’ve learned before, but can’t seem to get through my thick skull, others are slight variations of my previous beliefs, and still more are brand new lessons I’m learning based on the climate we’re in.
Even though I write fantasy baseball content for a living and consider myself knowledgeable when it comes to the sport, there are always going to be mistakes I make in managing my fantasy teams. My hope in going through this exercise is to not only make myself a better player but help you to avoid some of the pitfalls that I may have fallen into.
Trust your skills, but don’t back yourself into a corner
Heading into the season, I mentioned that a lot of my draft strategy in my fantasy baseball drafts was centered around the belief in my ability to find starting pitching value. I was happy to wait to draft starting pitching because I felt confident that I would be able to identify upside starters late in drafts or snag them off waivers in the first few weeks of the season. Then, the season started, and my fantasy teams were hurting for pitching early on.
Some of that is bad luck with injuries. I had a lot of shares of Justin Steele, Jared Jones, and Yu Darvish; however, I also had a few teams where I waited so long to draft starting pitcher that I backed myself into a corner where I NEEDED to hit on all of my late-round picks or find early gems on the waiver wire or I’d be in big trouble. Those teams have been the hardest for me to climb out of the hole, and while I’ve been gaining pitching points incrementally, it crystallized a truth for me: identifying your strengths going into a draft and playing to those is not the same as living and dying by them.
Trusting my ability to find good starting pitching late in drafts or on the waiver wire doesn’t mean constructing a roster that FORCES me to do that to have success. It can be a fine line to walk, but it’s one that you need to identify and stick to if you want to have a good fantasy season. My rosters that included more than one of Shane McClanahan, Sandy Alcantara, Gavin Williams, and Shane Baz, of which there were one or two, consolidated too many risks or too many uncertainties onto one roster. I looked at it through a lens of “I only need two of them to hit to net immense value,” but I ignored the possibility that none of them would provide any consistency for me.
Being “open” to pitcher injury concerns is not the same as relying on currently hurt pitchers
The second lesson is connected a bit to the first one. My belief in my ability to find starting pitching led to my comfort in taking risks on “injury-prone” starters early. I felt, and I still do feel, that all starting pitchers carry a certain level of injury risk, and so avoiding guys like Jacob deGrom or Robbie Ray or Cole Ragans simply due to concerns about their health was unwarranted. I was happy to lean into that risk and grab what I perceived to be value on pitchers who were discounted due to their injury concerns.
However, I realized another crucial lesson here: a pitcher being “injury-prone” is very different from a pitcher “returning from injury.”
Concern about deGrom’s injury history or Max Fried’s “potential” forearm weakness or Ray’s previous injuries is not the same as concern about Shane McClanahan or Spencer Strider coming back from injury. If we’ve seen the pitcher on the mound and healthy, then we can have a certain level of confidence that they are coming into the season as healthy as any other pitcher. At that point, our only concern about them, I believe, should be just the general risks that come with being a starting pitcher. However, assuming that a pitcher is healthy just because they’ve had surgery and been rehabbing for more than the necessary number of months is not the same thing. I now think of this as the idea of “not emphasizing previous injury concern but acknowledging current injury recovery.”
I should not have drafted as many shares of McClanahan and Sandy Alcantara, and Lucas Giolito as I did, even if they were early in draft season and were later-round picks. None of those picks have panned out so far, no matter how late in the draft I took them. Acknowledging that Alcantara likely wouldn’t be his “normal self” until the summer should have pushed me to say, “But what if it’s later than that?” Even if it felt like a “value” at that point, in the draft, it probably makes more sense to roll the dice on healthy starters who simply have questions about their true talent level, like Kris Bubic, Clay Holmes, Shane Baz, or MacKenzie Gore.
At least with those pitchers, you’ll know early on if you’ve hit on the pick or not and not have to wait around and say to yourself, “In a month, he may have those kinks ironed out.”
That means you’re not going to find me laying huge bids down on Shane Bieber, Eury Perez, and Brandon Woodruff, among others, when they finally return off the IL in the second half of the season.
Adjust quickly to league-wide trends or signs
This third lesson is also kind of connected to the first two, but you need to adjust quickly to what you’re seeing on the field. Not just with specific players but with league-wide trends. For instance, this year we had some inkling early on that the ball wasn’t flying as far in the air as it had in previous years, and also that the depth of starting pitching seemed to not be as prominent as it had been in previous years.
If we had gone to Baseball Reference, we could have seen that the league-wide OPS is the lowest it’s been since 2022 and the second-lowest since 2014. The HR/game rate is also tied for the lowest we’ve seen since 2015, and the runs per game is the second-lowest since 2015 as well. That should have signaled us to prioritize power hitters on the waiver wire early on, expecting that we might need more power for our teams than we initially thought.
At the same time, league-wide strikeout rate from a pitching standpoint is the lowest it’s been since 2017, and starting pitchers are throwing fewer innings than they have in almost a decade. Meanwhile, WHIP is significantly up from last year, despite BABIP being down. WHen you look at the waiver wire, you see far fewer potentially exciting arms sitting around, which would have told us to focus on “boring but safer” starting pitchers on the waiver wire in the first few weeks of the season.
Now, when I say “boring but safe” starting pitchers, I don’t just mean grabbing Michael Wacha on the wire in a 12-team league, even though that would have been good; I mean grabbing guys who had clear roles and weren’t at risk of being pushed from the rotation after one bad start. You could have added Bubic, David Peterson, Merrill Kelly, or Tyler Mahle because they at least seemed to be in a position where they had some leash in their rotations. They weren’t likely to leave you scrambling on the waiver wire for starting pitchers in a week. We should have identified early on that playing the streaming game was going to be harder this season.
Use FAAB early
This lesson isn’t quite a new one for me, but it’s one I learned the hard way this year. Thanks to Jenny Butler, I’ve been tracking my waiver wire claims in my NFBC leagues for the past two seasons, so I can more successfully analyze my spending habits and FAAB strategy. As it turns out, this year, I was too slow moving on the waiver wire in a few formats.
I placed some small bids and was able to land some solid players with those small bids, but I never bid above $50 until I tried to pick up Chandler Simpson in a few leagues on April 20th (I didn’t bid enough). In fact, my largest successful bid before the calendar flipped to May was a $36 win of Andy Pages. Hey, that worked out for me.
The issue is that I was saving my money for something that seemed like a sure bet. A top prospect who was called up, or a starting pitcher who won a rotation spot and had skills I liked, or a hitter who was starting to tear the cover off the ball. None of those bids seemed to materialize other than my missed bids for Nick Kurtz in the middle of May.
Now, some of that could be because there has been no hot closer pick-up, or that most of the trendy breakout starting pitchers were drafted in March. Or maybe the overall hitting performance has diminished to the point where there isn’t a slam-dunk waiver wire add. I think the more accurate truth is that data has become so prevalent, and fantasy players are getting smarter with identifying early signs of a breakout, that you need to move at the smallest sign. That means you can’t be afraid to spend the money early on because, if you get it right, you’re landing an impact player for the vast majority of the season.
If I look back at my bidding, I see a few shares of Ben Rice added on March 23rd, some Shane Smith added on April 6th, and Luke Weaver and Chase Meidroth added on April 13th, but I see a lot of missed chances too. Why did I only bid $8 on Landen Roupp in a 12-team league on March 30th? I liked his skills, and he had a rotation spot. Same goes for Matthew Liberatore, who got a $1 bid from me in a 15-team league on March 30th and then a $7 bid on March 20th in the same league when he was still available. I bid just $21 on Grant Holmes in a 15-team league on April 13th and $5 on Jorge Polanco in a 12-team league on April 6th, despite me writing him up in a pre-season article.
I know everybody can go through their claims and poke holes in strategy, and I know we’re not all going to hit on 100% of the bids we make, but I think I’ve learned to be a little more aggressive in the early going, and I rectified that by making sure I scooped Addison Barger in the beginning of May when he was called up. Don’t be afraid to be a little more aggressive than you’d like to be on a player you like in the first weeks of the season.
Give new pickups a couple of weeks
When you do pick up those players, try not to be so quick to get rid of them. Now, to be clear, there are players you pick up just because they’re streamers or because you like their matchups for the week. However, if you pick up a player because you like their skills, their process, or what they seem to be doing under the hood, don’t be so quick to give up on them. You believed in what they were doing, and the underlying skills you believed in don’t vanish after one or two bad weeks.
I’m in some leagues this season where Nick Kurtz was dropped after his bad first few weeks. Miguel Vargas was dropped in late April in one of my leagues just two weeks after he was added. Same goes for Max Muncy, who was picked up in one of my 12-team leagues on April 13th and then dropped a week later.
I’m guilty of it as well. I also added Max Muncy in early May and then dropped him after a bad week (and because I had added Barger on waivers). I was able to pick Muncy back up, but it cost me extra money. I dropped Landen Roupp in one league on April 6th after targeting him just two weeks earlier, before the season started. I added Hunter Goodman in a two-catcher league at the start of the season and dropped him on April 13th after he had a stretch where he went 2-for-28. I’m now starting Henry Davis in that league.
There were some other instances where I dropped Matt Shaw after he was demoted, and I’m not sure that connects because he was sent to the minors and I wasn’t sure when he’d come back up, but the point is: if you believed enough in the player and role to give them a shot on your team then give them a couple weeks to prove you right or wrong.
Don’t give up on veterans so soon
That’s especially true if they’re a veteran player with a track record of success. So often we see people want to cut a player after a slow start to the season, but we have to step back and realize that players have poor 3-4 week stretches all the time during the season. It’s just amplified when it’s taking place at the beginning of the year. If you look at the swing decisions, contact rates, or exit velocities and don’t see any glaring red flags, then we need to give those veterans a bit of a chance to right the ship.
If you look at the league leaderboards for April, some of the worst hitters by wRC+ among qualified batters were Andres Gimenez, Jordan Westburg, Alec Bohm, Jake Burger, Brandon Lowe, Taylor Ward, Lourdes Gurriel, Marcus Semien, Max Muncy, Cody Bellinger, Brandon Nimmo, and Carlos Santana.
If you look at that same leaderboard for just May, Santana ranks 8th in wRC+, Lowe ranks 18th, Muncy is 20th, Gurriel is 24th, Bellinger is 25th, Bohm is 36th, and Ward is 46th. They’ve all been top 50 hitters in baseball in May. Burger has been solid since coming back up from Triple-A, Westburg was battling an injury, and Gimenez is about to return from the IL, so we’ll see if he rights the ship as well.
Not all of the veterans who struggle to start the year are going to rebound, but we need to look under the hood and see if there are any real concerns rather than just getting trigger-happy because of a slow start.
Don’t bet too heavily on rookies
Last, I think we need to be cautious about how much we rely on rookies. I know there is always a Bobby Witt or Jackson Merrill who produces tremendous value in their rookie season, but it’s not as common as we’d like to think, and it’s often backloaded. Jackson Chourio and Colton Cowser had solid years in 2024, but Chourio hit .243 in 82 games in the first half with nine home runs and 35 RBI, while Cowser batted .219 with a 30 percent strikeout rate in the first half of the season. If you had them all season, you still had the benefit of their stats, but you had to remain patient and also withstand the cold streaks. That’s harder to do if you invested a lot of draft capital or FAAB.
I sometimes think that we keep willfully ignoring that the gap between Triple-A and MLB is getting wider. When the minor leagues contracted, that meant there were fewer roster spots in each organization. The group most profoundly impacted by that contraction was the veterans who were hanging on but likely never had a future in the big leagues. The guys like Anthony Kay, Yonny Chirinos, Tucker Davidson, Adam Oller, and Mitch White that wind up abroad, or the guys like Marcos Gonzales, Lance Lynn, Alex Wood, and Spencer Turnbull, who tried and failed to find jobs this spring. While those pitchers are not great MLB pitchers, they are experienced veterans who know how to pitch. They propped up the talent level at Triple-A. They made young hitters learn how to hit veteran pitchers who could properly spot breaking balls or successfully pitch backward.
As the pitching talent in the minors has thinned out, it’s made adjusting to big league pitching much harder. This season, only 12 rookie hitters have a wRC+ above 100. One of them is Yankees back-up catcher J.C. Escarra, who nobody is rostering, and another is Jake Mangum, who’s 29 years old and only has 92 plate appearances this season. The only rookies who have (currently) meaningfully helped fantasy rosters are Jacob Wilson, Carlos Narvaez, Jasson Dominguez, Chase Meidorth, and Drake Baldwin, although he has only 120 plate appearances. Cam Smith has just inched over 100 wRC+, Nick Kurtz and Agustin Ramirez qualify too in their limited sample size, and Matt Shaw has been really good since his early-season demotion.
Many of the pre-season darlings or early-season waiver targets have not helped rosters: Dylan Crews, Caleb Durbin, Luisangel Acuna, Kristian Campbell, Alan Roden, Max Muncy (Athletics), or Edgar Quero.
On the pitching side, the best rookie starters have been Noah Cameron, who may be booted from the rotation; Logan Henderson, who was booted from the rotation; Shane Smith, who can’t get any wins on the White Sox; Chad Patrick, and Tomoyuki Sugano. Cade Horton has been solid in his four starts. Jack Leiter has flashed upside but has been inconsistent. Jackson Jobe couldn’t seem to miss bats. Roki Sasaki was a disaster before getting hurt. Will Warren started poorly and has pitched better of late. Chase Dollander can’t defeat Coors, and the list goes on.
I know everybody is now salivating over Jac Caglianone, Roman Anthony, or maybe even Andrew Painter, but it may be foolish to expect these guys to meaningfully improve our fantasy teams right when they arrive. I’m not saying not to take shots on these prospects, but, much like my lesson right before this, maybe we need to prioritize the veterans off to interesting starts rather than hold onto our assets and wait for prospects to come up. Or, during draft season, we may have been better off using those later-round picks on veterans who we knew would have an opportunity, like Jonathan Aranda, Eugenio Suarez, Ryan O’Hearn, Geraldo Perdomo, Jung Hoo Lee, or TJ Friedl.
