Fantasy Baseball 2025: How to Value Risk

(It’s fantasy baseball draft season! The FTN Fantasy team and a host of helpful guests present our Ultimate 2025 Fantasy Baseball Guide. Check it out and prepare for the 2025 MLB season.)

In 2019, I entered my first Main Event. I had not played a ton of NFBC prior, just three Draft Champions Leagues. However, I had been very successful in home and online leagues, so I felt ready to make the jump to the high-stakes world.

Spoiler Alert: I was not.

I was excited to draft and knew I wanted a team with high upside. No one drafts a team in a league with an overall contest wanting just to win their league. They want to win the overall. I thought the way to do that was with high-risk, high-reward players, so I loaded up on rookies and injured players projected to return in May. If my team could survive until then, I would have a great shot at winning the overall.

Another Spoiler Alert: My team did not survive.

After that debacle, I would have another bad year in 2022, which forced me to reevaluate my process. I did in-depth breakdowns of all my teams to see where I was going wrong. By comparing the results from each team, I drew certain conclusions. One was that I had been making a logical fallacy about risk. The corrections I’ve made have been very profitable, allowing me to cash in both of my high-stakes leagues in 2023 and two of my three in 2024.

Fantasy baseball has risks involved — some of which cannot and should not be avoided. My problem was not that I took those risks, but how I took them. Below, I will discuss my thoughts on what kind of risks are in the game and how I approach them now.