First TD Bets — Wild Card Monday Slate
Alex Christenson
(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.)
Most successful high stakes fantasy baseball players preach avoiding early risk, yet Jacob deGrom’s ADP is in Round 3, and could move up by Main Event time. That’s a story for another day. The focus here will be on taking speculative chances on starting pitchers later in the draft.
Most fantasy managers roster three starting pitchers in “set it and forget it” mode (their SP1-SP3). After allowing for two closers, four spots remain for streaming starters with favorable matchup, third closers or dominant setup men. Almost all fantasy teams have at least four more starting pitchers with the plan of using their SP4 much of the time, their SP5 often, with the rest requiring a favorable matchup, but they’re still too good to drop instead of keeping on reserve.
Drafting a pitcher outside of SP1-SP5 that ends up in SP1-SP3 range is a huge boon to managing pitching. You have a fourth arm to rely on every week, freeing up reserve spots for other purposes, not to mention having injury coverage for one of your big three.
Translating this to a typical ADP, you’re looking for a pitcher drafted outside of the top 250 overall who finishes the season as one of the top 150 fantasy performers. The question is whether this is a practical endeavor?
Here are last season’s starting pitchers fitting the criteria (or close to it):
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