Fantasy Baseball 2025: Archetypes, Tools and Targets — Identifying Late-Round Prospect Breakouts

(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.)

As fantasy players, we crave data to analyze with which we can construct informed opinions. The purpose here will be to shed light on how to operate when the data we generally analyze — performance at the MLB level — is not a data point yet. We will explore how to weigh what matters — skill sets, minor league performance, organizational depth charts, overall MLB team context — to identify prospects in specific roto categories who can make a fantasy impact this season.

Absent reliable data, it’s vital that we dig deeper into prospects’ skill sets to see how they’ve stacked up against lesser competition and how that can manifest into regular and productive playing time. Two fundamental examples are the skill sets of speed and power.

A rookie with wheels and a combination of a high contact rate and an above-average walk rate can earn playing time and make an impact if the opportunity presents itself. It’s your basic speed with OBP archetype.

Power is often far more hit or miss (if you’ll pardon the pun), because power hitters frequently swing … and miss. For every Kyle Schwarber, there are 20 Joey Gallos who didn’t make enough contact to unlock their otherworldly power. Many of these duds were once highly touted prospects.

Finding fantasy-relevant prospects with no MLB experience is a daunting and often impossible task. We won’t shy away from difficult tasks in these competitive streets, so let’s focus on intentionality for this exercise — segmenting characteristics of prospects with identifiable skill sets and underlying metrics that can directly translate into immediate fantasy production within specific roto categories.

The Archetype

Let’s start with the obvious: No two fantasy prospects are alike. Everywhere we look, we can find top-100 or top-500 prospect rankings lists. Typically, we expect a prospect ranked 13th to be better than one ranked 38th, but that isn’t always the case. Some publications may factor in defensive ability, though fantasy managers only care about defense related to how it affects the prospect’s ability to garner regular playing time. Some may not appropriately value, or account for big league readiness, or a path to playing time created by a hole in the major league lineup. Mostly, we will want to look for players with the following characteristics: