Fantasy Baseball 2025: Breakout Pitchers — The Power of Peripherals

(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.)

Pitching in fantasy baseball can feel like a dart throw, especially around draft time. With injuries being so prevalent for the position, it is becoming essential to find late round targets that can support your rotation when it inevitably falls apart. It can be cumbersome parsing through the vast sea of pitching metrics to find that next great breakout candidate.

Understanding and contextualizing advanced metrics is essential in leveraging their predictive power. We could then use this knowledge to highlight targets who fall under the breakout umbrella.

ERA

ERA is a key metric in the fantasy baseball landscape. However, it is the Achilles heel in the analytics sphere. Not to say that ERA is unimportant; it is the most referenced metric in regard to pitching, and the most productive pitchers tend to have the lowest ERA.