This article highlights my bold predictions for the 2025 fantasy baseball season. I’ll set the over/under at three of these being right, as my goal is more to make you think than anything.  I have tried my best to embody these predictions in my various redraft and dynasty league decisions this offseason (that’s right, I still have Keston Hiura rostered in a few, admittedly deeper, formats!). I have listed them in approximate order of least to most bold.

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The reliever landscape has faced some of the biggest changes in recent years as many teams have gone away from anointing a single guy to be their closer, instead embracing committees where they trust a number of relievers to close the game out in the 9th. The committee strategy often includes putting their best guy in a fireman role meaning he could come in for any sticky situation from about the 6th inning on. This is undoubtedly a smart way to run a bullpen from a “real life” standpoint, but it can be rough on us fantasy folks where Saves remain a prominent category.

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This article ranks the top 25 hitting prospects by peak projected MLB wRC+ heading into 2025, continuing an annual tradition (skip to the bottom for the ranking!). It is a counterpart to the top 25 pitching prospects piece I published last month.

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Continuing an annual tradition, this article ranks the top 25 starting pitching prospects by peak projected MLB ERA heading into 2025 (skip to the bottom for the ranking!)

Like the other projection systems at FanGraphs, my projections capture the usual ingredients: past performance weighted by recenecy, regression to the mean that accounts for a player’s probability of making the major leagues, major league equivalencies to adjust for minor league difficulty, aging, park effects, and league scoring environment. The peak projections make use of aging curves to translate a player’s forecast to a late-20s peak forecast. Regardless of where the “true” peak age is, there is broad consensus that most growth happens in the teen years and early-20s, however.

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I have once again been called up from Triple-A for the spot start with Jeff away, as I have minor league options remaining. This article approximately follows his methodology, focusing on players widely available at the start of this week (I use a <75% owned in the Main Event threshold). The players are ordered for redraft leagues roughly by my rest-of-season preference–only two weeks to go (!)–grouped by starters, relievers, and hitters. I tend to put a lot of weight on recent playing time trends and popular weekly (e.g., Razzball) and rest-of-season projections, including the various systems published at FanGraphs, and my own system. I play in a lot of NFBC 15-teamers, so that’s the context I have in mind when writing this. Happy bidding!

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Should you still trust pitching projections in the final month of the season? Or is it enough to just look at how a player has performed this year? This article explores some strategies for how to better project September pitching performances. Read the rest of this entry »

How can Statcast improve hitting prospect valuations? This article examines the predictive power of prominent Statcast metrics at the Triple-A level.

With Statcast data now publicly available for every Triple-A game since 2023, I wanted to look at how much it helps us evaluate hitting prospects compared to more traditional data. Specifically, this article considers how well several Triple-A metrics from the full 2023 season — wOBAcon (wOBA on contact), xwOBAcon, barrel rate per batted ball event, and 90th percentile exit velocity — predict MLB wOBAcon in 2024 (MLB wOBAcon through the games of July 26th, as I have been working on this piece for a little while now).

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Jeff is away this week, so I have been called up from Triple-A for the spot start. This article approximately follows his methodology, focusing on players available in most leagues at the start of this week. The players are ordered for redraft leagues roughly by my rest-of-season preference, grouped by starters, relievers, and hitters. I tend to put a lot of weight on recent playing time trends and popular rest-of-season projections, including the various systems published at FanGraphs, and my own system. I play in a lot of NFBC 15-teamers, so that’s the context I have in mind when writing this.

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We’re getting close to 50% completion of the 2024 season, so I thought the time was right for a midseason update to my projections-based prospect ranks. You can find more methodological detail, along with the preseason lists here (bats) and here (arms).

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This article takes a look at some of the new bat tracking metrics published this week at Baseball Savant. It aims to help readers incorporate the new metrics into their analysis toolkit.

Bat tracking metrics have now been published for 2024, starting on April 3^rd. Last year, Baseball America published a test version of average bat speed as well. The operationalization of the bat tracking metrics has been tweaked since the Baseball America version was published, but so far, this is the data we have to work with.

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