Archive for Featured

Note: Any stated rostership rates come from the NFBC RotoWire Online Championship, the same rates we use on the FanGraphs Player Rater. For reference, these leagues are 12-team Roto leagues with 30-man rosters (2 C, 1B, 2B, SS, 3B, MI, CI, 5 OF, UT, 9 P) and weekly add/drops.

American League

Angels

• Ryan Johnson threw the best start of his career.

The rookie turned in the best outing of his young career, allowing just one hit and one walk with eight strikeouts over six scoreless innings in a 5-1 win over the Orioles on Tuesday night at Angel Stadium.

Johnson carried a no-hitter until the sixth inning before he gave up a one-out single to former Angels infielder Jeremiah Jackson on a first-pitch cutter. But he got ex-Angels outfielder Taylor Ward to promptly ground into a double play to end his night, as he faced just one over the minimum.

“I feel great,” Johnson said with a big smile after his third career start. “You can’t feel anything but great after that. That’s exactly what I wanted to do.”

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Ret of season projections are a great way to identify players likely to perform better moving forward. The table below shows all the starting pitchers whose rest of season OOPSY-projected ERA is 3.80 or better (as compared to a league average of 4.19) and at lest 0.20 better than what they have shown so far this year (through June 22).

We’ll likely follow this up with another version looking at potential fallers based on the OOPSY projections. Today, we’ll highlight four starting pitchers that should perform better based on their skills and stuff for the rest of the season.

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• Daily SP Chart archive
• 2-Start podcast episode
• SP Rankings (last update: 6/5 | next: July)

Welcome to the Daily SP Chart, click here if you’re new to get an idea of what I’m doing with these rankings.

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Don’t run on Mookie:

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Relief pitchers are wild, untamable beasts, and the fantasy saves and holds markets are incredibly volatile from season to season. In competitive, standard 5×5 roto formats, we mostly pay up for the ace closers because they are rare commodities. During the season, we chase relievers moving up their team’s respective bullpen hierarchies in hopes of landing a team’s next closer for pennies on the dollar. In leagues that include holds, the landscape is even more volatile and unpredictable. Skills decline, bullpen roles change, and relievers’ respective teams get better or worse from season to season. Since 2024, only 12 relievers have averaged 20 or more holds per season. One of them (Griffin Jax) is now a starter, and another (Bryan Abreu) has become the biggest liability at the position.  The reliever with 30+ holds in a season is a unicorn. Former Giants and current Blue Jays submariner Tyler Rogers is the only reliever with 30 or more in each of the last three seasons. In 2025, six relievers earned 30 or more. In 2024, there were seven, and in 2023 only three, including Rogers. Though in holds leagues, holds are just part of the fantasy package — it’s only one category. Similar to how some managers approach OBP instead of AVG leagues, we often tend to overvalue the category that shifts from the standard. To provide value, relievers must also help in strikeouts and the ratio categories.

In this article, I’ll review the biggest risers and fallers from last season to this season. The goal is twofold: to identify relievers who might be fantasy-useful (for standard formats and holds leagues) and to weed out those whose skills, roles and fantasy viability are declining. Mike Podhorzer wrote a fantastic piece on non-closing relievers, and you’ll see some of the same pitchers highlighted in his data tables.

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Tyler O’Neill homers on Opening Day. Mike Trout homers on his birthday. And new dads homer what feels like all the time. 

So in honor of Father’s Day, I’ll comb through the Fangraphs Transaction Tracker to find a few newly minted pops, check in on how their season has been going, and offer a bit of not at all fatherly advice. 

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In shallower formats, it’s true that non-closing relievers typically hold minimal fantasy value, assuming your league isn’t counting Holds. But in deeper leagues, especially mono formats, I would prefer to start a middle reliever over a slew of starting pitchers in order to preserve my ratios. Every day relievers are being recalled from the minors so it’s very difficult to keep up with the entire landscape. Since they usually fly under the radar, you should be able to catch newly dominant ones early when no one else is even looking.

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This hurts just watching it:

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• Daily SP Chart archive
• 2-Start podcast episode
• SP Rankings (last update: 6/5 | next: July)

Welcome to the Daily SP Chart, click here if you’re new to get an idea of what I’m doing with these rankings.

• Joe Ryan out sick

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Every Monday, this column will break down the most popular waiver wire and free agent acquisitions of the weekend. I dig into the top adds on the ever-popular Fantrax and in the NFBC Online Championship (OC), a national mid-stakes contest with 240 total leagues of 12 and a six-figure grand prize. Reviewing player adds between the two should provide us with a well-rounded perspective and barometer of the fantasy baseball marketplace.

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