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Every Sunday, in my waiver report I rank lowly rostered closers that might be worth a pickup. I add a note to each closer, in the following format:

Relievers: Saves-based ranks

Grant Taylor: Good reliever who could be the closer.

Andrew Kittredge: Good reliever who seems to be the closer.

Clayton Beeter: Average reliever who is the closer.

I don’t go into details on a pitcher’s talent, but use adjectives like “Good” or “Below-Average” to give readers a sense of how I value view that pitcher’s talent. I’ve winged those values using the season’s results from our Closer Depth Charts.

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“I think you know my opinion on RP.”

• Trusted leaguemate and fellow fantasy writer Sam Lutz

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Over the years, I’ve gone to the cutting edge of stats to find advantages. I can go into a deep analysis on any player’s fantasy value, but there isn’t always time to analyze each player’s profile. For a shortcut, I use OPS to evaluate hitters and xFIP and botERA for pitchers. They give me a good predictive look, especially in a small sample. Besides those stats, I might make a cursory look at BABIP and Contact% for hitters and K%-BB% for pitchers.

Note: Recent plate appearances could be the #1 stat to follow for hitters, but I’m going to focus on production stats.

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After a week off for the holiday, I’m back with notable pitcher playing time changes for the last two weeks for starters and relievers. Here are the tables:

While writing my recent articles about how to use projections to find undervalued players based on market ADPs, I was struck by a follow-up question: when ranking players, which is better – ADP, or projections?

As we strive to value players more objectively, probing this question is valuable. It will help calibrate how much weight to assign consensus rankings versus your favorite projection systems. If we’re lucky, it might point us to some things that the market or the robots identify particularly well relative to the other. When we can marry the strengths of objective, data-driven processes with the advantages of human behavior and judgment, we are better off for it.

And this is a meaty question; theoretically each method has its strengths. Average draft position is a ranking derived from the wisdom of thousands of fantasy owners. It should be valuable in this respect. But we fantasy owners are subject to our own pernicious little human biases when it comes to player evaluation. Are we better off just letting the robots do the work for us?

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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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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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Last week didn’t have significant projection changes worth reporting, but we’re back this week with news aplenty. The relief pitcher table now looks different; instead of showing percent change, which can over-inflate minute projection changes in actual innings, I’m now calculating remaining innings pitched and selecting for significant swings there.

Below are the biggest notable swings in remaining projected playing time for starters and relievers for the last two weeks. To help provide additional context, I’ve added a couple columns to the starting pitcher table to illustrate the change in projected starts for the rest of the season, in addition to the percentage. Because teams have about 100 games left at the time of writing this, the percentages ironically would have been just fine for this week, but I’m introducing the widened table this week anyhow.

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My son competed in the State Track Meet this weekend, so I’ll only had time to cover the pitchers while Jack Dorfman covered the hitters.

In this article, I cover the players using CBS’s and Yahoo’s ADD/DROP rates. Both sites have the option for daily and weekly waiver wire adds. CBS uses a weekly change while Yahoo looks at the last 24 hours. Yahoo is a great snapshot of right now, while CBS ensures hot targets from early in the week aren’t missed. I start players being added at CBS who started the week on less than 40% of rosters.

The players are ordered for redraft leagues by my rest-of-season preference, grouped by hitters, starters, and relievers. Read the rest of this entry »