The ever-shrinking share of innings going to starting pitchers in today’s game has us focusing on volume more than ever. “Bankable” these days is someone with back-to-back 150+ IP seasons, a total that doesn’t even qualify for the ERA title (requires at least 162). A blind spot in my analysis has been that I don’t follow up the year after their surge. I’ll read or even create content in the spring of a given year highlighting the big IP gainers from the previous year just so people are knowledgeable about the big spikes, but I don’t circle back to see what those guys did for an encore.
We will look at the biggest IP gainers from 2023 to 2024 and see how their 2025 fared. There were 21 pitchers who added at least 75 innings in 2024 and they’ll serve as our focus group here broken down into a few clusters. Later in the offseason, I’ll take a closer look at the 2025 IP gainers with some thoughts on their 2026 outlook.
Nine pitchers added at least 100 innings in 2024, averaging just 38 innings per season in 2023 before surging to 158 per in 2024. Meanwhile, the group’s average FIP dropped as well, down 78 points to 3.89.
Frankie Montas essentially missed all of 2023 with just 1.3 IP so virtually all of his 2024 was surplus. Unfortunately, the results weren’t anywhere near his 2021-22 output (3.55 FIP). An early-spring lat injury kept anyone from investing so his flop season with the Mets (39 IP of 6.28 ERA and TJ surgery) wasn’t really felt on the fantasy landscape.
Garrett Crochet, Tarik Skubal, and Carlos Rodón are the major outliers on the list, all adding volume to their 2025 total with elite production. Crochet’s FIP went up, but only 20 pts to 2.89 in 205.3 IP, most in the AL. Skubal, of course, is headed toward a second straight Cy Young win. Rodón did have a 1.40 improvement on his FIP in 2024 but that only got him to 4.39, though 16 Ws and 195s Ks helped him still finish SP42. He was back to stud Rodón this year with an SP10 finish.
Simeon Woods Richardson couldn’t maintain his 2024 volume, but he did still lower his ERA and WHIP despite the 40-point jump in FIP. He delivered occasional streamer value en route to a 4.04 ERA/1.28 WHIP in 111 IP.
Ronel Blanco was felled by TJ (internal brace version) which is a bummer because I would’ve liked to see how he followed up his breakout season. His skills remained intact with a 14% K-BB and he was still extremely difficult to square up with a .207 AVG against. Now he’ll miss most of 2026 and have to climb back up the hill at age-33 in 2027.
Nestor Cortes had a disastrous Opening Day in Yankee Stadium (8 ER), was traded to San Diego during a 4-month injury absence and looked decent again in his August return before a torn biceps injury cut him down and will now keep him out for half of 2026. He is completely off the fantasy radar at this point.
Trevor Rogers is the most unique case on the board. He ramped back up to 153 innings if you count his MiLB work but struggled so much that he became an fantasy afterthought. He was also going to miss upwards of two months to start the 2025 season leaving no reason to draft him anywhere outside of maaaaybe a last 2-3 round Hail Mary in Draft Champions. Instead, he became arguably the fantasy pickup of the season (at least pitcher pickup; Nick Kurtz is really tough to beat for the overall best pickup). He had an elite season debut on the backend of a doubleheader against Boston in late-May but was sent back down for over three more weeks before settling in for the stretch run. Now he’s the de facto ace of the O’s and positioned to be a mid-rotation fantasy arm in 2026. The return of his velocity (+1.2 to 93.1 mph) and razor-sharp skills (18% K-BB) have me ready to buy back in at the draft table.
Looking at 2025, the group’s average output dropped to 107 IP but the collective FIP improved as only Cortes and Montas were bad — both for fewer than 40 innings, though, so not a lot of damage came from them.
The seven pitchers featured here came with a lot of hype for 2025 thanks to a couple fantasy aces and several young arms on the rise. Their 164 IP average actually tops the first group, but they are coming from higher 2023 totals so only an average of +91 IP. They also clipped the first group in 2024 FIP with a 3.89 mark.
Max Fried was either your 2/3 if you were pitching-forward or the ace for a team waiting on starters and he delivered with an SP11 finish. His 195 innings mitigate the strikeout rate issues as his 189 total tied for 14th-most. The 19 Ws play a big role in that finish as well, but it’s not like his 2.86 ERA/1.10 WHIP combo is anything shy of fantastic meaning even if win volatility gets the best of him next year, there is still a firm skills floor here. He also now has at least 165 IP in 4 of the last five seasons. I’m still getting used to that being workhorse adjacent (18th in IP since 2021), but that’s where we are today.
Cole Ragans laid such strong groundwork in 12 starts with the Royals in 2023 that his breakout 2024 wasn’t a huge shock. In fact, paired together he had 258 IP of a 3.00 ERA/1.12 WHIP and ascended into a top 50 overall ADP for 2015. He showed flashes of greatness, including a 3-start, 31-strikeout run right out of the gate, but he sputtered in May and injuries limited his ability to ever recover leaving him with a 4.67 ERA/1.18 WHIP in 62 IP. He did finish strong in three abbreviated September starts (2.77 ERA/0.77 WHIP/22 Ks in 13 IP) and posted 38% K rate on the year, both of which have buying back in even at a continued high price. Nothing about his season has me less confident in his ability. He might not stay healthy in 2026, either, but I’ll bet on the talent.
Ryan Pepiot and Brandon Pfaadt were both big breakout picks with similar ADPs and a lot of crossover amongst their ardent supporters. Both were building on sharp small samples from the year before and played on teams capable of supporting a quality young arm (at least we thought so coming into the season, both clubs wound up sub-.500 and short of expectations). Results aside, it is encouraging that both managed big IP totals again this year. Pepiot added 38 IP up to a career-high 168 while Pfaadt’s 5 IP dip was more because of performance as he actually managed 1 more start than 2024 with 33 (Logan Webb stood alone with 34).
The “results aside” caveat was really just for Pfaadt as his excellent 5% BB rate (3rd in MLB) was essentially wasted by the 1.3 HR9 and .316 BABIP. There’s a case he’s just in the zone too much as neither problem is new (career 1.4, .315). Pepiot didn’t reach the lofty heights I had for him in my Bold Predictions, but he gave you what you paid for: SP46 ADP, SP45 season finish.
I’ve been using FIP as the easy catchall here but it does obscure the success of someone like Jose Quintana who posted a 3.96 ERA, nearly a run lower than his 4.81 FIP. And he was likely curated to an even better ERA by many of his fantasy managers as a streamer. He ended the season with a 7.40 ERA in his final four starts, but most managers likely avoided the bulk if not all of those starts given the matchups (ARI, PHI, TEX, STL). In short, a quality streamer who even found shallow league viability early on as he posted a sub-3.00 ERA through his first 10 starts.
The market was keen to what Sacramento’s park could do to Luis Severino after his rebirth with the Mets in 2024. His early-300s ADP was even too high for his SP161 finish, but his buyers went in eyes wide open to the potential trouble at that stadium. Sometimes playing a home/road split with a pitcher is dangerous, but Sevvy proved incredibly bankable depending on venue. He was completely unusable in Sacramento with a 6.01 ERA/1.53 WHIP and wasn’t shy about how he felt pitching there. Meanwhile, he was a ratios stud on the road with a 3.02 ERA/1.07 WHIP. If he is traded out and lands in the right spot, he could be a worthy bounce back bet for next season, but if he remains with Sacramento then he’ll stay a venue-focused streamer which is a scary player class to bet on.
Kyle Harrison had a whirlwind first half with the Giants. He started in the minors and then spent time in the bullpen after a promotion back to SF, capped off by a brief stint in the Giants rotation before his inclusion in the huge Rafael Devers trade that put him on the Red Sox. They sent him back to the minors until September when they gave him a relief appearance and two starts. He was a bit different with the Red Sox, but not really in obvious standout ways. His velo was down nearly 2 mph to 93.4 but he threw a lot fewer fastballs (-13 pts to 52% usage), funneling most of that into his 87 mph cutter (11% usage) while also amplifying his curve usage 7 pts to 32%. For more on his changes with Boston, check out this David Laurila piece. He did enough to get back on my radar. A former big time prospect who will be just 24 years old in an organization that has done some intriguing things with starting pitchers is a winning formula for a quality late-round pick.
Our final group features three studs (Sánchez, Lodolo, Sale) and two duds (Paddack, Fulmer). It was the only group who saw their 2025 output go up as the gains of Paddack, Sánchez, and Lodolo cancelled out the 50+ inning dips of Sale and Fulmer. Paddack keeps them from improving their FIP as a whole, but no one felt bad about investing in the three studs even with Sale dropping his IP count so much.
Cristopher Sánchez showed that 2024 was just the beginning for him, pitching quite a bit better in 2025 with a 2.50 ERA/1.06 WHIP combo in a career-high 202 innings, up 20 from his 2024 total. His SP6 finish might perfectly portend his 2026 ADP. He could even secure the 5-spot after Skubal, Yamamoto, Skenes, and Crochet.
At age-36 and litany of injuries on his ledger, it was hard to expect another 170+ innings from Chris Sale but I was confident that the innings we did get would be good. And that’s how it all played out: he pitched 126 innings with a sparkling 2.58 ERA/1.07 WHIP combo with a near-identical 26% K-BB rate (-0.4 from 2024). Where do we go from here, though? He can be a top 25-30 SP with even just 100 innings if they’re good enough, but what price are you willing to pay for the 37-year-old southpaw? I know he’s not coming off a Cy Young win again, but I’m not sure he drops all that far off his 36 ADP from 2025.
Nick Lodolo missed most of August and some of September, but otherwise had a great season. He took the compelling skills we saw in 2024 and turned ‘em into results in 2025. Like teammate Hunter Greene, his HR rate jumped back up in 2025 but his control improvements mitigated any damage from the added homers. He will likely be a big fantasy target for his believers next season and even drum up some longshot Cy Young chatter.
Chris Paddack was a passable backend innings eater for the Twins but a gigantic surge in homers (+1.3 to 2.7 HR9) tanked his time with the Tigers and snuffed out the last remnants of fantasy value that might’ve been lurking.
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The ultimate takeaway here is that I don’t think an innings surge alone should change how you feel about a pitcher. You should probably expect fewer innings (-31 on average among the 21 pitchers studied here), but outside of Cortes’s 35 IP meltdown the performance of the collective group didn’t really fall off. There will be some tricky cases to investigate such Matthew Boyd and Drew Rasmussen and again, I’ll take a deeper look at the 2025 gainers later into the offseason.
In early June, Alex Chamberlain graced us with a FanGraphs article about Brendon Little and a new concept called, “Implied Miss Distance”. Chamberlain, along with Baseball Prospectus writer/researcher Stephen Sutton-Brown, have done some great work utilizing Statcast bat tracking data, giving readers a new perspective on something like a swing and miss. But, back in early July, nearly a month after Chamberlain wrote about Little’s amazing knuckle-curve and it’s ability to make hitters whiff so hard that the outfield flag flutters, hitters stopped chasing the pitch. They were tired of looking silly and would no longer budge, allowing us to imply nothing:
If it wasn’t for Chamberlain’s article, I wouldn’t have known about Little or his knuckle-curve. But that’s why FanGraphs is the best, and when I recently watched the Blue Jays and their relievers’ deteriorating August WHIP, I heard the broadcasters mention Little’s falling O-Swing, or chase, rate.
If you only focused on Little’s knuckle-curve and the damage hitters have done to it in each month of the season, as you see in the table below, you wouldn’t think twice about the pitch’s performance:
Little’s Knuckle Curve by Month 2025
Month
KC
Total Pitches
KC%
wOBA
Mar/Apr
96
218
44.0%
.194
May
111
229
48.5%
.176
Jun
119
243
49.0%
.212
Jul
103
193
53.4%
.192
Aug
76
193
39.4%
.146
Sep/Oct
51
119
42.9%
.257
Among pitchers who have thrown at least 100 knuckle curves in any of the last five seasons, Little’s 2025 wOBA of .188 is a fringe top 20 (25th) out of nearly 200 pitchers. Last season, Little got even closer to the top 20 mark (23rd) with a .186 wOBA on the pitch. But the broadcast never said anything about Little getting hit; they were focused on the lack of chase and, therefore, an increased BB%:
The chart above includes all of Little’s pitches. By isolating the O-Swing% to only his knuckle-curve, we can see that this overall drop in hitters’ chasing after Little’s offerings wasn’t solely because of them spitting at that specific pitch:
Thanks to the incredible addition of the Pitch-Type Split Leaderboard by the FanGraphs web team, we can now view the averages of individual pitches with ease. In 2025, among all pitchers who have thrown at least 10 knuckle curves, the league average O-Swing% currently sits at 35.5%. Little’s mark on the season is 36.5%. Rolling averages are different from season averages, and when Little’s chase rate rolling average dipped, so did the chase rolling average of his two other pitches:
Chart 4 – Rolling KC, FC, SI Chase% Comps
The straight red line indicates times when Little stopped throwing his cutter. It’s interesting to see how the line stopped running horizontally around the same time his knuckle-curve was at its worst. Unfortunately, it didn’t fill the chased pitch gap, and that 40-50 game mark fell around early to mid-July when Little’s WHIP went upwards:
Brendon Little’s Monthly Splits (All Pitches)
Month
KC%
WHIP
K-BB%
Mar/Apr
44.3
1.31
26.8
May
48.5
0.98
17.3
Jun
49.0
1.42
15.7
Jul
53.4
1.60
21.3
Aug
39.4
1.65
0.0
Sep/Oct
42.9
1.65
10.0
Hitters weren’t getting boosted wOBA’s from Little’s lack of chase, but the 1.65 WHIP (5.97 eqiuv. ERA) meant they were hitting his other pitches and walking more. I’ve been rambling on about Little for more than a few paragraphs now, and you’re probably waiting for the point. The point? The point is, pitchers need to adjust when a pitch that used to be chased no longer gets chased. They know that. We know that. Yet, it’s difficult to keep track of on the fan side of things. Pitchers will go about adjusting in all sorts of ways.
In Little’s case, it was really just a blip. If you go back up to the graph showing individual pitch chase rates, you may notice that Little’s usage of the cutter, even if it wasn’t chased, allowed the chase rate on his knuckle-curve to jump back up. Hitters did a great job of laying off Little’s knuckle-curve from around games 30 to 70, but excellence is when a pitcher can adjust in the moment to hitters. That’s robotic. So, let’s!…get!…robotic! For the remainder of this article, I’ll present a detection system that can run daily to capture when a pitcher’s most used fastball and most used secondary are in good or bad rhythm using individual pitch plate discipline metrics. Here’s an example from Little’s 40 to 80 game span:
The table is just a summary of what you see in Chart 4 above, but it’s designed to be placed in an automated system. If chase is up on one pitch and called strike is up on another, that’s good. If both pitches are falling to generate either chase or called strikes, well, that’s bad. Categorizing the balance between his sinker’s called strike rate and his knuckle-curve’s chase rate is as simple as creating rule-based logic:
Using the pitcher’s median values allows the categorization to detect improvements by each individual. I’m using “smart” medians to call the league median if a player has a zero value. That happens when they haven’t generated any chase or called strikes. If we use Brendon Little’s game logs to isolate his performance during those game periods from the table above, we see some pattern in a very small sample:
Brendon Little’s Overall Performance in Small Samples
Game Number
WHIP
K-BB%
41-50
0.91
32.3%
51-60
2.10
0.0%
61-73
1.33
15.4%
Little was at his best when he was in decent balance. This is the type of tracking that could be useful when streaming pitchers or looking for hot relievers. To test this out on a grander scale, I built a dataset that includes data from the last two months. This keeps the sample limited to more recent performance. Furthermore, I limited the data to only pitchers with more than 60 total pitches thrown in that time. Then, I took each pitcher’s most utilized fastball by pitch percentage and used it to calculate their called strike rate. I did the same with each pitcher’s most utilized offspeed, or non-fastball, pitch and used it to calculate their chase rate. I then calculated each pitch’s 15-game rolling rate, called strike for fastballs and chase for non-fastballs, and labelled their performance balance. Finally, I counted the number of days in which a player has been either good (balanced) or bad (unbalanced) and found the current status of players in both groups:
The results focus on a pitcher’s most recent stretch. For example, Emilio Pagán has had one of his best K-BB% (22.4%) marks of his career this season, and in his last five games, it’s been even better (26.3%). He’s had recent success thanks to his four-seam and splitter working in unison.
Is there more to do? Always. I’ve only compared fastball called strike rates with offspeed chase rates, but all of these plate discipline metrics could be compared for balance. For example, it may be better to have a balanced swinging strike rate and chase rate. But, fundamental to this analysis is the assumption that it’s hard to get anywhere without a fastball and offspeed pitch that work well together. Does it mean anything? Is the balance even predictive of future success? Maybe, maybe not. What it certainly can do, as I believe I’ve exemplified here, is explain a pitcher’s success or lack thereof. If you are interested in doing this analysis on your own without spending hours calling and pinging pybaseball’s API, you can view pitch-specific plate discipline metrics on our new and totally awesome Pitch-Type Splits Leaderboards. Stay balanced, stay cool.
Rostering hitters who only hit against one type of pitcher can be challenging. You must pay extra attention in a world where paying extra attention is the only way to win. So there you have it. In this article, we’ll pay extra attention to playing time patterns to see if we can find a few sneaky additions who may add a handful of dingers to our fantasy pile before the season is over.
The word “Issue” and the name “Tarik Skubal” haven’t been used in the same sentence very often in 2025. The Detroit Tigers’ lefty is the clear frontrunner for winning the Cy Young award at the end of the season. However, back in May, hitters began ambushing Skubal, knowing their best chance of even being graced with a ball in play was on the first pitch. Read the rest of this entry »
