How Much Are Picks in Each Round Worth Anyways?

Fantasy baseball is a drama. And as such, it follows Freytag’s pyramid. Naturally. 

For the uninitiated, think of Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy, not unlike most of our seasons. 

The exposition sets the scene. Rising action builds your interest, as the characters you’ve been introduced to start moving and shaking. Then the climax. Violence, betrayal. Injury and breakouts. From there, the falling action is lines you up for the third act, by which point, you’ve already tuned out. Because you’re not making the playoffs. Or getting in the money. 

Fantasy baseball is entertaining because it’s set up the same way. 

The Exposition takes place within the span of a few minutes as you mourn the end of your season. We already know all of the players. The Rising Action is the rest of the offseason. The anticipation that feeds your late nights of research, making you closer to an angsty teen than you’ve been since high school. Draft prep is your studying now. This all leads up to the Climax. Draft Day. Nothing during the season lives up to the Draft. 

That’s why the rest of the season is Falling Action. Your expectations for your team fall. The slope is steep. You stumble through May, rumble through July as your team stretches for its last gasp, and crumble in September, when illusions of this being the year finally fade. 

Since we’re in the Rising Action of draft prep… “Already?” some of your leaguemates may respond. But since we, you and I, are already in draft prep, it’s time to use our neatly wrapped 2026 and see what lessons we can take away. 

What’s stuck with me throughout this season is the struggles of some expected star hitters. All I need to say is “Vladdy” and you’d get the picture. Last week, I wrote about how hitters, in 2026 and across the last six seasons, bust basically just as often as starting pitchers, the latter of which is essentially the boogeyman for many drafters during the early rounds.

As part of evaluating busts, I used plenty of Player Rater exports to monetize results. And it made me wonder, “How much is each round of the draft worth?”

As it turns out, there are a few different ways to answer this. 

Par

One way to conceptualize how much each round in the draft is worth is to see how much players in each round have produced on average over the last six seasons. 

If a player meets the collective round average, let’s consider that meeting “par.” 

There’s two ways I thought to measure a round’s average, or par. You could either take it literally, meaning average out the dollars earned by the players in each round using ADP. Or, you could say each “round” is 15 players, and take the top 15 earners from each season, and say those are the first rounders. And so on. That’d approximate a target you’d want to hit for your picks in each round, based on what players earn each season. 

As you can imagine, there’s a gap between these two par measurements. Over the last six seasons, only 30 of the 90 top finishers were drafted in the first round by ADP. This means that on average, only five of the 15 top finishers each season were first rounders. 

Regardless of how you measure it, the market has done fairly well over the last six seasons. Players drafted earlier earn more, on average, directionally mirroring the final ranked list of players at season’s end. 

After the first few rounds, the gap between target par and literal par is quite slim. And outside of the first round, between 30% and 40% of players drafted met their round’s target par. 

Tiers

Round by round par is a bit noisy though. As in any ordinal rankings, there really isn’t an equivalent gap between every round of players. So like many fantasy drafters and analysts would tell you, the way to go is through tiers.

The top two rounds are distinct in terms of average earnings, but as seen in the curve shown earlier, the earned values of players starts to flatten out around the tenth round. Scott White has referred to this as “the Blob”, primarily referencing starting pitcher values leveling out after the first 30 or so are off boards. There are differences of course, and the tiers reflect that. 

Within this tier framework, there are also differences in realized upside. Hitting par for a first rounder means a better than $20 season, whichever way you slice it. But for a fifth rounder, par drops closer to $10. And down and down you go until meeting par means not finishing with a negative dollar value. 

That’s where the par framework starts to need help. Especially in the later rounds, how do you differentiate between late round options, when they are all likely to be poor performers. 

When the bar to clear is low, maybe we should still aim high… 

Upside Hit Rate

So not all pars are equal, but $10 is $10. And $20 is $20. Here’s how often each round produced seasons worth $10 or more since 2021. 

And here’s how often each round produced seasons worth $20 or more since 2021. 

Throw this into the tier format discussed earlier, and you can not only start to see why the tiers are structured the way they are, but also how to perhaps differentiate within the tiers, depending on your league format, risk tolerance, or other factors. 

The first four rounds have three tiers for a reason. The $20+ hit rates make that clear.

After both the first round and the second, there are 10% drops in likelihood of snagging a $20 player. By the third and fourth round, the odds are just in 1 in 4. After the ninth round in a 15-team league, so after pick 135, the odds fall from just below 20% to below 10%. On average, from pick 135 on, less than two players per round will earn $20. 

Depending on your league type, that may strike you a few different ways. In shallow leagues, or in leagues where you are only in the money if you top your league, you may opt to chase players that you think could hit for $20 seasons in the later rounds. That could mean a mix of top prospects, playing time standouts who could accumulate a $20 season, fallen stars who have done it before, or injury bounce backs. All will likely have some flaw the market deemed risky. And the market will be right on more than 90% of these players.

So you could instead focus more on $10 options in these rounds. Through pick 195, or through round 15 of a 15-team league, more than 20% of players will earn $10 or more. That’s three players per round. In deeper leagues especially, or in draft and holds, you may decide that $10 players are more feasible in the later rounds than taking the big swing at a $20 player. That could mean focusing much more on job security than on skill indicators, as playing time is king in these formats where accumulation matters. 

In any format, position eligibility should be a consideration as well. 

Here’s how often each position met the $10 and $20 thresholds, sorted by tier. 

Here’s the $10+ table.

And the $20+ table.

As we get closer to drafts, I think these tier boxes will come in handy, particularly as you plan out which players you could land early and move through your drafts accordingly. 

Each year’s player pool is different. So this isn’t necessarily one size fits all. But I think it’s at least describing how we value players relative to their performance, by position. 

Throughout the rest of the offseason, I’ll bring in more comparisons to this recent past season performance to offer some potential context as you dive into early drafts without much ADP, focusing on positional taxes, draft strategies, and early draft options as we start to see early ADP trickle in. The show must go on.