The Early 2026 Starting Pitcher Market

As many of you know, the fantasy baseball season never stops for a dedicated contingent that not only plays through the fall and winter but sometimes even does their first draft for the following season during the current one! But I don’t need to explain the concept of “diehards” to y’all, you’re already here. Over at the NFBC there have been 70 Draft Champions drafts completed (15-team, 50-round Draft & Hold leagues), but I’m going to focus on a tighter recent sample of 11 drafts since Christmas since it will give us more recent player movement better accounted for in the data. You can find the ADP data here and use the calendar feature to chop it up as you see fit.

I wanted to get a better feel for the ebbs of flows of where starters are going so this will be a tour through the SP market in the top 300. I’m not explicitly outlining the biggest risers and fallers in this piece. You can track the movement in the SP market (and all positions) in Justin’s reports. I’m going to look at some overall volume counts and then look at them through the prism of some category thresholds.

Here are the number of SPs taken after every 50 picks up to pick-300:

And then slicing it by each 50-pick chunk:

After a sluggish start of 26% in the Top 50, it dials up to 33% over the next 100 picks (51-150). The 201-250 slice is the quietest with just 22% of the picks being used on starters before surging back up to 32% in the final portion of our sample. If you like to go against the grain, avoid pitchers in the 101-150 pick range and dive in at the 201-250 level. These are arbitrary cuts at the 50s and things can pivot quickly as we see with the 10 point uptick in that final slice of 251-300. I would use this more to check the frequency of SPs being taken around my biggest targets and if there’s a lull when your guy usually goes, maybe you can push it a little bit whereas in that 51-150 range, you might jump your favorite up a little bit because so many SPs are going in that range.

From here I took the Steamer Projections and did some slices with these stat thresholds: 24%+ K%, 3.75 or ERA or better, and 1.20 WHIP or better. I didn’t bother with Wins for what I hope are obvious reasons. Both the ERA and WHIP are a bit worse than the 80th Percentile zone that a lot of managers like to target which sit around the mid-3.60s for ERA and a couple clicks under 1.20 for WHIP (~1.17). The deeper you get in the draft, you likely won’t even be using all of their innings unless they breakout so you could reasonably invest in a projected 4.00 ERA/1.25 WHIP combo and whittle it down with keen streaming.

STRIKEOUTS

A 24% K rate is right around a strikeout per inning and that’s about what you need to make a real impact these days. Unsurprisingly, this is the deepest category of the three we’re going to look at here because generally the better projected ERAs and WHIPs get taken early and often. I also included the group’s projected strikeout rate for comparison.

Obviously, the top of the heap is littered with strikeout studs but check out that cliff dive after pick-150. Gavin Williams, Robbie Ray, MacKenzie Gore, Carlos Rodón, and Edward Cabrera are the only ones hitting the threshold in that pocket. There are some upside candidates like Shane Bieber who has a career 28% mark, but just a 22% projection. He cratered to 20% in 2023 before the injury washout in 2024 (44% K, but just 12 IP). He then returned from TJ with a 23% in 40 IP plus another 18 Ks in 18.7 playoff innings. His velocity was also back up 92.6 mph, right in line with 2021’s 92.7 mark when he had a 33% K rate. I’m not sure he gets all the back up there, but he’s a good bet a strikeout-per-inning in a healthy season.

Trevor Rogers is down at a mere 20% projection and how much you buy into his 17% from 2024 will likely dictate your confidence in that projection. While I’m not sure Rogers repeats his 2025 ratios (1.81 ERA/0.90 WHIP), I like him for a mid-20s% K rate after bouncing back to 24% in his standout season. His 3.75 SIERA will be a much better guide for an ERA projection which isn’t too far from 3.83 career mark now. Shane Baz’s 23% projection feels pessimistic given his 25% career rate and I say that as someone who hasn’t been the biggest fan of his over the years, but c’mon! He has the raw stuff to blow well past 24% if he takes a step forward with Baltimore. Finding strikeout upside is the easy part and as such, I’m usually more concerned about what it will cost in ratios.

ERA

Yeah, this isn’t shocking. The top ERA projections are going to fly off the board early. You aren’t obligated to get one as long as you’re comfortable drafting the middle-late rounds and playing the wire. Just because there aren’t a lot of sub-3.75 ERAs going after pick-150 doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of studs to come out of that pool. In fact, 28 of the 50 best SP ERAs (min. 100 IP) were drafted outside of the Top 150 or in-season pickups. It also doesn’t mean that the projections aren’t still valuable even if you only use them as a sobering reality of what could be if your pet pitcher doesn’t pan out the way you hope. There’s still a reason they are going they are past pick-150, so they aren’t flawless.

WHIP

Projected WHIP is enough tougher to come by, drying up severely after the Top 50. WHIP killers can hide in plain sight if they are delivering big strikeouts and/or a useful ERA. Outside of his 3.53 ERA in 2025, Clay Holmes was kinda rough with 1.30 WHIP and just an 18% K rate. A repeat of the latter two results will make it really hard to drop another ERA like that, let alone a sub-4.00 ERA. The unicorns are Shota Imanaga (1.20) for the 151-200 range and Shane McClanahan for the 201-250 range. In fact, McClanahan is the later round projection god: 3.56 ERA, 1.20 WHIP, 26% K-BB, but his health outlook is very much up in the air, saddling him with a 242 ADP as of now. Except that to soar in March if he’s pitching well in Spring Training.

That final group is where managers start throwing riskier darts with young unproven guys or injury-addled veterans. The average age leading up to the 251-300 slice is 29.2, but dips to 27.6 here despite oldheads Sean Manaea (age-34) and Gerrit Cole (35) being here. Take your pick from the abundance of post-hype arms hoping to deliver on promise: Bryce Miller, Noah Cameron, Casey Mize, Shane Smith, Joey Cantillo, Quinn Priester, Troy Melton, Ian Seymour, and Reese Olson among others. There will be breakouts in this group, but plenty of busts, too.

I’m about to get my Draft Champions season going here soon and I’ll likely aim for an ace starter and reliever within my first 10 picks, but otherwise 8 bats and then load up on arms in the next 10 picks to lay my foundation of pitching for the endgame.