2025 Fantasy Baseball: One analyst's 3-stop roadmap to draft success
With Opening Day on the horizon, fantasy baseball analyst Andy Behrens shares what he's been doing often this draft season.
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We did it, folks. The drafting is (mostly) done.
Fantasy baseball sign-ups remain quite open at Yahoo, just to be clear, and we would encourage you to go draft six or seven additional teams. But for me personally, the drafting is pretty much finished.
I do happen to be trapped in a slow-pick draft that feels like it won’t end before July, but everything else is behind me.
[Join or create a Yahoo Fantasy Baseball league for the 2025 MLB season]
For the benefit of anyone with drafts still ahead of them — or possibly as a cautionary tale — today I have been tasked with discussing my general strategies and tactics for building rosters in 2025. Broad brushstrokes only.
If instead you need the Glengarry leads, Dalton Del Don and Scott Pianowski have you covered. I’m simply here to talk process.
One last time for the drafters in the back: Wait. On. Pitching.
In the year 2025, it is absolutely ridiculous to draft any starting pitcher in the first round. Or the second round. Or third.
If you’re me, you wait until at least the eighth round — often later, depending on the league’s size and the tendencies of opposing managers. I have not yet been tempted by any starting pitcher near the top of any draft this spring. I am somewhat vulnerable to Michael King and Tanner Bibee when they slip, but nowhere near the opening rounds.
I’ve already talked through my reasoning on this etched-in-stone draft principle in various places, so I’ll just lay out the essential points one final time:
As a group, pitchers are extremely high-risk in terms of health — they accounted for 74% of all time spent on the injured list last season;
In the current era, none of them can be reasonably projected for 200 innings — only four pitchers reached that mark in 2024 and none of those guys hit 210;
Quality pitchers always emerge in-season — in fact, two of this year’s consensus top-five starters (Paul Skenes and Garrett Crochet) were waiver adds in a majority of leagues last spring.
If you want to continue drafting as if it’s 2002 and there’s a Randy Johnson out there somewhere, go ahead. I can’t stop you. Go get your guys. I, however, have become an uncompromising Zero SP hardliner and I’m delighted with the results.
You can always wait another round at catcher, too.
The best kind of fantasy catcher by far is someone with eligibility at the position who does not actually catch.
The next best sort of fantasy catcher is someone who typically spends his non-catching days at designated hitter.
Willson Contreras is a great example of the first variety of catcher and his brother William is a fine example of the second. To date, Willson is the only luxury backstop I’ve acquired in any 2025 fantasy league. He has the cleanest path to appearing in 150 or more games this season, because he’ll spend the year playing first base for the Cardinals.
As a general rule, however, I won’t use a top-75 pick on any backstop, given the demands of the position and its elevated injury risk. If we had a vintage Joe Mauer or Mike Piazza in the player pool, I’d of course feel differently. But that’s a level neither Contreras brother has yet reached.
I’m content to be the last manager to address catcher in any league; give me Gabriel Moreno, Alejandro Kirk or Connor Wong. I also don’t mind taking a flier on one of the pre-injured backstops — Francisco Alvarez, Sean Murphy or Tyler Stephenson — as an IL stash. We have a few interesting prospects on the way at this spot, too. Miami’s Agustin Ramírez is coming off a 25/22 season in the high minors, a power/speed profile that almost never exists at catcher.
Well, we can’t wait at every position, so give me a top-of-draft first baseman.
The four players at the top of the Yahoo consensus ranks at first base are, without question, four of the game’s best hitters. One of them is ambiguously injured at the moment, but it’s not as if Freddie Freeman is un-draftable.
I’ve been proactive about landing one of the upper-tier first basemen, because pretty much every other name on the cheat sheet has obvious limitations. We aren’t getting stolen bases at this spot in all likelihood, so we need to make sure to snag a legitimate difference-maker in the other four categories.
If you settle for one of this position’s various 70-25-70-.260 platoon types, he’s not actually helping you anywhere. Let’s not disrespect the beefy sluggers who can do everything but run. A few of them have traits rarer than speed.
