In my last article, I explained why your chances to win a championship in a fantasy baseball 12-team mixed Roto league improve when you ignore starting pitching for roughly the first eight rounds.
In summary, starters are injury-prone. They are volatile; there are numerous potential adjustments, and each can result in performance that defies projections. The most free loot on the waiver wire is always starting pitching, not hitting. Starters are pitching less than ever and are thus less valuable. There’s a lack of consensus on pitching rankings, so you can get value according to your rankings later in the draft — that’s far less feasible with hitters you rank. And the bust rate with highly drafted starters is enormous — over 50% for starters taken in the early rounds of 2025 drafts.
But which hitters should we target with those picks we’re not spending on starting pitchers? Once we settle on a type of batter, I’ll make specific recommendations relative to NFBC ADP in February.
The mistake I’ve made — and an expert is only someone who has made every mistake that can be made in a narrow field — is targeting upside hitters. I wanted to leverage the hitters at the top of the draft so monumentally that I would just crush anyone. I didn’t just want to have the best hitting team; I wanted to crush the field. This strategy is dumb. I love upside, but it’s something to target more cheaply when you are building on your high-floor hitting foundation.
Acting like you’re rich because you have so much draft capital to spend and making expensive impulse purchases on hitters you think can explode in value is a recipe to lose a Zero-SP build. Trust me, it happens all the time. Focusing on highly projectable players early reduces that risk considerably.
Never pay to gamble. Try to get upside where the downside risk is minimal. You should only take two to four big swings with low floors (or no floor) when it comes to prospects, and the cost should be so low that you can confidently cover it with an average performer via waivers.
I filtered two populations of hitters who qualified last year according to Statcast. Doing so eliminated prospects and 2025 late-season callups, which is ideal since we don’t want to target those players. If someone we like falls to us in the later rounds, that’s fine. You have a couple of middle-to-late (ideally late) picks to play with. We are trying to have fun, I know.
The first group was filtered in five ways: strikeout rate (under 23% — MLB average is 22%), walk rate (over 8% — average 8%), xwOBA (over .339 — average .316), out of zone swing percentage (under 28% — avg. 28%), fly-ball rate (over 20% — avg. 24%). This is overfitted for fantasy, especially if you don’t play in an OBP league. Remember, we’re not trying to find necessarily the best fantasy hitters but the most stable ones. Obviously, better plate discipline, measured by strikeout and walk rate, means lower expected variance. And worse plate discipline measured the same way (high Ks and low walks) means higher expected variance.
In other words, good luck projecting Peter Crow-Armstrong. If you needed his bat for the final two months of 2025 to win your league, you were out of luck. He’s exactly the kind of hitter we don’t want in a Zero-SP build because we don’t need ceilings at the top of the draft; we need floors.
So let’s first identify the hitters to target based on the aforementioned five 2025 stats, then reduce to just two filters — xwOBA and K% (for batting average leagues).
I’m not saying to avoid hitters who are not on the list. Obviously, drafting Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani fits in with a heavy-on-hitting build. There are actually very few hitters with poor plate discipline (3.5 or more Ks per walk) who are costing premium draft picks (pre-Pick 100). Crow-Armstrong (ADP: 27th overall) leads this list: You can’t draft him. You don’t need to catch lightning in a bottle with a Zero-SP build. Leave him to the people who drafted starting pitchers with three of their first five or six picks. Zero SP drafters also have to forget about Zach Neto (29th overall), Hunter Goodman (65th), Riley Greene (72nd) and Byron Buxton (73rd; Buxton was a must-draft for me last year because he was so cheap – but it’s never the player, it’s always the price). For the record, Ohtani and Judge are both under 2.0 Ks per walk.
Here are the most stable hitters/hitters to target in a Zero-SP build based on the five filters above, in order of February ADP:
Springer is old (playing his age-36 season). Though he was great last year, Springer has a collapse risk. I advise against drafting him, even though I stipulate he is being discounted for age. He still costs an eighth-round pick.
I’m shocked Rooker is on the list, but I don’t argue with stats. I would draft as many of these hitters as my league allows in the first eight rounds. That’s a foundation of at least six high-floor bats, assuming you draft two closers (more on that in a future column).
If you focus more on Ks and ignore walks because you are in a batting average league, you have more options. Again, though, worse plate discipline, as measured by walk rate, means more volatility. Despite not quite making our K/BB filters above, all of these hitters do have a K/BB ratio of 3.0 or less. And some of these players were knocked out by fly-ball rate (meaning their homers are volatile) or a high chase rate (even though their walks and Ks aren’t terrible). To be clear, while these hitters aren’t necessarily targets, it’s fine to draft them at their ADP:
Freddie Freeman made this second list but, like Springer, is too old for me to target in the sixth round, where he’s going on average. He’s also a collapse risk.
If Bo Bichette makes it into the top 100 (he’s 101 as I write), you can definitely draft him despite his low walk rate. While you can say 2024 screams volatility for Bichette, he’s generally been an asset in average and especially hits and will bat behind Soto, which is the best lineup spot in baseball.
Another hitter who didn’t make the list (just missed in xwOBA at .335, not the .340+ we filtered) is Maikel Garcia. I would definitely draft Garcia in all formats at ADP (78th).
After Pick 100, you don’t need to follow such tight rules and should be more concerned with balancing out your roster for categories and also with taking some high-ceiling swings, since the price is low enough to be worth the risk.