After a long, cold, frustratingly slow offseason, MLB’s regular season begins on Wednesday, March 20, with the Dodgers and Padres squaring off in Seoul (the 28 other teams will get things started on Thursday, March 28). With precious little time to go until Opening Day, now is the time to start cranking up your fantasy baseball drafts — and we’re here to be your one-stop shop for all things draft prep. We just recently unveiled our top 300 overall for redraft leagues in 2024, as well as top prospects to know, full positional previews and sleepers at every position.
Now, however, it’s time for something a little less fun: players to avoid at every position. Next up: starting pitcher, one of the most frequently misunderstood positions in fantasy. It can be easy to talk yourself into needing to spend big on your rotation come draft time, with so many spots to fill and such injury and performance volatility year-over-year. But that volatility is exactly why you should embrace waiting a bit — there are so many pitchers to choose from each year, and spending early draft capital means you’re really dodging some landmines. Who am I avoiding this draft season? Read on to find out.
Fantasy baseball busts: Starting pitcher
Tyler Glasnow, Los Angeles Dodgers
ADP: 42
Glasnow’s talent is beyond dispute: His stuff is some of the most ridiculous in the sport, and upon returning from the IL on May 27, he ranked third in the league in strikeouts (162) and fourth in the league in K-BB% (25.8%). If you could wave a magic wand and tell me that Glasnow would be good for 180 — or, heck, even 160 — innings this season, I’d have absolutely no problem with an even more aggressive ADP than the one above. But there’s the rub: Glasnow’s workload this year is a huge question mark, not only because of his lengthy injury history but because of how much depth and injury risk there is in the Dodgers rotation. Glasnow’s 120 innings in 2023 were a career-high at the MLB level, and he’s only ever reached 150 innings in a season at any level once, back in 2017. Glasnow has been on the 60-day IL three separate times in the past five seasons with an elbow or forearm injury, and while it’s possible he’s past that — his IL stint last season was due to a left oblique injury — I just don’t see how you can justify this kind of price for that kind of injury history, especially considering how conservative the Dodgers are likely to be with their new ace with an eye toward getting him to October in one piece.
Blake Snell, free agent
ADP: 63
I have a simple rule when it comes to Snell: Draft him coming off his down years, avoid him coming off his up years. Given that he just won his second Cy Young Award, we’re clearly falling into the latter category this time around. About the only thing we can be sure of is that Snell will be among the best per-inning strikeout pitchers around; beyond that, his refusal to pitch over the middle of the plate will always lead to an ugly WHIP and way more volatility than you’d like at this point in the draft — he’s had an ERA north of 4.20 in two of the last five years, and remember, he had a 5.40 as late as May 19 last season before going on to win the Cy Young.
Chris Bassitt, Toronto Blue Jays
ADP: 114
Bassitt has long been among the more underrated fantasy starters out there, so it brings me no pleasure to report that I think this may finally be the year the foundation begins to crumble. The righty has lost velocity in each of the last two years, and both his K and walk rates are going in the wrong direction. He can still really spin it, and he’s still got good command. But he’s always been a more than the sum of his parts sort of guy, and that leaves less margin for error than his recent track record would suggest — and his 4.04 expected ERA from last year backs up that skepticism.
Michael King, San Diego Padres
ADP: 148
I really do get why King’s ADP has continued to climb, but I just can’t bring myself to be the one who actually buys in at this point. Given how great he looked when given a chance to start down the stretch last year, there’s a chance I could be regretting this fade a few months from now. But there’s just so much we don’t know about King, specifically about his ability to hold up at that level over a full season’s workload. He has a serious elbow injury in his recent past, his 104.2 innings last year were a career high and even his run of excellence with the Yankees comes with some red flags: King threw more than 80 pitches in a start three times, more than 100 just once, and he followed that 100-plus outing with two relative clunkers (five walks in six innings, four runs in four innings with one strikeout) to end the season. If he were going a little later, where his worst-case scenario wouldn’t hurt you quite so badly, I’d be all in. But this is a bit rich for me given how many other intriguing starters are out there.
