With the regular season in the rearview mirror, it's time for a look back. Last week we examined the position players who provided the most value relative to their draft slot. This week, we're moving on to starting pitchers. I'll be using RotoWire's preseason ADP numbers and earned auction values.
Bryan Woo, 
Seattle Mariners
ADP: 140.8, 42nd among starting pitchers
EAV: 4th among starting pitchers
Woo was excellent for the Mariners during the 2024 season, finishing with a 2.89 ERA, 0.90 WHIP and 101:13 K:BB over 121.1 innings covering 22 starts. However, there were legitimate reasons as to why you could get him outside the top 40 among starting pitchers. One was that the swing-and-miss was lacking, with his 21.4 percent strikeout rate ranking more than one percentage point below league average. Another is that Woo was a clear injury risk. He had multiple arm-related absences in 2024 and was often hampered by injuries in the minors, too. Woo is currently shelved with a pectoral injury that kept him off the Mariners' ALDS roster, but he stayed healthy enough to make 30 starts during the regular season and finished with a 2.94 ERA, 0.93 WHIP and 198:36 K:BB across 186.2 frames. He set a franchise record by going six-plus innings in each of his first 25 starts of the season, and the strikeout ability he showed in 2023 with the Mariners and in the minors resurfaced. It will probably be fair to consider Woo at least an injury
With the regular season in the rearview mirror, it's time for a look back. Last week we examined the position players who provided the most value relative to their draft slot. This week, we're moving on to starting pitchers. I'll be using RotoWire's preseason ADP numbers and earned auction values.
Bryan Woo, Seattle Mariners
ADP: 140.8, 42nd among starting pitchers
EAV: 4th among starting pitchers
Woo was excellent for the Mariners during the 2024 season, finishing with a 2.89 ERA, 0.90 WHIP and 101:13 K:BB over 121.1 innings covering 22 starts. However, there were legitimate reasons as to why you could get him outside the top 40 among starting pitchers. One was that the swing-and-miss was lacking, with his 21.4 percent strikeout rate ranking more than one percentage point below league average. Another is that Woo was a clear injury risk. He had multiple arm-related absences in 2024 and was often hampered by injuries in the minors, too. Woo is currently shelved with a pectoral injury that kept him off the Mariners' ALDS roster, but he stayed healthy enough to make 30 starts during the regular season and finished with a 2.94 ERA, 0.93 WHIP and 198:36 K:BB across 186.2 frames. He set a franchise record by going six-plus innings in each of his first 25 starts of the season, and the strikeout ability he showed in 2023 with the Mariners and in the minors resurfaced. It will probably be fair to consider Woo at least an injury yellow flag heading into 2026, but he's now firmly established as an elite fantasy hurler while he's on the mound.
Carlos Rodon, 
New York Yankees
ADP: 138.5, 38th among starting pitchers
EAV: 5th among starting pitchers
Rodon's four-seamer velocity fell to 94.1 mph in 2025, which is more than a full mph lower than it's been in five seasons. He also saw his walk rate go 7.7 percent to 9.3 percent and strikeout rate tick down from 26.5 percent to 25.7 percent. And yet, Rodon finished with easily his best season in pinstripes, boasting a 3.09 ERA, 1.05 WHIP and 203:73 K:BB over 195.1 innings. The lefty combatted his declining four-seamer velocity by throwing fewer of them, using a sinker as a significant part of his repertoire for the first time in his career and also upping his changeup usage to a career-high level. The result was fewer homers, more grounders and more weak contact. Rodon also benefitted from a career-low .228 BABIP after he posted a .285 BABIP in his first two years with the Yankees. Rodon has logged 30-plus starts in back-to-back seasons and in three of the last four campaigns, a remarkable feat considering how injury-prone he had been in his career. The southpaw looks like a good bet for some regression in 2026, but as long as he's on the mound he should be a solid source of wins and strikeouts.
Cristopher Sanchez, 
Philadelphia Phillies
ADP: 162.5, 45th among starting pitchers
EAV: 6th among starting pitchers
Sanchez broke out in 2024 in his first full season in the Phillies' rotation, pitching to a 3.32 ERA and a top-10 finish in the National League Cy Young voting. In 2025, he established himself as one of the best hurlers in the game, finishing with a 2.50 ERA, 1.06 WHIP and 212:44 K:BB across 202 frames covering 32 starts. The left-hander maintained his elite groundball rate (58.5 percent) and elite walk rate (5.5 percent) this season and, thanks in large part to career-best velocity across the board, elevated his strikeout rate from 20.3 percent all the way to 26.3 percent year-over-year. Now that Sanchez has shown he can miss bats and handle a big workload, he's virtually foolproof in fantasy, as much as any pitcher can be foolproof, anyway. Just be prepared to pay a much heftier freight next spring.
Nick Pivetta, 
San Diego Padres
ADP: 201.7, 59th among starting pitchers
EAV: 11th among starting pitchers
Coming into the 2025 season, Pivetta had never collected an ERA lower than 4.04, and he had also never made his home starts away from a hitter-friendly venue. Both of those things changed this year, as the 32-year-old got to call Petco Park home, and his 2.87 ERA ranked 10th in baseball. Pivetta did take advantage of his new pitching-friendly home confines, posting a 2.36 ERA, 0.86 WHIP and 113:27 K:BB over 103 frames at Petco, but he was also quite good on the road with a 3.55 ERA, 1.14 WHIP and 77:23 K:BB in 78.2 innings. Not much changed about the right-hander's repertoire and usage from 2024 to 2025, other than it was his curveball rather than his sweeper as his most-used secondary offering. Pivetta remained an extreme flyball pitcher who gave up a lot of hard contact, but the 22 home runs he served up was his lowest total as a full-time starter even as he accrued a career-high 181.2 innings. Just nine of those homers came at Petco, even as Pivetta threw 24.1 more innings at home. Some level of ERA regression in 2026 is likely, but this does mostly just seem like a pitcher who finally found the right landing spot.
Trevor Rogers, 
Baltimore Orioles
ADP: 480.2, 166th among starting pitchers
EAV: 20th among starting pitchers
Rogers was so ignored by fantasy drafters last spring that you can't find him in RotoWire's preseason ADP tool even if you scroll all the way down. I used NFBC to obtain the numbers above, and on that site you'll find Rogers wedged in between Yariel Rodriguez and Brant Hurter. In other words, no one saw this coming, and you can include the Orioles in that, as Rogers wasn't a fixture in their rotation until late June. Rogers visited Driveline over the winter in hopes of regaining some velocity after his four-seamer fell below 92 mph in 2024, and he accomplished that goal in getting it back above 93 mph. He also added a sweeper and upped the whiff rate on his slider to 41 percent. Rogers' .226 BABIP in 2025 was nearly 100 points lower than his career mark coming into the season (.320), and his 84.2 percent LOB rate is also unsustainable. Still, while ERA estimators point to some regression, they all agree that this version of Rogers should remain effective.
Runners-up: Nathan Eovaldi, Texas Rangers; Matthew Boyd, Chicago Cubs; Andrew Abbott, Cincinnati Reds, Cade Horton, Chicago Cubs, Quinn Priester, Milwaukee Brewers
