Major league starting pitchers are actively trying to undermine our fantasy teams. You must accept this fact, even if it hurts a little.
As a group, pitchers are simply the enemy of joy. Charlatans. Deceivers. Layabouts. At no point in the history of baseball have we asked less of our pitchers, yet they continue to disappoint us.
Fantasy baseball’s greatest ongoing scandal is that so many of you continue to treat starting pitchers as if any of them can be relied upon. It’s been 15 years since any starter managed to clear 250 innings in a single season (Justin Verlander, 2011). Last year, only three pitchers topped 200 innings and none of them reached 210. You’d be a fool to actually forecast anyone for more than, say, 190 frames.
If you’re among the tens of thousands of managers who play in rotisserie formats at one of the major fantasy platforms, then your league likely imposes an innings or starts maximum for the season (1400 IP is the Yahoo default). Back in the day, you might have reasonably expected your team’s top starter to account for 18-20% of your fantasy squad’s full-season innings total. But in the current era, there’s basically no chance anyone is giving you 15%.
You might assume that ADPs and average auction values would account for such a well-understood change to pitching projections, but, well … nope. We just keep pricing these guys as if there might be a vintage Randy Johnson among them. Also, as velocity among pitchers trends upward (along with constant max-effort throwing), their percentage of total days lost to the injured list has soared. Last season, pitchers accounted for 63% of days spent on the IL and 63.4% of total salary lost to injuries.
Again: These guys cannot be trusted.
For years, I have been fully committed to the Zero SP lifestyle and there have been no recent data points to dissuade me from following the same path in 2026. I will simply never select a pitcher in the opening 6-7 rounds in any draft, nor am I willing to spend more than $10-$12 at an auction on any of these grifters.
Thankfully, it’s never been easier to avoid the upper-tier starters in drafts while still assembling a stellar fantasy rotation. Just think about the prices we paid for Hunter Brown, Bryan Woo, Andrew Abbott and various others last season. One of my league-winners in 2025 finished with Cam Schlittler, Jacob Misiorowski, Cade Horton and Abbott tossing its most important innings; each of those guys was an in-season pickup, a gift from the wire.
If you’d like to see a thoughtful Zero SP approach executed in a competitive league, please keep scrolling. Let’s have a look at my recent drafts in The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational and RazzSlam, plus my Tout Wars auction. (Each is a triumph in its own way. Everyone is saying it.)
TGFBI
That’s about as aggressive as I’m ever gonna be with respect to pitching, and I still waited until overall pick No. 117 to select my first. Misiorowski and Schlittler are exactly the sort of arms we’re hoping to build around with this approach. Ideally, we can find pitchers with elite traits at middle-tier prices.
RazzSlam
All pitching prices are somewhat deflated in RazzSlam, given the peculiar nature of the scoring system (points league, best ball). Gausman is much too rich for me in leagues with standard configurations, but here he landed in the tenth round. Still, I managed to construct an unassailable group of hitters before soiling the roster with its first pitcher. When we go Zero SP, one of the primary goals is to crush the batting categories.
Here’s what an 80/20-ish hitter/pitcher spending split gets you in a 15-team auction:
Tout Wars
My only great regret in Tout Wars was not taking a cheap-and-late flier on one of the pre-injured vanity starters who might return at mid-season — Hunter Greene, Gerrit Cole, et al. We have unlimited IL slots at our disposal in Tout, which generally makes stashing damaged players a low-risk proposition.
If your formative years as a fantasy baseball manager were back in the ‘90s or early-2000s — when starting pitchers were something more than cameo contributors — then you will understandably struggle with Zero SP principles. Rejecting fantasy dogma can be difficult. It’s not for everyone. But I am urging you to recognize the limitations and risks of pitchers in today’s game. These men are pure saboteurs, nowhere near the circle of fantasy trust.