Lessons Learned For Fantasy Baseball 2025

November 3, 2024

Michael Cecchini reviews lessons learned from the 2024 season and identifies how we can improve for 2025 Fantasy Baseball

Welcome back to the Lookahead; this week we apply lessons from 2024 to our 2025 draft prep.

One of the primary, overarching goals with this column is simple: how can we improve as fantasy players? Just as a shop owner doesn’t know what to order next without taking inventory, so too should we reflect on past fantasy experiences to avoid making the same mistakes again. What did we miss about certain players, and why? And how can these lessons inform future decisions?

Today we’ll examine a few players that let us down this past season and identify similar players who could be landmines in 2025.

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Zach Gelof, 2B - Oakland Athletics

This one is relatively straightforward. Some of my favorite analysts emphasize a batter’s ability to make contact, but I was convinced that superlative contact quality (e.g. hard hit, barrels) could override swing-and-miss. For example, Bryce Harper and Rafael Devers had well below-average contact rates, ergo Gelof could likewise succeed.

It turns out Gelof is not in the class of those guys as far as hitting the ball hard consistently; I was led astray by his 11% barrel and 41% hard-hit rates in 2023. After all, he hit .267 and went 14/14 in just 69 games. Hence, I equated Gelof to Matt McLain lite, except Gelof was going much later in drafts.

There was just one problem: contact quantity. McLain made contact far more often (85% zone and 75% overall, per Sports Info Solutions), supporting his batting average. Gelof meanwhile was near the bottom of the majors in both, with just 75% zone and 68% overall contact rates in 2023. I didn’t expect a great average but thought he’d be able to repeat something close to .250 based on his Statcast readings.

Gelof still provided power and speed in 2024, but he wasn’t able to successfully overcome his contact deficiencies, destroying our batting averages by hitting .211. His marginally acceptable 27% strikeout rate ballooned to an unmanageable 34%:

Moreover, Gelof’s contact quality dipped too, down to 9% barrel and 37% hard hit rates. Pitchers had a book on him now and exploited his dubious swing decisions.

There’s another lesson here: don’t be too quick to buy into small sample excellence, especially when there are warning signs that could collapse the whole profile. Having learned the hard way, I previously wrote about three 2024 small sample standouts who could be “next year’s Gelof.” 

2025 Version: Connor Norby (Nice run of late-season power but 12th percentile contact rate, 33% strikeouts, and 18% SwStr)

Brandon Drury, UT - Los Angeles Angels

This one was a little trickier to figure out. Drury appeared pretty safe for boring but solid production, coming off two seasons of a .260+ batting average and 26+ HR. His playing time was safe on a thin Angels team. He was 31 and played at least 125 games in both 2022 and 2023. He was cheap in drafts too, and a nice fallback option for middle or corner infield in the later rounds.

Well, all of Drury’s believers were treated to a dreary letdown: he began slowly, dealt with a hamstring strain in mid-April, and was just awful when he did play: his .169/.242/.228 line added up to a 34 wRC+, by far the worst in MLB (min. 300 PA). He went from 14% above league average to 66% below.

The thing is, Drury didn’t have a complete collapse in contact or strikeout rate. He just stopped hitting the ball hard consistently (-2 mph average exit velocity) and stopped hitting it in the air, with an absurd 57% ground ball rate, up 15% from 2023.

We still couldn’t explain why Drury was so bad. Yes, he had the hammy and dealt with a migraine, but we didn’t learn the main culprit until after the season: Drury revealed in late September he had changed his swing entering the season, ironically to get to more power.

What happened to Brandon Drury this season? He says the search for more exit velocity was a mistake.

Also, how the Angels fixed Brock Burke.

Plus, updates on Neto, Schanuel; the draft and tomorrow's game time.https://t.co/tQqwobYTGp

— Jeff Fletcher (@JeffFletcherOCR) September 29, 2024

Clearly, there were factors here we couldn’t have known beforehand, but Drury had also shown consistently solid production for only two seasons. The lesson here: approach late-career breakouts with caution and low expectations.

2025 Version: Jurickson Profar (By far a career year at 30. He added bulk and hard-hit rate, so he may have a new level now, just don’t overpay for it.)

Chas McCormick, OF - Houston Astros

This one hurts. I was all about drafting Chas, but like Drury, McCormick broke out at a relatively advanced age (28) in 2023, hitting .273 with 22 homers and 19 steals in just 115 games.

Even before then, he’d flashed good quality of contact with 10%-barrel rates the prior two seasons, primarily against lefties. In 2023 he showed he could hit righties well enough to play every day.

Or so we thought. McCormick was given a shot as a regular in 2024...and posted a .576 OPS over 94 games. Yes, he suffered a hamstring injury in April, missed three weeks, and ended with a hand fracture in mid-September. However, he wasn’t good before, during or after the injuries. From opening day to the hammy issue: .602 OPS. After returning from the hammy until the hand injury: .564 OPS.

Despite owning lefties in prior seasons, he had a worse OPS versus them (.550) than against righties (.590).

It’s possible McCormick just started slowly and the hammy bothered him even after the IL stint. But as with Gelof, McCormick has always walked a fine line between dubious contact quantity (80% career) and solid quality (10% barrel). Well, as the playing time went up his zone contact plummeted to 76% and he chased and whiffed more (16% SwStr).

McCormick is a combination of lessons, from extrapolating small sample performance to waving away his own org’s reticence to trust him to dismiss possible contact issues that could sink the profile.

2025 Version: Jo Adell (15th percentile contact% and OPS dropped 24 points with full-season PT)

Luis Campusano, C - San Diego Padres

It’s a familiar story in that Campusano had only shown us a small stretch of good performance, hitting .319 (.305 xBA) with seven home runs over 49 games in 2023. But unlike some of these other misses, Campusano had shown elite contact ability, with 91% zone and 84% overall that year. I was convinced he could give our fantasy teams an average boost as a C2 while possibly expanding the power output.

It seems the Padres believed the same, as Campusano opened as their No. 1 backstop. It did not go well. He was one of the worst defensive catchers (-13 OAA) and didn’t hit for power or average, batting .227 with 8 HR in 91 games. He did suffer a thumb injury in late June but hadn’t produced much before that either (.653 OPS, five HR).

In Campusano’s case, the skills he’d shown before didn’t degrade completely; he still boasted above-average contact and chase rates. He just didn’t hit the ball as hard consistently, with his hard hit dropping from 41% to 34% and his already middling barrels from 7% to just 4%.

The Padres eventually lost patience and sent Campusano to the minors while elevating Kyle Higashioka, a much better fielding catcher who also happened to be barreling at the plate.

Again, we have a short sample all-star who couldn’t maintain his performance into a new season. The other Campusano lesson is the importance of defense: unless a defensively limited player is mashing, he has no margin for error to sustain playing time. I’ll be taking catching and fielding metrics into greater account going forward.

2025 Version: Ryan Jeffers (-7 OAA, Hard Hit fell from 43% to 34% with full PT)

Nick Pivetta, SP - Boston Red Sox

Pivetta was not a complete disaster like some of the above players, but he left us wanting…again. Perhaps this lesson is more about us than the player.

Pivetta is an enticing pitcher because he regularly sits near the top of metrics we value, especially K-BB%: in 2023 he ranked 8th at 22.7%, between Freddy Peralta and Chris Sale (min. 100 IP).

He also breaks stuff models, sitting 10th that season in Stuff+ and 12th in Pitching+, per FanGraphs. His second half was even better, ranking second and top six respectively in each metric. Based on these numbers, many drafters thought Pivetta could be their SP3 or SP4 with upside.

Here’s the thing: in 2024 Pivetta ranked 10th in K-BB% and fourth in Stuff+. Pretty great! However, his ERA sat north of 4 for the fourth straight season (4.14). Not terrible, but not helpful either. He finished as the 68th-best starter, earning $4. That’s not even an SP5 in a 12-team league.

Pivetta’s approach of challenging hitters high in the zone to induce whiffs also makes him a heavy fly ball pitcher (48%), which wouldn’t be so bad except it’s led to extreme home runs: career 15.5% HR/FB% is well above the league average of 11%. You may want to blame this on his home venue, as Fenway is a great hitter's park.

However, Pivetta was worse on the road, with a 4.42 ERA versus 3.86 at home and far more home runs allowed as well (18% HR/FB% to 11%). Look, Nicky P gave us a boatload of strikeouts (172) and a boost in WHIP (1.13). This wasn’t a total miss. But it does warn us against focusing on certain metrics to the exclusion of others.

For example, xFIP normalizes homers allowed to league average and has always liked Pivetta about a half-run better than FIP (or ERA) does. When a player has established a statistical baseline over multiple seasons, we should probably just trust his actual numbers.

2025 Version: Taj Bradley (career 17% HR/FB% and xFIP half to full run better than FIP; a nice upside play but draft SP depth around him)