Over the weekend, I asked the RotoWire staff for their favorite sleepers and busts for this season. Throughout this week, I'll share our team's picks across a series of four articles. After covering hitter sleepers yesterday, today we'll move onto pitcher sleepers.
The players are listed in order of their ADP in the RotoWire Online Championship. I've included each writer's explanation for their pick from their response to my email, as well as a link to their writer page here at RotoWire so you can check out all of their work.
Intro by Erik Halterman
Fantasy Baseball Sleepers: Pitchers
Pete Fairbanks, RP, Marlins (ADP 114)
Fairbanks has three straight seasons with at least 23 saves. He has posted a WHIP lower than 1.05 in two of the last three seasons. He can get 25-plus saves and help with ratios, making him a prime target for those who decide to wait on closers. — Mike Barner
MacKenzie Gore, SP, Rangers (ADP 169)
Texas got a career-best season out of Nathan Eovaldi in 2025 by convincing him to lean more on his secondary pitches, and Gore is a younger, better pitcher with some of the same issues when it comes to giving up hard contact on his four-seamer. The king's ransom of prospects the Rangers gave up to get him suggests they believe they can unlock another level in Gore, too. — Erik Siegrist
Shane Baz, SP, Orioles (ADP 195)
I would've liked Baz a little more had he
Over the weekend, I asked the RotoWire staff for their favorite sleepers and busts for this season. Throughout this week, I'll share our team's picks across a series of four articles. After covering hitter sleepers yesterday, today we'll move onto pitcher sleepers.
The players are listed in order of their ADP in the RotoWire Online Championship. I've included each writer's explanation for their pick from their response to my email, as well as a link to their writer page here at RotoWire so you can check out all of their work.
Intro by Erik Halterman
Fantasy Baseball Sleepers: Pitchers
Pete Fairbanks, RP, Marlins (ADP 114)
Fairbanks has three straight seasons with at least 23 saves. He has posted a WHIP lower than 1.05 in two of the last three seasons. He can get 25-plus saves and help with ratios, making him a prime target for those who decide to wait on closers. — Mike Barner
MacKenzie Gore, SP, Rangers (ADP 169)
Texas got a career-best season out of Nathan Eovaldi in 2025 by convincing him to lean more on his secondary pitches, and Gore is a younger, better pitcher with some of the same issues when it comes to giving up hard contact on his four-seamer. The king's ransom of prospects the Rangers gave up to get him suggests they believe they can unlock another level in Gore, too. — Erik Siegrist
Shane Baz, SP, Orioles (ADP 195)
I would've liked Baz a little more had he stayed with the Rays and was moving back to Tropicana Field for his home ballpark, but it's not enough to get my off of him as my favorite mid-rounds pitching target. It's a young arm with big velocity who is on a good team and who is further removed from Tommy John surgery. The leap is coming. — Ryan Boyer
Oriole Park isn't the most favorable venue for pitchers, but it is light years ahead of the bandbox
that is Steinbrenner Field. Baz had terrible numbers at Steinbrenner last year (5.90 ERA, 2.0
HR/9), so the switch to Camden Yards should vastly improve his consistency in 2026. — KC Joyner
Aaron Nola, SP, Phillies (ADP 211)
I've seen this former All-Star fall past pick 200 in drafts, and I'm willing to take that risk. This is a former ace who had a 3.64 ERA and 1.11 WHIP from 2018 to 2024. I'll trust a seven-year sample size over one stinker season, especially since he's looked so good in the WBC. — Joel Bartilotta
Jack Leiter, SP, Rangers (ADP 235)
2024 was disastrous for Leiter, but in 2025 he improved in many key places. It's not just that he got his ERA down to 3.86, but his strikeouts went up, his walks went down, and lefties only managed to hit .183 against him. — Chris Morgan
Gerrit Cole, SP, Yankees (ADP 255)
Cole's days of racking up 200-plus strikeouts with a sub-3.00 ERA are likely over, especially since he's not expected to make his 2026 debut until late-May. However, in the competitive AL East division, I expect the Yankees to plug him back into their starting rotation as soon as he's ready. The former Cy Young award winner is reportedly hitting 97 mph on the radar gun with his 2026 spring debut on the horizon. — Ryan Rufe
Braxton Ashcraft, SP, Pirates (ADP 256)
In 69.2 innings as a rookie swingman last year, Ashcraft had a 2.71 ERA, combining an above-average strikeout rate (24.3 percent) with an average walk rate (8.2 percent) and a strong groundball rate (50.3 percent). Stuff+ (109) and Location+ (104) both liked him quite a bit, with his fastball (113) and slider (118) grading out particularly well by the former metric. He was handled cautiously and wasn't asked to pitch deep into games even after moving into the rotation, so those numbers may drop a bit this year in longer outings, but not to the point where he'll no longer be worthy of a late-round pick. — Erik Halterman
Merrill Kelly, SP, Diamondbacks (ADP 260)
Kelly has been one of the more understated pitchers in baseball over the past few years and could provide some rotation stability outside the early rounds. His 3.47 ERA and 1.15 WHIP across the past four seasons provide a solid floor, and he could be decent in the strikeouts department if he can get closer to the career-high strikeout rate of 25.9 percent he set in 2023. Assuming the back injury he picked up during spring training only slightly delays his season debut, of course. — Evan Hauge
Cade Cavalli, SP, Nationals (ADP 317)
Cavalli's surface numbers in 2025 were nothing special — a 3-1 record, 4.25 ERA, 1.48 WHIP and 4.53 FIP with a 7.4 K/9 across 10 starts and 48.2 innings — but the underlying metrics were encouraging, as the 2020 first-round pick ranked in the 90th percentile or better in chase rate, barrel rate and groundball rate. With the results on his knuckle curve stabilizing over a full season and a high-90s fastball to pair with it, I like Cavalli's chances of seeing improved batted-ball outcomes, generating more punchouts and beginning to look like the front-of-the-rotation arm the Nationals envisioned after tabbing him as their Opening Day starter. — Jeremy Schneider
Clayton Beeter, RP, Nationals (ADP 304)
The Nationals will win some games and generate some save opportunities in 2026. That said, the guy who is probably their best saves option, Beeter, is pretty much being ignored. He needs to throw more strikes, but his main competition, Cole Henry, has the same problem and has slightly lesser stuff. Beeter could be worth a flyer. — Brad Johnson
Matthew Liberatore, SP, Cardinals (ADP 347)
He's still just 26, is left-handed, throws a bunch of different pitches, has a 23.6 percent swinging strike rate this spring and is locked into a big-league rotation in a favorable park. It's more normal for a pitcher to break out in their mid-20s than to just succeed right away in the majors, and this is Liberatore's year. — James Anderson
Liberatore has put in the offseason work and the results have shown up this spring in his overall stuff grades and as well as his 14:1 strikeout to walk ratio in 10 innings of work. He's an Opening Day starter with an ADP well outside the top 300. That's the only thing he and former teammate Miles Mikolas have in common, as Liberatore is starting to flash the skills that made him the centerpiece of the Randy Arozarena deal with Tampa Bay before the 2020 season. — Jason Collette
Lucas Erceg, RP, Royals (ADP 355)
It was only last year that Erceg looked like the Royals' closer before the acquisition of Carlos Estevez, and last spring the Royals talked of using Erceg at times in the ninth. Estevez's velocity is down this spring and he had just a 7.4 K/9 last year. Meanwhile, Erceg is healthy this spring after his season ended in mid-September due to a right shoulder impingement and he isn't getting much hype as a closer in waiting. — Peter Schoenke
