Deep league breakout pitchers for the 2025 fantasy baseball season

After more than 150 pitchers have been taken in your draft, you are no longer swimming in a pool of high-upside options. But there are plenty of leagues where you have to keep on picking starting pitchers long after the 300th player is taken, long after the sure things are all gone. This article is for those of you looking for any sliver of hope late in a deep league draft.

Of course, you’re not going to hit on all of these guys, even if they fall to you in the draft. Last year, this exercise had two mini-wins in Dean Kremer and Cody Bradford. Don’t look at the rest of the recommendations. They all suffered various terrible maladies like injury, lost roles, and maybe some of the worst command we’ve seen from a starter in years. Don’t look back. Only forward.

This year’s bunch will be better. Probably.

Aaron Civale, MIL

Sometimes it’s as simple as trusting your projections. The OOPSY projections on FanGraphs include Stuff+, so if you take a look at the starters being picked outside of the top 300 picks who have an OOPSY ERA projection, you’ll find most of them also have a decent Stuff+ number. Let’s limit it to those with 97 or better Stuff+ to really concentrate the list, though.

Only the bottom four on this list, sorted by projected ERA, are locks to have roles at the beginning of the year. Of those four, Civale was the only one with an ERA under 4.50 last year (the other three had a combined 5.68 ERA).

There are some exciting higher-level reasons to like Civale this year, like the fact he changed his pitch mix pretty heavily with the Brewers by bringing the slider and four-seam back or that he threw both his breaking balls harder in Milwaukee than he did in Tampa. But he’s always fiddled around with the right mix to complement his elite curveball, and that can come and go. The real reasons to take him: He’s got a role, he’s projectable and he has a high floor. That may not be exciting, but it’s just as important when you’re filling out the back end of a rotation.

Sean Burke, CWS

Good ole No. 1. It’s great to have a big, booming, high-velocity fastball with great extension — Burke’s in the top 25 among starters when it comes to releasing the ball close to the plate, and just ask Gavin Williams if that’s a good thing. Hitters don’t seem to see it well.

He doesn’t spin the ball all that well, and his breaking balls are not model pleasers, but a 2,500 RPM curveball with movement like his has some potential still, even if it’s not over 3,000 RPM like a Seth Lugo yakker. One of the closest comps for his curveball is Hunter Brown, though the Astro throws his curveball almost three ticks harder than Burke.

There’s still a good foundation here: Massive extension and good velocity on a riding fastball, a good power change, and two breaking balls that can at least push average. He won’t get you wins, and he had a hard time staying healthy, but he spent his offseason working on his body to stay on the field more often. There’s something here.

Max Meyer, MIA

So many pitchers come to camp with a new pitch. How many pitchers come to camp with an entirely new arsenal? Check out the changes Meyer made this offseason:

• Lowered his arm slot nearly three inches
• Somehow also increased his fastball ride two inches
• Increased his velocity (sitting 96 mph this spring)
• Added a sweeper with more than 13 inches of sweep
• Altered his changeup grip to get six inches more drop

You gotta sit up and take notice when someone changes their arsenal on such a fundamental level. He always had a great gyro slider — a platoon-neutral spinner with tight movement that will always be his foundation. Now he has two fastballs he can go to around that, as well as a big sweeper he can play off the slider, and a changeup that looks better than it has in years.

His strikeout rate this spring is not different than it was in the past, so he may not suddenly make good on the promise of his third overall draft selection, but his swinging-strike rate is up, and if all he does is turn down the knobs on the home runs that have been plaguing him so far in the big leagues, he could be a good mid-rotation piece for the Marlins. He’ll at least be useful at home, with a chance to be the new regime’s first big success in player development.

Jack Leiter, TEX

The hop is gone.

“Being a smaller guy, I used to want to get the most of my delivery, and so I’d have this little hop into my landing,” Leiter said at camp this week. “Now I’m smoother, just gliding into release.”

There are new things here, too. A sinker. A changeup (more on this later!).

“It’s a true five-pitch mix now,” he said.

Spring training statistics aren’t super useful, but, notably, Leiter had only walked one of the first 29 batters he faced this spring before he walked five of his past 12 in a surprise start in Surprise. At least he’s attacked his command problem with every tool in his bag. Like Hunter Brown, who had mediocre command grades but decent underlying location numbers, that sinker can give him another hard pitch so batters can’t isolate the four-seamer and pounce on mistakes as easily. As with many other pitchers who have slowly ironed out kinks in their mechanics, he’s worked on having a simple, repeatable delivery that still gives him power. We talked about miss locations and making sure the misses go in the right direction. Everything’s on the table.

The foundation, though, is an explosive four-seam fastball that ranked in the top 10 among starters last year if you drop the innings threshold low enough. Here’s how it looked in Surprise this week, as it jumped in on the lefty.

Settling everything else in the constellation around this excellent platoon-neutral power riding fastball has taken some time, but in today’s game it can just take a little while to figure it out. Young starters who hit the big leagues fully formed are the rarity. Tyler Mahle’s stuff never came back after his latest injury, and now he’s hurting again. Leiter may break camp with the job.

Mitch Spence, ATH

With a low 4.00 ERA projection, a mediocre strikeout rate and a Stuff+ that’s just under average, maybe it’s not obvious what Spence brings to the table. But sometimes it’s just how the arsenal fits together against lefties and righties. Spence’s arsenal has found a way to fit together and allow him to get both lefties and righties out.

Against lefties:

• His fastball is a cut four-seamer, which produces the kind of movement in on lefties that makes it tough to square up
• His slider is a power gyro slider that doesn’t have much side-to-side movement, making it easier to command and use against lefties
• His curveball is a huge two-planer at 80 mph that can function almost as a changeup due to the velocity and movement

Against righties:

• His sinker becomes more of a weapon, boring in on the hitter’s hands
• Both of his breaking pitches are a little more dangerous when it comes to whiffs, though he chooses to play the cutter and slider off each other more

The new Stuff+ model breaks pitchers into two parts, one against same-handed hitters, and one against opposite-handed hitters. Spence’s pitches are remarkably consistent. Most righties are better against same-handed batters, but Spence is a little different. He has a 98 overall Stuff+ against righties and a 101 Stuff+ against lefties.

This spring, the extra spice comes from an uptick in velocity. Spence was holding 93 mph on the gun on his cutter into the fourth inning in his last appearance — he sat under 91 on the pitch in his rookie season. He won’t be a huge asset in strikeouts, and it remains to see how the park in Sacramento will play, but for those of you in leagues where you can afford to give him a look on the bench to see if he’s going to be useful in certain matchups, he could bring a modest return on a cheap price.

Quinn Mathews, STL

Often, factors out of a player’s control end up deciding their fate. If you look at the Guardians’ roster, as an example, you’ll see Triston McKenzie’s stuff is up this spring, but he’s out of options. Teams don’t like to lose assets, so the lanky righty is almost a lock to make the Opening Day roster. The opposite is probably true for Mathews. Stuck behind a group of established major-league starters, mostly without options, means he’d have to push Andre Pallante to the pen, and the Cardinals may not want to start their young starter’s clock just yet.

There are other team factors that speak in Mathews’ favor, though. This is clearly a team in transition with a decent chance of ending up closer to the bottom of the division than the top. While they’ve been hard at work improving their player development pipeline, trading current starters for future value looks pretty likely. Add in the injury history for someone like Steven Matz, and it seems a lock that Mathews will get innings in the majors this year, maybe as many as 100.

He’s prepared for bulk. Once a divisive figure after throwing over 130 pitches in a start for Stanford, Mathews has kept on ticking right through the minor leagues, with over 140 innings across four levels in his first year in the pros. His Triple-A Stuff+ numbers weren’t great, with only his slider registering as an above-average pitch, and even his location numbers were below average. But from personal looks at Stanford, and spring numbers that are much more positive, some level of success seems to be likely, and maybe right off the bat. It’s a polished approach — at least a true four-pitch mix with command — and he’s gotten batters out everywhere along the way.

And from judging the landscape around him, opportunity is about to knock.

(Top photo of Max Meyer: Rich Storry / Getty Images)