The Best Early Sleepers For The 2025 Fantasy Baseball Season (Pitchers)

The top 3 late round pitching options to help you come out ahead in your fantasy baseball draft

A little bit ago I put out my first version of this article covering hitters. We took the early NFBC draft data for 2025 drafts and located my favorite four hitter sleepers. It was such a fun article to do, and in sticking with my content plan I think it’s time we cover the pitching side of things.

It’s important to keep in mind what I’m defining as a sleeper. To me, a sleeper is a guy taken typically outside the top 180 who has the potential to be a top-10 at the position player. In terms of pitching, I stretch that out more to the top 15-20 range. It’s a guy who’s being overlooked for whatever reason when there is underlying data that points to this may in fact be their year.

Heading into the 2023 season I was very big on Justin Steele who ended the season 16-5 with a 3.06 ERA. Heading into 2024 my guy was Seth Lugo who ended the season 16-9 with a 3.00 ERA and 22 quality starts. Both had low ADP heading into opening day. The draft diamonds are there, you just have to know where to look.

For me, when spotting “sleepers” on the pitching side I look for guys who made changes to their pitching arsenal, who have seen velocity changes, previously successful guys coming back from injury, and guys now pitching in either more pitcher-friendly parks or who’ve moved to more pitcher-friendly teams on the development side of things. It’s a lot of different qualifiers, but in casting a wider net you can get yourself a wider player base to focus on and then whittle down to find the best options.

Keeping these things in mind, let’s dive in and see who you should be keeping your eye on this draft season.

Spencer Arrighetti - Hou

2024 Stats: 7 Wins | 171 Strikeouts | 4.53 ERA | 1.41 WHIP

I am not sure if there is a player in baseball that had such a drastic difference in their first and second-half numbers last year. At least as a pitcher. In the second half of the 2024 season Arrighetti dazzled and put his name firmly in the “Is he about to be that guy next season?” conversation. So to see him currently being selected as the 85th pitcher off the board and 218th overall is both surprising and exciting.

Starting with his start on July 7th, Arrighetti was damn near lights out through the end of the year. He saw vast improvements in almost every statistical category across the board.

• 76 IP

• 91 Strikeouts

• 3.08 ERA

• 3.57 xFIP

• 20.7% K-BB%

• 1.18 WHIP

That improvement wasn’t just dumb luck either. A lot of it had to do with some slight pitch mix changes Arrighetti made at the beginning of July. The first was dropping his usage of that god-awful fastball. It had a .303 batting average and a .528 slugging percentage against last season. From July on he dropped the usage to below 40%, thank god.

The second thing he did was pair his arsenal down in general. At the beginning of July, he had five different pitches he was throwing 11.6% of the time or more. From July on that number dropped to just three. He upped both his cutter and curveball usage and saw his dominance on the mound grow with it.

He has the general “stuff” to be a good pitcher at the major league level. In what would be considered the “second half” of the baseball season, Arrighetti had a 22% K-BB rate. Amongst starting pitchers who threw at least 50 innings in that second half, that 22% was the 12th best in all of baseball. Houston doesn’t necessarily have the best track record at developing young starting pitching, but they may just have something cooking with Arrighetti and to get him after pick 200 feels like highway robbery at this point.

Bowden Francis - Tor

2024 Stats: 8 Wins | 92 Strikeouts | 3.30 ERA | 0.93 WHIP

What Francis did at the end of the 2024 season, going from a solid reliever for the Blue Jays to one of the most unhittable starters in baseball, needs to be studied. Technically I guess that’s what this portion of the article I’m writing is. But I mean in general, it was so damn good that I think it needs a lot more attention than it’s currently getting.

2024 was the year of the splitter. So many pitchers worked on adding a split-finger into their arsenal to what amounted to a mixed bag of results. Bowden is one of the few who saw tremendous success with the pitch. That success really came to fruition the minute he took over as a starter during the final days of July.

In his transition from reliever to starter, Bowden thought it a good idea to up his splitter usage by 10%, drop his curveball usage by 20%, and turn himself essentially into a fastball/splitter guy with good enough secondary pitches to mix in and get outs. Combine those things with his elite almost seven feet of extension and you get a pitcher who’s really really hard to hit. The success he saw from doing so speaks volumes. He made nine starts down the home stretch of the season and they may have been the most electric nine starts you can imagine.

• 4-2

• 59 IP

• 56 Strikeouts

• 1.53 ERA

• 0.53 WHIP

• 23.2% K-BB Rate

• 33.6% Hard Hit Rate

When I said they were electric, I meant electric. In those nine starts, he managed four starts of at least seven innings and only one or fewer hits allowed. He had just a 3.3% walk rate, and hitters managed just a .121 batting average against. While many of these numbers are exciting, he does have some underlying numbers that do point to some regression. Mainly his 99.2% left on base rate. No pitcher in their right mind will ever manage a number that high for more than just a few starts. Because of that, his 3.72 xFIP points to a number closer to what you can expect over a full season.

When you’re drafting a pitcher outside the top 200, you should be more than happy with a guy carrying a 3.72 xFIP. Especially when said pitcher put together all those other numbers while utilizing a pitch he just learned prior to last season. Now with an entire season and now offseason under his belt with the splitter, it’s not crazy to think Francis may up his usage with it even more in 2025 and if so he could be this season’s 2024 Bryce Miller.

Taj Bradley - TBR

2024 Stats: 8 Wins | 154 Strikeouts | 4.11 ERA | 1.22 WHIP

I really wanted to add Taj Bradley to this list and he almost didn’t make it. He didn’t necessarily end on a good note. There are plenty of statistical indicators that point to him really struggling. And I was racking my brain trying to figure out what it is that makes me like him so much. What it is that has me feeling so hopeful for Bradley in 2025? And then I found it.

Bradley had a season that really is the tale of two starters. The starter he was from June 8th through July 25th is a completely different person than the starter we saw from the 31st on.

• ERA - 0.82 | 6.51

• WHIP - 0.89 | 1.54

• K% - 30.8% | 22.4%

• Batting Average Against - .161 | .288

I will admit it took me a while to put my finger on just what happened to Bradley to make the wheels fall off like that. What I believe it all comes down to is the fact that he started to overthrow his splitter. Not in a sense that he was throwing it too much, but in a sense that he was overthrowing it every time it came out of his hand. Because of that, his numbers imploded in August and he couldn’t recover by season’s end.

For the entire year, Bradley’s splitter was dominant. It had a .213 BAA, .194 xBA, and .280 xSLG. The kind of results you look for in a pitcher’s most used secondary pitch. But that month of August I mentioned was an absolute doozy. He threw the splitter 117 times and it had a .483 BAA, .401 xBA, .759 SLG, and .532 xSLG. No other month saw his splitter have an xBA above .210 or an xSLG above .377 both of which were in August.

(Full season splitter data)

(August splitter data)

Looking at the numbers you can see he was clearly putting a little extra mustard behind his splitters in August. Velocity is up about half a mile an hour, IVB and arm side break both up a considerable amount. It seems as though that extra bit he was putting behind it may have had a hand in making it a bit more uncontrollable leaving it much too hittable at times. While it is a small sample amid a much bigger season, that small sample just so happened to be so bad that it made him unrosterable down the final stretch of the season and tanked his season-long numbers.

Tampa Bay is excellent at getting the most out of their starters and I fully expect them to get Bradley back on track for 2025. That should mean a potential top-30 starting pitcher finish for the young right-hander currently going at pick 191.