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Sleepers and breakouts are all the rage during draft season, but knowing who to avoid can make your life much easier when staring at that never-ending list of names.
Busts are those players who fall short of expectations or are bad values relative to their draft season ADP. I will be going through the names and pulling out a few that could end up biting you in the butt. For this list, I've gone with CBS ADP as the baseline.
Without further ado, we should get into some starting pitcher bust candidates for the 2025 season.
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Jacob deGrom, Texas Rangers (CBS ADP: 44)
As much as it pains me to put him on here, I would be doing you a disservice if I did not at least mention Jacob deGrom. The two-time Cy Young Award winner has been one of the most divisive players in fantasy baseball for the past few seasons. DeGrom is the ultimate boom-or-bust case among starting pitchers, but you will have to decide if you want to pay the price.
The 36-year-old's ceiling is the best pitcher in baseball, but he has started just 20 games over the last three seasons. You would have to go back to 2019 to find the last season deGrom eclipsed 100 innings pitched. The superstar pitcher has been electric on the mound when healthy.
It took some tweaking, but here are the SIERA leaders for pitchers who have pitched at least 100 innings in the past three seasons.
DeGrom benefits from a smaller sample size than anyone else on the list, but his stats are still impressive. Despite the emergence of generational strikeout pitchers like Paul Skenes and Spencer Strider, deGrom still topped the list with the highest K% and K/9. DeGrom also had the lowest SIERA, FIP, xFIP, and BB/9 among that group of pitchers. So, his health is the only real reason to be wary of deGrom.
With shoulder, wrist, and elbow issues plaguing him for the past few years, the veteran pitcher's health is a major red flag for fantasy drafters to keep in mind. With a CBS ADP of 44, selecting deGrom in the first five rounds will not be for the weak. Add that he's coming off another major arm surgery, and I probably will not have him on many of my fantasy teams this year.
Ronel Blanco, Houston Astros (CBS ADP: 202)
Ronel Blanco had a stellar 2024 season, finishing with a 2.83 ERA across 167.1 innings. The 31-year-old's first season as a full-time starter could not have gone much better, but several stats suggest he will not approach those numbers in 2025.
Bryce Miller, Seattle Mariners (CBS ADP: 97)
This pick will probably rub some people the wrong way, but Bryce Miller's bust potential is worth discussing. The 26-year-old had a remarkable 2024 season, finishing with a 2.94 ERA in 180.1 innings of work. Miller's sophomore season in the Majors went smoother than his first, but his advanced stats suggest he was overperforming.
The Mariners righty finished the 2024 season with a 3.72 xERA, 3.58 FIP, and 3.85 xFIP. These stats suggest that Miller was lucky in the ERA department last year. Like Ronel Blanco, Miller also finished in the top five in both BAA and BABIP among qualified pitchers. The young pitcher relied on his defense to make plays outside the routine.
The pitchers with sustainable low BAA and BABIP numbers are typically the extreme groundball hurlers, but Miller had a GB% under 40% in 2024. Miller is an important name to mention in this bust conversation because his ADP is sitting around the 80s on most sites, placing him in the top 100 picks. Given what we know now, Miller is a pitcher I would like to avoid at his current ADP, but that is not to say he is a lost cause.
Tanner Bibee, Cleveland Guardians (CBS ADP: 92)
Robbie Ray, San Francisco Giants (CBS ADP: 157)
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