2026 Position Previews: Relief Pitcher
A detailed look at relief pitcher for 2026 fantasy baseball leagues
Read the rest of the position previews series here.
Relief pitcher is unique among all of the fantasy baseball positions. It’s the last one I always do. That’s because it’s constantly changing with signings, trades, and injuries. It’s also because I don’t like getting into relievers. They throw 50-80 innings per year, so pretty much anything can happen.
RP strategy is league-dependent more than any other position. If your league uses holds, everything changes. If you’re in a points league, everything changes. What I’m not going to do is write three different versions of this for every possible league setup.
I think the best way I can help you is to give you general thoughts and then spend most of my time focusing on saves only leagues.
General Advice
If you’re an experienced fantasy baseball player, you don’t need me to tell you this stuff. Here’s some 101.
If you’re in a league where holds are just as valuable as saves, you can just chill out right away. Last year, there were 40% more holds (1,733) than saves (1,201).
Saves: 223 had one, 55 had 5+, 19 had 20+
Holds: 394 had one, 183 had 5+, 30 had 20+
Long story short, it’s very easy to pile up SV+HLDs, and therefore, you don’t need to spend a ton of draft capital on the category.
Pitchers projecting for 20+ holds to target cheap in your SV+HLD drafts:
Jeremiah Estrada (SD)
Tyler Rogers (NYY)
Alex Vesia (LAD)
AJ Minter (NYM)
Garrett Cleavinger (TB)
JoJo Romero (STL)
Bryan Abreu (HOU)
Matt Strahm (KC)
Matt Brash (SEA)
Hunter Gaddis (CLE)
Gabe Speier (SEA)
Jose Ferrer (SEA)
Fernando Cruz (NYY)
Garrett Whitlock (BOS)
Luke Weaver (NYM)
Tanner Scott (NYM)
There are many more to be found. Just use ATC projections or something to get you going! Actually, I did the work for you. Here you go.
Saves Leagues
My rankings will be based on the leagues where your main goal is to pile up saves.
First, let’s look at some teams to generally avoid this year. Here’s the breakdown of how many players got saves for each team last year:
The Diamondbacks set a record. I only checked this back to 1990, but things were way different before 2010 or so. We can confidently say that the Diamondbacks set an all-time MLB record with 17 different players converting a save last season.
Just for that short tweet, you can see how much different things have been these last six seasons. Every team above 12 different guys getting a save has come in these last six years.
So we’re spreading the saves around more than ever before. There are not very many strong bets for 30+ saves. The proper reaction is one side or the other, but probably some of both.
Pay up for saves since there are relatively few great bets
Pay down for saves cause they’re easier to find on waivers
Giving you two pieces of opposite advice, that’s next level.
But I’m on option #1. It’s true that you can find some saves on waivers at any given time. You can find somebody to get you one or two per week. But that doesn’t mean you can find someone to pick up in May who will rip off 20 saves the rest of the way. When the main guy loses his job to injury or performance, the most common fill-in for him is a smattering of guys.
I don’t want to be the first guy to take a closer in my leagues. Don’t start the run. But get in as soon as the run starts.
What Stats to Look For
It’s pretty simple with closers. We want strikeouts, and we don’t want home runs. Walks are a big deal with starters; not so much with relievers. These guys will mostly have super high strikeout rates, and a walk is not a problem if you strike the next couple guys out.
This is the one place where I’m actually tempted to look at Stuff+. That stat gives you a good idea of how many strikeouts a dude can get, and that’s by far the most important thing with a reliever. We also have less data to look at with relievers, so we find ourselves looking at small sample sizes way more often here, which is another thing that makes Stuff+ useful.
But if you have 50+ innings from a guy over the last couple of seasons, you’ll be fine just checking his K% and making sure it doesn’t come with some out-of-control walk rate. Ground ball rates are a bonus, but not nearly as important. That’s what we’ll be focusing on as we go through these tiers.
Tier One
I’ll keep the tiers large for this bad boy. In my opinion, we have six clear stud closers with no questions about their job security on winning teams.
Relief pitchers aren’t a part of my team previews series, as you may have noticed, and I don’t spend much time analyzing them. So I’m leaning on he high stakes drafters for this one. Although, I did have to boost Devin Williams up the list because I like him more than the average person seems to. We should be completely ignoring last year’s ERA. ERAs are always weird and subject variance, but it’s even more so when you’re talking about 70 innings worth of work in a given year. Throw out Williams’ result last year. Look at the 27% K-BB%, 18.9% SwStr%, and 45% GB%. He’s a tier one stud on a team that should win a bunch of games.
Here are the sub-tiers if we must:
1.1
Edwin Diaz
Mason Miller
1.2
Jhoan Duran
Andres Munoz
Cade Smith
1.3
Devin Williams
My target is Williams. He’s very often the 8th or 9th closer off the board. I love that idea.
Tier Two
Aroldis Chapman
David Bednar
The Red Sox and Yankees closers are near the top of the board this year, but I’m pushing them down into their own tier below the big boys. David Bednar has been inconsistent in his recent career (although not last year while he was on the Yankees, and he’s clearly the closer for them), and Aroldis Chapman wasn’t anywhere near here in previous years. His crazy breakout with the Sox last year push him up here. And that’s fine, but how can you draft him as confidently as you can Edwin Diaz, Mason Miller, etc.? You can’t, don’t be silly. But if he’s even 75% as good as he was last year, he’ll get a bunch of saves.
!!FIRST CLIFF HERE!! If you’re in a saves-only league (no holds), get one of these eight guys! Maybe even get two of them!
Tier Three
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