2026 Position Previews: Starting Pitcher, Part 4
Late Round Starting Pitcher Targets
View all position previews posts here.
There’s a link to my green, yellow, red grades at the bottom of this post. That will tell you quickly how I feel about each guy.
Green = Priorities/reaches
Yellow = Fine at the price
Red = avoiding unless they fall a ton
You’ll find the NFBC average auction values on there. I find those interesting just to see what the high-stakes guys are doing. But don’t use them as your target values in your own auction drafts, because the settings might not match.
I got to #80 in the last post. Around this time, it gets pretty tough to rank these guys. Let’s look at at least one more tier here, and then I’ll just talk about some of the late-round names I’m into.
81 - 93
These are mostly pitchers who I don’t think are very good, but they’re guys who have rotation spots locked down to start the year.
DECENT INNINGS EATERS
I don’t think they’ll help your ratios on balance, but they can make a bunch of starts without killing you.
Jose Soriano
Noah Cameron
Quinn Priester
Merrill Kelly
Mitch Keller
Yusei Kikuchi
Aaron Nola
Kikuchi is a guy who might kill you, I guess. The ERA could be very bad, but he pitched well enough in 2024 for us not to put him in the coffin yet.
Jose Soriano, Noah Cameron, and Quinn Priester are the targets here if you’re looking for relative safety with a little bit of upside. They all get ground balls and have some form of deception about them. I could see all of them giving you a surprisingly good ERA if they can get lucky. But the strikeouts really aren’t going to be anything special.
I’ve been too low on Merrill Kelly before, and maybe I’m doing that again this year. He gets a ton of mileage out of that changeup. But he’s very old and, even at his best, he wasn’t giving you much fantasy ceiling. So I think it could go south in a hurry for him this year. Same-ish story with Keller, Nola, and Kikuchi.
UPSIDE BETS
Bryce Miller
Joe Musgrove
Shane McClanahana
Hurston Waldrep
These would be the types I’d target late in smaller leagues where the replacement value is high. If McClanahan and Musgrove get back to full health and log 120+ innings, you’re profiting huge on the price this year. That is starting to seem basically impossible for McClanahan. We haven’t seen him in two years. It’s more likely with Musgrove, but he’s a command specialist, a 33-year-old coming off of TJ. Risky.
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