All-Bust Fantasy Team: Starting Pitchers

With the regular season in the rearview mirror, it's time for a look back. We've examined the position players, starting pitchers and relief pitchers who provided the most value relative to their draft slot. Last week, we looked at position players who were drafted early but disappointed. This week, it's time to review the starting pitching busts. I'll be using RotoWire's preseason ADP numbers and earned auction values.

Disclaimer: I will avoid listing the players that suffered catastrophic injuries. Obviously, Ronald Acuna and Spencer Strider were huge busts for fantasy purposes, and injury risk is something you weigh during draft season. However, there's little to dissect in terms of what went wrong for those guys.

Starting Pitchers

Kevin Gausman, Toronto Blue Jays

ADP: 34.41, 4th among starting pitchers
EAV: 40th among starting pitchers

Gausman wasn't bad this season. If you drafted him, you probably kept him in your starting lineup each week. However, as you can see from the numbers above, he was undoubtedly a disappointment relative to where he was selected. To discover why, you really don't need to look any further than the strikeouts category. In 2023, Gausman led the American League with 237 strikeouts. In 2024, he struck out just 162 batters over only four fewer innings. In 2022, Gausman had an AL-best 7.32 K:BB ratio. In 2024, his K:BB was just 2.89. Was a shoulder injury that cropped up during spring training to blame? Gausman made 31 starts, but his four-seamer velocity was down nearly one mph and was inconsistent from start to start. We also saw the whiff rate on his splitter drop nearly 10 percentage points down to a career-low 33.5 percent. There were still flashes of Gausman's old, dominant self. He authored the second and third complete games of his career and his first-ever shutout. He also collected a trio of double-digit strikeout games. Gausman will turn 34 in January, however, so it's possible his stuff is just starting to diminish.

Luis Castillo, Seattle Mariners

ADP: 32.46, 5th among starting pitchers
EAV: 39th among starting pitchers

Castillo falls into the same bucket as Gausman in that he was a perfectly fine fantasy starter in 2024 but clearly fell short of expectations. It's crazy how much Castillo has evolved over the years. During his time with the Reds, he was a changeup-heavy, groundball pitcher. The changeup was an excellent pitch and his most-used offering each of his last three full seasons in Cincinnati. However, the changeup has lost its effectiveness in recent years, and for the second straight season it was Castillo's fourth-most used offering. He's now a four-seamer/slider guy and more of a flyball pitcher or, at the very least, neutral. The shift has been a favorable one on the whole (especially when considering the ballpark switch), with Castillo giving up more hard contact and home runs but also greatly improving his control. His strikeouts have also been up a tick in Seattle (26.1 percent to 26.4 percent), but in 2024 that rate fell to 24.3 percent. It would seem that his four-seamer was most responsible for this downturn, as Castillo sported a career-low 95.6 mph velocity and a 27.3 percent whiff rate with the pitch, its lowest since 2018. Because he's throwing fewer changeups, Castillo is also now much more gettable for left-handed batters, with lefties posting an .846 OPS with 18 homers last season (versus a .576 OPS and seven homers against righties). Ultimately, my concern level with Castillo is low. If he can regain a little pep on his heater in 2025, he could easily go from being an above-average starter back to a borderline elite one.
 

Zac Gallen, Arizona Diamondbacks

ADP: 37.83, 6th among starting pitchers
EAV: 42nd among starting pitchers

Between the regular and postseason, Gallen wound up logging 243.2 innings in 2023. That alone was enough to have some concern with him heading into 2024, but you can see from his ADP above that the worry wasn't widespread. Gallen finished with only 148 frames in 2024, thanks mostly due to recurring hamstring issues which forced multiple early exits and a trip to the injured list. We also saw the right-hander's walk rate balloon to 8.7 percent, which included a 10.3 percent walk rate over the final three months of the season. Gallen did have some control problems earlier in his career, but from 2022-23 his walk rate was just six percent. The regression with his four-seamer might have been Gallen's biggest undoing, though. The pitch garnered a plus-27 Run Value in 2023, which ranked behind only Gerrit Cole. In 2024 the pitch had a minus-2 Run Value. When your most-used pitch goes from being elite to below-average, that's obviously not great. The velocity and spin on Gallen's four-seamer was virtually identical from the year before, so I'm not sure what, if anything, we can read into it. We'll have to wait and see where Gallen's draft day cost winds up, but I suspect his downturn in performance in 2024 will push his ADP for 2025 to where it probably belonged in the first place.

Jesus Luzardo, Miami Marlins

ADP: 79.44, 20th among starting pitchers
EAV: 145th among starting pitchers

Yes, injuries were a main reason for Luzardo's downfall this season. He missed three weeks of action during the first half with an elbow issue and then didn't pitch after June 16 because of a lumbar stress reaction. However, Luzardo's campaign was shaping up to be a clunker even before taking injuries into account. After putting up a 28.8 percent strikeout rate during the previous two seasons with the Marlins, the left-hander managed just a 21.2 percent mark in 2024, which was more than a full percentage point below league average. In what has become a bit of a theme in this article, Luzardo's struggles can be traced back at least in part to an underperforming four-seamer. The pitch graded out with a plus-15 Run Value in 2023 but fell to minus-1 in 2024 and its velocity was also down 1.5 mph. The whiff rate on the offering dipped, as well, from 19.4 percent down to 11.1 percent. Luzardo still had a whiff rate of better than 40 percent on both his slider and changeup and the xwOBA on those pitches was nearly identical to 2023. His health status remains cloudy, but Luzardo is still just 27 and could bounce back in 2025 if he can rediscover that heater.

Bobby Miller, Los Angeles Dodgers

ADP: 77.23, 23rd among starting pitchers
EAV: 225th among starting pitchers

As a 25-year-old former top prospect coming off a terrific rookie season, Miller's flop in 2024 was rather shocking. Miller fanned 11 over six shutout innings in his first start of the season, but he struggled in each of his next two outings and then went on the injured list with a shoulder problem. That cost him more than two months of action, and after returning he authored just one quality start in 10 tries the rest of the way (and that was a bare minimum six-inning, three-run effort). The end result was an 8.52 ERA (which was easily the worst among pitchers with at least 50 innings) and a 1.77 WHIP (better than only Justin Lawrence's 1.78 WHIP among that same group). The velocity on Miller's four-seamer was down 1.4 mph from the previous year and it got absolutely obliterated with a .461 xwOBA and 93.9 mph exit velocity. A .523 xwOBA on his sinker was even worse, and a .377 xwOBA on his curveball and .356 xwOBA on his slider were also poor. Only Miller's changeup with a .196 xwOBA yielded positive results among his five pitches. And yet, Miller's 113 Stuff+ was still well above average. The problem was a Location+ of 93, which ranked 343rd among 351 pitchers that accrued 50 innings. I'm not sure what caused Miller's command to completely tank. Maybe it was the shoulder issue. That his stuff was still good was heartening, though, and, if healthy, a rebound in 2025 is certainly possible.

Runners-up: Walker Buehler, Los Angeles Dodgers; Chris Bassitt, Toronto Blue Jays; Justin Verlander, Houston Astros; Jordan Montgomery, Arizona Diamondbacks; Mitch Keller, Pittsburgh Pirates