Buy low on pitchers Brandon Pfaadt, Sonny Gray, others after second-half swoons in fantasy baseball?

New York Times

12-03-2025

In the major leagues, pitchers can have a rough second half of the season due to bad luck, fatigue, or a deeper issue. But when they do, their downturn allows you to buy the dip. Here, I will look at five pitchers who were performing below their standards the last time we saw them in MLB games and investigate what we should expect going forward.
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Take a glance at Pfaadt's stats, and it's easy to say he's compelling but hasn't figured it out yet. He gave up too many home runs and didn't have enough strikeouts. A second-half ERA just barely under 6.00 (!) drives that point home. If he was turning a corner, shouldn't we see it in the results?
The answer is yes, and we are.
His second half K-BB% of 22.1% was 11th among pitchers who threw at least 50 innings. And yet his ERA was multiples higher than everyone around him on that leaderboard. Why? Take one look at the 'luck' stats. His BABIP was .368, which contributed to a strand rate of 57.3%. Someone has to be the unluckiest pitcher of the year, and in 2024, it was Pfaadt.
Let's use SIERA, which incorporates strikeout, walk, and batted ball data to give an ERA estimate as a soundness check. That estimator says he deserved a second-half ERA of 3.30, which is slightly more desirable than his figure of 5.93.
Here's the full-year picture:
One of these things is not like the others.
Other than offering a K per inning, Pfaadt has never been a fantasy value, and many drafters will ignore him for now. Get him while he's cheap and grow Pfaadt on the profits.
Do you know those signs in small towns that point in 10 different directions? Gray's numbers are like that.
From a passing glance, he looks like he's settling into the latter stages of his career, where he'll put up mid-4 ERAs until no one feels like paying him to do that. What else is there to make of a second half where he gave up a .475 slugging?
Well, under the surface, Gray was an ace. Seriously.
His second-half K-BB% was 24.6%, eighth among pitchers who threw at least 50 innings and just ahead of Paul Skenes. The two pitchers' BABIPs were similar, too. Skenes stranded more runners, but not nearly enough to explain the massive difference in results. So what does? Gray gave up 1.76 HR/9 versus 0.41 for the Pirates.
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Gray was basically Skenes at home. In St. Louis, for the full year, Gray paired his excellent strikeout and walk rates with a 0.48 HR/9, leading to a 2.79 ERA. His other stats stayed the same when he ventured elsewhere, but his home run rate quadrupled to 1.98. I know we're getting granular here, but it gets wackier. His home run rate against lefties was elevated on the road, but not by much. Against righties …
Busch Stadium is tough on righty homers, but not that tough — it's 23rd among the 30 parks in how easy it is for righties to hit it out. Gray doesn't have significant home/road splits in his career, so expect major regression for both stats, but the road rate should travel further. His 2024 ERA was his worst since he left Cincinnati, but his SIERA was the best of his career. Similarly, his Stuff+ was a meh 95, but his Pitching+ was a strong 105.
As Gray ages, his four-seamer gets worse, but his sweeper is still elite, and his sinker is excellent. Below the surface stats, I see a veteran still tinkering and figuring out what works. That led to career bests in swinging strike rate, K%, BB% and SIERA.
How many of you knew Sonny Gray had a 30.3% strikeout rate last year?
The projections dial him back to around 25% but give him some positive regression to a mid-3s ERA. If you can pay for that, you can profit on the upside that the homer rates will normalize while the core process stats remain elite.
Kirby will open the season on the IL, but his MRI apparently showed no structural issues, just inflammation, so we can be optimistic that this absence will be measured in weeks, not months.
What should we expect from the game's premier control artist when he returns?
At first glance, Kirby's second half looked unremarkable. His BABIP rose 16 points, and his ERA increased by 0.63, but he still kept it under 4.00. Small sample fluctuations, right?
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Perhaps, but Kirby did seem to suffer some degradation in his underlying quality as the season went on. He allowed more in-zone contact and hard hits as the season went on, leading to a 4-point drop in K% in the second half, and a rise in SLG% allowed from .364 to .438. He wasn't bad, exactly, but he wasn't a great value either.
His velocity and spin rates held steady throughout the year, so there wasn't an obvious injury. Eno Sarris theorized he may have become too predictable, which fits the narrative of batters making more and better contact despite comparable stuff.
That all feels fixable, but it might take a little tinkering, and now he doesn't have the spring to play with. I like Kirby a lot in the long term, and a great 2025 is still in his range of outcomes, but for now, I'm knocking him down to back-end SP2 territory.
Bradley is one of those pitchers who will have some stellar seasons, but he needs to unlock a new level first. That might mean adding a pitch or changing how he uses his existing arsenal.
His 2024 campaign showed both sides of what he's capable of. In the first half, he was one of the league's top pitchers, with a 30.5% K rate backing a 2.90 ERA. In the second half, hitters started teeing off on his four-seamer, and his ERA nearly doubled to 5.30, while the strikeouts dropped to 23.1%.
Where I see room for optimism is in how exactly those wheels came off. Bradley had a disastrous seven-start run from the end of July through August. His pitches were less effective in August, but the big culprit was his split-fingered fastball, which had given up a slugging percentage around .200 until then, before ballooning to .759. He began to right the ship at the end of the year.
A lot of pitchers look like aces if you magic away their worst month, but Taj's disastrous August looks more discrete and fixable than the wobbles you'll see from pitchers with lesser stuff. That doesn't mean it won't happen again, nor can we be sure the Rays won't monkey around with his innings, but the ceiling here is still very high.
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Eovaldi's second half looks like ordinary bad luck — higher BABIP, lower LOB%, slightly better K-BB%. The xFIP and 3.64 SIERA back up that narrative.
The thing is, he does this every year now. In 2023, his first half ERA was a stellar 2.83. Then, he got hurt and came back for 20.1 disastrous innings in September. The year before was similar, with a strong start, followed by injuries and mixed results. It's hard to find any particular pattern except that he seems to wear down at some point in the summer.
Last year, hitters swung more at pitches in the zone and hit the ball harder as the year went on, suggesting his stuff, predictability, or both were going in the wrong direction.
Eovaldi is still a good pitcher; you can reasonably say he was unlucky last year. However, if you get two or three good months out of him, I'd see what you can get for him in a trade.
(Top photo of Brandon Pfaadt: Tim Warner / Getty Images)