5 Potential Fantasy Baseball Busts for 2025

Nailing your early picks and identifying the correct sleepers and breakout players in your draft can go a long way toward having a successful fantasy baseball season, but it's also just as important to avoid drafting those players who might not live up to expectations.

While every draft will inevitably have its share of misses, we can try to minimize them by pinpointing which players are more likely to bust, whether it's because they're a high injury risk, due for regression, and/or overhyped.

With that in mind, let's look at five players who could be potential busts in fantasy baseball this season. All average draft position (ADP) data will be from FantasyPros' consensus ADP.

Potential Fantasy Baseball Busts for 2025

Chris Sale, SP, Braves

FantasyPros' Consensus ADP: 35.0

If you drafted Chris Sale at his ADP last season (124.8), you got to enjoy quite the return on investment that resulted in him not only winning his first-ever Cy Young but also the NL Triple Crown by leading in wins (18), ERA (2.38), and strikeouts (225).

After a season like that, it isn't surprising he's going to cost a whole lot more than that to enlist his services this time around, and he's typically one of the first 10 pitchers drafted.

Maybe last year was the start of a late-career revival for Sale, but betting on lightning to strike twice feels awfully dicey when we're dealing with an oft-injured pitcher entering his age-36 campaign.

If we look at Sale's underlying numbers in 2024, he passed with flying colors pretty much across the board. He logged a 2.64 xFIP, 32.1% strikeout rate, and 5.6% walk rate, and his Baseball Savant page was littered with all those bright red bars we like to see. Even if we nitpick an abnormally low 6.3% HR/FB rate, adding some home runs to his tally wouldn't significantly worsened such a stellar season.

But as a player going in the third round or so who's likely to anchor your pitching staff, we also need to remember this is the same guy who suffered several minor to serious injuries (including Tommy John surgery) during his tenure with the Boston Red Sox, and the 177 2/3 innings he threw for the Atlanta Braves last season were his most since 2017.

And even near the end of 2024, Sale started to see a dip in velocity in September and made his final start on September 19th. He ultimately would to be left off the Braves' Wild Card roster due to a back injury, and the team would fail to advance.

Injuries are always impossible to predict, but are we really that confident that Sale can put up another top-10 season? That's essentially what his ADP is banking on, and taking that plunge feels like playing with fire.

Jose Altuve, 2B, Astros

FantasyPros' Consensus ADP: 44.6

Jose Altuve is fresh off another strong fantasy campaign and is once again one of the first second basemen being taken in drafts. However, this might be a situation where we want to be out a year too early rather than a year too late. Altuve will turn 35 years old in May, and there were signs of decline even last year despite producing a 20-20 season while batting .295.

For one thing, Altuve's plate skills have started to take a step back. While his 17.4% K rate was still above average, he isn't sniffing anything close to his career average anymore (12.8%), and his chase rate rose to an egregious 37.3% (6th percentile). This coincided with his walk rate dipping to 6.9%, his lowest mark in a decade.

Altuve has never measured especially well by Statcast quality of contact metrics, and last year's low marks in barrel rate (35th percentile), hard-hit rate (11th percentile), and average exit velocity (11th percentile) certainly don't alleviate any concerns. His .145 ISO was his lowest since the 2020 pandemic season, and his 20 home runs were more a product of reaching 682 plate appearances -- hardly a guaranteed repeat in his mid-30s.

Finally, his speed has been in decline, ranging between the 38th-44th percentile in sprint speed over the past two years.

All of this culminates in a profile that looks more shaky that last year's numbers would indicate, and his overall counting stats could also suffer from what should be a weaker Houston Astros lineup. Most projection systems on FanGraphs see Altuve's batting average dropping to the .260-.270 range, and when you throw in viable concerns about his power and speed, it's hard to justify drafting him inside the top 50.

Jacob deGrom, SP, Rangers

FantasyPros' Consensus ADP: 63.2

Jacob deGrom last made it through a whole season in 2020, which probably deserves an asterisk considering it required making just 12 starts due to the pandemic. Across the four years since that campaign, deGrom has made just 35 total starts and logged 197 1/3 innings due to injuries. That's not far off from the workload he put up in 2019 alone -- his last true full campaign -- when he made 32 starts and reached 204 innings. He underwent his second career Tommy John surgery in 2023 and will turn 37 years old in June.

And yet, despite all this, deGrom has a 63.2 ADP on FantasyPros and is being taken inside the top 50 on specific platforms. This has him as on average the 20th pitcher off the board, and he sometimes even goes just outside the top 10.

Admittedly, the allure is abundantly clear; his numbers have remained otherworldly when healthy. Over these last four injury-marred seasons, he's posted a 2.01 ERA and 0.68 WHIP that's backed by a 1.76 xFIP, 42.5% strikeout rate, and 3.3% walk rate. If something remotely close to that version of deGrom is still in there, even somewhere in the neighborhood of 110-130 innings -- as most projection systems are forecasting -- would make him worth this ADP.

But with both injury history and age not being on his side, this feels like a massive leap of faith to assume he can both stay on the field and still produce elite metrics.

Yes, the payoff could be great if everything aligns perfectly. However, the fact remains that we haven't seen him make more than 15 starts or crack 100 innings since 2019. The floor outcome is simply very low for a player getting picked in the fourth or fifth round.

Willy Adames, SS, Giants

FantasyPros' Consensus ADP: 70.0

Although Willy Adames is coming off a breakout 2024 campaign, his name is popping up on his fair share of bust lists this offseason.

That's because it's fair to wonder whether we can realistically expect him to duplicate last year's stat line.

Part of Adames' surge in value came from career-high 21 stolen bases, blowing his previous best out of the water (8). In fact, prior to 2024, he had 30 stolen bases across the prior six campaigns combined.

While recent rule changes have aided in a league-wide rise in stolen bases over the past two seasons, Adames stole just five bases in 2023, so his increased output could be more the result of an aggressive Milwaukee Brewers strategy that led to them to the second-most stolen bases in 2024. However, he signed with the San Francisco Giants this offseason, a team that just so happened to steal the second-fewest bases last season.

Add in that Adames has seen his sprint speed steadily drop since his debut in 2018 (83rd percentile) to 2024 (50th percentile), and it sure looks unlikely his new steals-averse team will be giving him the green light a ton.

Batting average could be an issue, too. While Adames bumped up his average to .251 last year, he hit just .228 from 2022-23, and he didn't demonstrate any noticeable 2024 improvements in strikeout rate (25.1%) or xBA (.243).

Power is the one area where we can feel reasonably comfortable -- he's hit between 24-32 home runs in each of the past four seasons -- but even in this instance, he could land on the lower end of this range. That's because the Giants' Oracle Park ranks 27th in home run park factor for righties, whereas American Family Field is 7th.

Unfortunately, this looks like a case where we're buying high on a career year that looks awfully hard for Adames to replicate in 2025.

Hunter Greene, SP, Reds

FantasyPros' Consensus ADP: 93.0

Hunter Greene had fantastic results last season but is a prime regression candidate.

After posting a 4.62 ERA and 1.31 WHIP over his first two MLB campaigns, Greene broke out for a 2.75 ERA and 1.02 WHIP in 2024 while achieving career-highs in innings (150 1/3), strikeouts (169), and wins (9).

However, most of his underlying metrics didn't reflect such a dramatic improvement. After posting a 30.7% strikeout rate from 2022-23, that mark dipped to 27.7% last year, and his walk rate stayed roughly the same (9.3%). Both his xFIP (4.19) and SIERA (3.81) in 2024 came in above his career averages, too.

Greene also appeared to benefit from good luck in BABIP (.237), strand rate (80.5%), and HR/FB rate (6.9%), as these were outliers compared to both career and league averages. In fact, among pitchers with at least 150 innings, he ranked inside the top five in all three metrics. While pitchers have some influence over these categories, regression is the most likely outcome for Greene.

Now, if there was one way Greene did see a massive improvement, it was the quality of contact he allowed. After being a launching pad for home runs previously, he finished 86th percentile or better in barrel rate, hard-hit rate, and average exit velocity. Although it's certainly possible some of this sticks, hitters have more control over quality of contact than pitchers, which makes it harder to predict whether this is something Greene can continue to maintain at a high level.

Further, the right-hander didn't see any dip in fly-ball rate (48.3%), meaning he's still at the mercy of Great American Ball Park owning the league's highest home run park factor.

Overall, there are just too many red flags to completely buy into last year's breakout, making Greene someone to consider avoiding at this ADP.

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The above author is a FanDuel employee and is not eligible to compete in public daily fantasy contests or place sports betting wagers on FanDuel. The advice provided by the author does not necessarily represent the views of FanDuel. Taking the author's advice will not guarantee a successful outcome. You should use your own judgment when participating in daily fantasy contests or placing sports wagers.