How to Exploit Loopholes in Fantasy Baseball Pitcher Rules

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  • By Nathan Baker

    Last Updated on December 16, 2025 1:26 pm by Paul Williamson | Published: December 16, 2025

    Every fantasy baseball format has exploitable quirks that provide opportunity for players to seek an advantage, especially in leagues without strict limitations on transactions, appearances or starts. While acquiring good players at efficient values is the most fundamentally sure way to prosper in fantasy baseball, winning on the margins can often produce far more than marginal results, separating a good season from a championship season.

    In this article, I’ll be breaking down three strategies that can be used to exploit common gaps in league rules, all of which must originate from your draft strategy.

    Punting Pitchers

    If you are a commissioner, setting weekly start and transaction limits can eliminate this exploit, yet most leagues do not have one by default. Especially exploitable in points leagues, this strategy works by exclusively drafting hitters in the draft, up until the point where you’ve rostered enough hitters that you can only just fill out your available pitcher slots.

    With a roster stacked with offensive talent, and completely bereft of pitching, you will drop your entire starting staff every day, maybe bar one or two excellent pitchers, and pick up an entire slate of pitching streamers for that day. In points leagues, this is a virtually guaranteed method to win a title, although also a guaranteed method to piss off your league mates, but in categories leagues, the methodology is slightly more complicated.

    By neglecting the quality of your starting staff, you are effectively punting the ERA and WHIP categories on a week to week basis, leaving you with eight possible categories that you can win regularly. You’ll win wins and strikeouts every week, and you should have an extremely high chance of sweeping the offensive categories with regularity, making it a balancing act of when it is safe to neglect seeking wins and strikeouts and start hunting saves. On most weeks, you should win a minimum of six categories, and a maximum of eight, putting you in great shape to win any H2H categories league. While this can be done in roto categories leagues, I’d only advise it in a format where playoffs exist, as you cap your win rate at about 75%; more than enough to win every matchup in head to head leagues, but probably not enough to finish first in a roto league.

    Now what if your league has a transaction limit, but not the far less common start limit.

    Stacking Starters

    The draft strategy here is similar, in that you want to seek maximum quality for your hitters, thus dedicating the beginning of the draft to ensuring you have a top player at every offensive position. Once you’ve just filled out your starting lineup, you should focus on drafting exclusively pitchers, until the point where your league does not allow you to roster any more. In many formats, you are only required to keep as many hitters as you can start at once, which is the ideal way to run with this strategy.

    Your lineup will not change on a day-to-day basis, but your rotation will. You are sacrificing the ability to make matchup based decisions in your lineup, but those shouldn’t be necessary with a team full of fantasy baseball stalwarts on the offensive side. With pitching, you are going for quantity over quality, and only rotating out streamers for the worst starters in your rotation. This will still enable you to field significantly more starts per week than other players in your league, but it won’t give you the same guaranteed positive outcome as the prior method. Still, if you draft your hitters reasonably well, and maybe find one versatile backup to fill in on off days, you’ll give yourself a heavy advantage over the long run.

    In categories leagues, you aren’t punting ERA and WHIP in this strategy, but you’ll still be operating at a disadvantage in those categories. Your roster flexibility will allow you to save your transactions for the last two or three days, and chase the categories that you’ve got a chance in, which is potentially more ideal for roto leagues, even without a start limit.

    Points leagues should all have transaction limits and start limits to avoid bad faith exploitation, but as with many things in life, there are no solutions, only trade offs.

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    December 16, 2025, 1:26 pm