The 2025 MLB season is right around the corner, officially starting on March 18th in Japan, with the season beginning in earnest on March 27th. That means fantasy baseball drafts are also right around the corner, so it’s time to think about the most important question of the season: who should you target in the draft? Fortunately there is a mature and competitive industry of fantasy baseball experts offering draft rankings to guide us. But whose rankings should you listen to? That’s what we aim to answer with this accuracy study. Today we will look at which experts submitted the most accurate draft rankings in 2024, to help us decide whose rankings to watch this year.

Methodology

Before we get to the results, we need to sort out what precisely we mean when we say rankings are “accurate.” You can find all the details on how we measure accuracy in our methodology article. This has four main steps:

1. Rank the player performances: To judge the accuracy of rankings, we need “actual” ranks to compare them against. Since most fantasy baseball leagues don’t use fantasy points, we don’t have a free way of ranking player performance like we do for football. Instead we rank players according to their recorded stats in the standard 5×5 categories – HR, R, RBI, SB and AVG for hitters, and K, ERA, WHIP, SV and W for pitchers. We do this using VBR, which converts each stat to a z-score. The z-score represents how much better or worse a stat was than the league average, in terms of standard deviations. This contextualizes each stat within the league, and puts the various stats on the same scale so that we can soundly combine them into a single score.
2. Determine the player pool: We want to include every player who is relevant in a typical 12-team fantasy league, with room for breakout players and surprise busts. But we don’t want to cast so wide a net as to include players that aren’t actually fantasy-relevant. So for each position we decide a rank cutoff, and include any players who were within that cutoff according to preseason ECR, or according to final results. This ensures we include any players that had high preseason expectations but fell off, and players that broke out during the season. This also means the size of the player pool for each position can vary slightly. For example we took the top 20 first basemen according to draft ECR and top 20 according to final results, which included 23 unique players in 2024.
3. Score the experts’ predictions: To judge an expert’s rank for a given player, we compare that player’s actual VBR to the VBR of the rank the expert predicted, and subtract to get the difference. This gives us an “error” for that player. To rate an expert’s rankings for a position, we accumulate all the player-level errors across the player pool, and get a lower-is-better measure of expert accuracy.
4. Rank the experts: We assess the accuracy of experts at each position, and for overall accuracy we add together the positional scores. We don’t apply any extra weighting to the positional scores. This means each player has equal impact, and the relative importance of each position is proportional to the number of players of each position in the player pool.

Overall 2024 Accuracy Standings

We had 44 different experts qualify for the 2024 draft rankings accuracy competition. Without further ado, here are your top 10 winners:

See the full field of experts (44 total) | Combine top experts into consensus rankings

Congratulations to Greg Smith for taking home 1st place! This is Smith’s first time at the very top, but he’s no stranger to success. This represents his fourth straight top-10 appearance, including a #2 result in 2021. In addition to winning overall, Smith earned the distinction of being the most accurate expert at each of the two most important positions – Outfield and Starting Pitchers. This is an extremely rare feat – it’s only the second time an expert has ranked #1 at two different positions since we started tracking accuracy in 2016. Add to that top-5 finishes at 3B, SS and RB and you have an extremely impressive result of top-5 in five different positions. No other expert reached the top 10 in more than four different positions.

Our second place winner is Grey Albright, founder of Razzball! His name should be familiar if you read this article last year, because he was the winner! This year adds a third excellent result to Albright’s resume, with last year’s win and a strong 11th place finish in 2020. This year he achieved the top 10 at four different positions – C, 2B, SP and RP – as well as narrowly missing at 11th for both 3B and SS. Albright has the highest floor of any expert this year – this 21st-place finish at 1B is the best for any expert’s weakest position.

Third place goes to FantasyPros‘ own Mike Maher! Maher has an excellent streak going – this is his third consecutive year in the top 5 overall. Maher has never finished worse than the previous year, so expectations are sky high for 2025. He earned a top-10 finish at four different positions – 2B, 3B, SP and RP – meaning he joins his podium-mates among just four experts to reach the top 10 for both SP and RP.

Top Experts By Position

In addition to the overall leaderboard, we like to recognize experts who absolutely nail individual positions. Here are your #1 experts for each position:

This wraps up our review of 2024 Fantasy Baseball Draft Rankings accuracy. Happy drafting!

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Jacob Herlin is a Data Scientist for FantasyPros. You can find him on Bluesky @jacobherlin.bsky.social