Most Accurate Fantasy Baseball Rankings Experts (2025 Results)

Pitchers and catchers reported to MLB spring training this week, and the Super Bowl is behind us, meaning it’s officially time for baseball, and more importantly, fantasy baseball. The first step toward winning your league is developing a solid plan for your fantasy baseball draft. The foundation of a good draft strategy is a solid set of fantasy baseball rankings or projections to use as your starting point for player evaluation. Last week we went over 2025’s Most Accurate Fantasy Baseball Projections, and now it’s time to see who produced the most accurate fantasy baseball rankings last year, and thus deserves consideration for your fantasy baseball cheat sheet this year.

Most Accurate Fantasy Baseball Rankings

Here’s a look at our accuracy methodology, along with which experts had the most accurate fantasy baseball rankings of 2025.

Methodology

It’s worth understanding what we mean when we say one set of rankings is more accurate than another. You can find the full detail on our accuracy methodology here. I’ll give you the short-ish version. We measure rankings accuracy in four steps:

1. Rank the player performances: To judge rankings we need results to compare them too. Most baseball leagues don’t use fantasy points, so it’s not quite as simple as that. We rank players using VBR with their results in the standard 5×5 categories: HR, R, RBI, SB and AVG for hitters, and K, ERA, WHIP, SV and W for pitchers. That means we put each stat on the same scale by converting them to z-scores, representing how much better or worse the result is than the average player. Then we apply Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) logic to convert the scores from above/below average to above/below a replacement-level baseline.
2. Lock in the player pool: The MLB is much bigger than a typical fantasy league. There are many MLB players who are simply irrelevant to most fantasy leagues, so it would be silly to include them all. To determine the player pool, we set a rank cutoff for each position. There are two ways for a player to qualify to be included in accuracy: if his preseason ECR is above the cutoff rank, or if his actual finish (VBR rank) at the end of the season is above the cutoff rank. This means the size of the player pool for each position can vary from year-to-year based on how much those categories overlap. For example we take the top-20 first basemen by either standard. This year there were 2 players ranked as top-20 in the preseason who finished outside the cutoff, and 2 players who were ranked outside the top 20 but finished in the top 20, leading to a total of 24 first basemen.
3. Score the rankings: To score an expert’s rank for a player, we interpret the rank as a VBR prediction, and compare that to the player’s actual VBR. We subtract those to get a lower-is-better “error” for that player. An expert’s score for a position is the sum of all their errors for the players in the player pool.
4. Rank the experts: At this point, each expert has an error score for each position. For positional accuracy, we simply rank according to these error scores. For overall accuracy, we add together an expert’s scores for each position, and base the leaderboard on that. This means each player has equal impact on accuracy, and the relative importance of each position is determined by the size of the player pool for that position.

2025 Most Accurate Fantasy Baseball Rankings Experts

We had 41 experts qualify by submitting draft rankings for all positions in 2025. Here are the top-10 most accurate!

See the full field of experts (41 total) | Combine top experts into consensus rankings

A huge congratulations is in order for Ariel Cohen of Fangraphs, your draft rankings accuracy winner for 2025! If you follow our projections accuracy competitions his name should be very familiar. Cohen is the creator of ATC Projections, which have absolutely dominated our projections accuracy contests. ATC has claimed the #1 spot in 5 of the 7 years we’ve measured projection accuracy, and fell all the way to 2nd place the other two years. It is not unusual for projection experts to succeed at rankings too, and Ariel is living proof. This is his third top-10 finish for rankings and second time claiming the #1 spot (he won the competition in 2019). Whether it’s rankings or projections, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more reliable source of advice than Ariel Cohen.

Our second-place winner is Joe Bond, founder of Fantasy Six Pack! Joe, and industry veteran, has been on a real tear lately. This is his fourth top-10 result in the last five years of this competition (actually top-8, to be specific), and 15th place in 2019 and 2020 is not too shabby either. It’s reasonable to question why we should care about last year’s results when planning for this year – what if it’s just luck? But Joe is proof that excellence is sustainable and predictable. The fact that’s he’s done well so consistently inspires a lot of confidence in his rankings for this year.

And the bronze goes to Jody Smith of Draft Sharks! Jody has reached the podium in just his fourth year submitting baseball rankings. This achievement adds some nice baseball-flavored flair to a resume packed with NFL success. He achieved 2nd place in our 2024 NFL draft rankings accuracy competition, and another top-10 finish in 2021. He also has a 6-year streak going of finishing in the top 20 for NFL weekly rankings accuracy, a competition that regularly has 150+ participants.

Top Experts by Position

Overall accuracy is important, but so too is recognizing experts who absolutely nailed each position. Here are your #1 most accurate experts for positional rankings!

This concludes the results of our 2025 Fantasy Baseball Draft Rankings Accuracy competition. Happy drafting!

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