Early 2026 Fantasy Baseball Rankings: Top 40 at starting pitcher gives priority to biggest bat-missers

SPORTS TODAY

SPORTS TODAY How deep it is depends on how much grace you give to recent injury cases

Oct 25, 2025 at 1:06 am ET • 15 min read

Can we tell which starting pitchers are going to get injured? Do we have any sort of reliable metric for that?

Sure, past injury can be a predictor of future injury, but it’s not a particularly good one. We sometimes treat it as foolproof. Zack Wheeler Logan Gilbert and George Kirby were some of the safest bets to make it through the 2025 season unscathed, but they didn’t. Bryan Woo and Jacob deGrom were supposed to have no chance of remaining healthy, but they did.

The pitching motion is an unnatural one, and done with the repetition and force required to succeed at the major league level, it’s only a matter of time before injury is the result. So is predicting when and where one will arise a fool’s errand? Should we even bother to try?

Early rankings: C|1B|2B|3B|SS|OF|SP| RP

More and more, I’m beginning to doubt that. Surely, durability counts for something. A perpetual injury case like Tyler Glasnow can only be trusted to do so much, and there’s of course a big difference between a pitcher who goes 6-7 innings with regularity and one who never does. But when evaluating pitchers for a new season, effectiveness should be the primary and secondary consideration, with demerits for durability applied in only the most extreme cases.

With that, here’s my initial top 40 for 2026.

Note that the focus here is standard 5×5 scoring (such as Rotisserie leagues), but if you scroll a little further, you’ll see my rankings for points leagues.

Top 40 starting pitchers for 2026