SPECULATOR: Avoiding 2021's pitching landmines

Our quest to avoid landmines—an underappreciated yet critically important path to any fantasy title—forges on. Last week, we took lessons learned from Ketel Marte's 2020 bust to build a list of risky hitters going early in drafts. This week, we head to the mound.

Truthfully, it was tougher picking just one pitcher as the lessons-learned model for this exercise; the market was pretty good at avoiding true "busts" early in drafts. Using the NFBC's ADP data from July drafts, here were the starters going Top-75 overall (ADP) and how they fared (Rank) by season's end:

Pitcher            ADP  Rank*  Notes
=================  ===  =====  ============
Gerrit Cole          2      5
Jacob deGrom         7      7
Justin Verlander    10     --  DNP...

Almost!

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