We will continue to take a look at some players who are worth trading for in points leagues as trade deadlines loom closer and league standings begin to take shape. While many leagues don’t set their trade deadlines until July, it’s best to begin your shopping a little early to start seriously scouting the players you’re interested in targeting and to then beat your competition to the punch. Next week, we will get back to looking at some more hitters to target, which is where I think the majority of trade deadline focus should be. Since about half of starting pitchers end up on the injured list at some point in any given season, this strategy minimizes the risk of giving up major assets for a top-tier arm who then ends up a spectator from an IL slot during the fantasy playoffs.
Going after a just slightly-below-ace level pitcher (i.e., one generally not considered among the top 15 starting pitchers) could be worth the price, though, and the risk. Especially if you already went hitter-heavy in your draft and are more than happy with your offensive production, rounding out your rotation with one of these impending aces could be the key to unlocking your league’s 2025 title. The price for an ace like Tarik Skubal or Zack Wheeler, or even Max Fried or Carlos Rodón, given their cushy team situation, is likely to be unaffordable. It’s more productive to instead target one of the following pitchers performing at an ace-adjacent level, but who do not quite have household-name ace-level status quite yet.
2025 Stats: 3-5 W-L ; 2.87 ERA ; 1.14 WHIP ; 108 Strikeouts in 75.1 IP
It’s not exactly groundbreaking to include the current league-leader in strikeouts as a trade target, but this is mostly just to emphasis that the breakout that MacKenzie Gore has shown through the first two months of the 2025 season is legitimate, and that you shouldn’t be scared to go after him despite the diminished chances for wins that comes along with being a pitcher for the Washington Nationals. The 108 strikeouts that Gore has piled up so far in 75.1 IP are three more than reigning Cy-Young winner Tarik Skubal—and Gore has pitched eight fewer innings than Skubal, making his total even more impressive.
Gore’s four-seamer is the foundation of his arsenal, and for good reason. Thrown about 50% of the time, the pitch’s PLV score of 5.32 ranks in the 90th percentile among starting pitchers, and rarely is it thrown for a dud. Mistake %, or MTK%, is a Pitcher List metric that measures the rate at which a particular pitch is thrown in the zone while earning less than a 4.5 PLV — in other words, pitches that are not only strikes but, on paper, are also very poor quality pitches and therefore very punishable. This helps show which pitches a hurler is able to execute consistently without mixing in cookies. With an MTK% of only 2%, Gore’s four-seamer passes this particular test with flying colors, as based on this metric, he is executing his four-seamer well enough 98% of the time for the pitch to not be considered a mistake. Thanks to its average velocity of 95.4 MPH (77th percentile), Gore’s four-seamer is able to generate a SwStr% (Whiffs / total pitches) of 12.3% (79th percentile).
Complimenting the four-seamer are two plus off-speed pitches, a slider and a curveball, both of which have performed quite well in different ways:
MacKenzie Gore’s Slider Metrics
The curveball does a great job of keeping the ball on the ground, as indicated by its 83rd percentile grounder rate. Gore mixes in this pitch throughout counts to induce weak contact, and it works well. The slider, meanwhile, is typically reserved as a pure putaway pitch, with an insane SwStr% of 39.80% that makes it one of the more whiffable pitches in the game. With this quality of an arsenal it’s easy to see why Gore is finally truly breaking out, having honed in on his command a bit more this season than in previous years. His mechanics look as consistent as ever right now and he looks like a confident pitcher ready to take the next level into legit ace status. Given that his price is probably still slightly cheaper than some of the other premier aces in the game, Gore is my favorite arm to try and acquire for a second-half championship push.
2025 Stats: 5-4 W-L ; 2.14 ERA ; 0.87 WHIP ; 56 Strikeouts in 63 IP
To the frustration of both fantasy managers and Tampa Bay Rays fans, Drew Rasmussen has been on a pretty tight leash so far through the first two months of the 2025 season. Having undergone season-ending elbow surgery in July of 2023 to repair the UCL in his right (throwing) arm, Rasmussen returned in August of 2024 and was brought back very carefully and deliberately. He ended up throwing only 28.2 IP, mostly out of the bullpen, but it was to the tune of a 2.83 ERA and 35 strikeouts. That brief 2024 cameo was enough to remind people of the pitcher who snagged American League Pitcher of the Month in August of 2022, and whose career ERA had never surpassed 3.00.
Now a full-time starter again, Rasmussen has been pouring in great outing after great outing, with an impressive WHIP of 0.87 that ranks seventh among all starting pitchers. As hinted at earlier, the only complaint with his season so far has been the fact that more often than not, Rasmussen is being pulled after the fifth inning, and it’s become almost an inside joke/expectation among his managers that he will only go five innings in a given start. Even more frustrating is the fact that Rasmussen is often cruising through these outings, with a pitch count still in the 70s or low 80s, and minimal traffic on the base-paths, but Rays’ manager Kevin Cash still seems bound to the plan regardless. Without the added points benefit of a quality start being likely, this has left Rasmussen with little to no margin for error if you were looking for him to be a fantasy ace early in the season. Instead, with the training wheels still on, Rasmussen was performing more like a middle-rotation option, no matter how many clean innings he threw and how well his actual results looked on paper.
I would suggest that now is precisely the time to target Rasmussen, because there have been encouraging signs in the past few weeks that the leash, if not fully taken off, might at least be loosening.
The one discouraging thing about the above table is still the limited pitch counts. By far the most encouraging thing, though, is the fact that Rasmussen was allowed to complete six innings in three consecutive starts, coming away with scoreless victories in all of them. Crazily, he has not given up an earned run in almost a month (5/11/25 vs. Milwaukee) .
Rasmussen does most of his work with a four-seamer/cutter combination that devastates nearly all batters they see. Opponents are hitting only .205 against Rasmussen’s four-seamer, which has an extremely impressive PLV of 5.52 that places it in the 98th percentile. The cutter, while not grading out quite as highly on paper (PLV of 5.25, 69th percentile), has been even more effective, limiting opponents to a very non-threatening .152 average against. Rasmussen is not merely a two-pitch pitcher, though, as he mixes in sinkers, sweepers, and curveballs to keep hitters off balance and prevent them from sitting on either of his two main offerings. The sinker is thrown at about the same speed as the four-seamer (95 mph), making it extra deceptive despite a relatively weak PLV score.
With the training wheels (hopefully) in the process of being loosened, now is as good a time as ever to try and trade for Rasmussen.
2025 Stats: 4-4 W-L ; 3.24 ERA ; 1.05 WHIP ; 75 Strikeouts in 80.2 IP
Chris Sale is still the certified ace of the Atlanta Braves, and it’s understandable why that is—he’s the reigning Cy-Young winner after all, and his production has not slowed down much this season at age 36. Sale’s place atop the Braves’ rotation may not be safe past this season, though, as 25-year-old Spencer Schwellenbach seems to be putting it all together right before our eyes in his second season. On the heels of an impressive rookie campaign (8-7, 3.35 ERA, 1.05 WHIP and 127 strikeouts in 123.2 IP) that had him already pegged on many sleeper breakout candidate lists prior to this season, Schwellenbach so far has made good on those prognostications, and recently has been as sharp as ever, striking out 11 in back-to-back starts against the Padres on 5/25 and the Red Sox on 5/31. He completed the seventh inning in the start against the Padres, giving up only two runs, and his outing versus the Red Sox went for 6.1 scoreless innings.
Schwellenbach is showing many of the obvious signs that you want to see from a blossoming ace. His 80.1 innings pitched are seventh-most in the league, showing workhorse ability already at this early stage in his career. His four-seamer, the foundation for any proper ace, delivers the goods:
It simply doesn’t get much better than a CSW% of 37.7% on a four-seamer, and Schwellenbach’s been consistently delivering that type of performance with the pitch. His cutter that he uses 12% of the time could use some refinement (a batting average against of .346 suggests it is not currently a competitive pitch), but Schwellenbach also mixes in sliders, sinkers, splitters, and curveballs that all hold their own with above-average PLV scores and batting averages against.
There still might be a bump or two in the road in the rest of Schwellenbach’s season, as should be expected for a starter who has only notched 34 career starts thus far. His upside, though, makes him more than worth targeting as a worthy addition to your points league staff to improve your team down the stretch.
