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Fantasy baseball pitchers THE BAT identifies as top values

Lance McCullers profiles as a value draft pick as he makes his return from Tommy John surgery. Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports

Earlier this week I talked about all the best hitter values and how fantasy players are prone to overhyping young players like Luis Robert and Fernando Tatis Jr. (If I wasn't clear then: I'll pass so, so hard on these guys.) Drafting players like these usually involves horrible process, but for some reason the average draft positions of their pitcher counterparts don't get overinflated in the same way. In fact, some of the absolute best values on the pitching side this year are the kinds of sexy rookies that everyone wants to roster. So if you're being smart about things, take your upside shots on these young arms, pass on the Robert types and then fill in your rotation with the same kinds of boring or overlooked values you're also getting on the hitting side.

Methodology: I've selected a dozen pitchers that my projection system, THE BAT, ranks higher than where they are being drafted in NFBC formats. They aren't listed in any particular order. I simply chose players I thought were interesting to write about and that spanned a wide range of ADPs and reasons for being undervalued. There are plenty of other values out there, and I listed a few more players you should be looking at near the bottom of this article. Keep in mind that every league is different, and any player can be snatched off the table at any time, but these are the pitchers you can reasonably expect to get strong value from based on where they are being selected on average.