Which pitchers can benefit from ABS in fantasy baseball? | Baseball prospectus

Translated by Marco Gámez

With the Automatic Ball and Strike System (ABS) on the horizon for the 2026 season, my intuition is that we will be going through a period of upheaval when it comes to what is and is not a strike. The desire to use robots in the vain attempt to get ‘the right thing’ right as often as possible will be disruptive. It causes most pain at the beginning of the season and then appears intermittently, like indigestion when your eyes were bigger than your stomach at dinner.

In the meantime, there’s time to take a closer look at pitchers who could benefit from an increase in the number of strikes called on edge throws. Since squares that barely skirt the edge of the zone would be strikes in this context, the fuzzy zone is a logical place to start. It will not be an exact science, as it includes fields both inside and outside the zone, and we lack explicit measurements with the available data. We also know that the top of the zone has been trimmed more than the rest this past season as referees have made their annual improvements in overall accuracy.

That also brings us to the point of considering which pitchers could see an increase in called strikes. The number of throws in the shadow zone that were considered balls increased by 1.1% between 2024 and 2025. It’s a small number, but as is always the case in a Major League-only context, it’s important to understand that this represents thousands of pitches. In this specific case it was 7,858. If a handful of them had gone the other way, they could have changed an at bat…which could have changed the pitcher’s entire performance. The question “What would have happened if…?” It’s a dangerous premise, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think about it from time to time.

To limit it to a clear group of players, I researched everyone who threw at least 1,250 pitches last year. That includes those who were reasonably healthy and perhaps alternate roles, but it practically rules out relievers. I also included their performance in the shadow zone between 2022 and 2024 and took the difference, looking at who had an increase in called balls around the shadow zone that exceeded the league average increase. There are 59 players left. You can see it all details here.

Yusei KikuchiAngels (ADP 405)

I was pretty candid during the season when I said Kikuchi was my biggest mistake of 2025. I thought the improvements he made with the Astros would stick, or at least some of them, because they came from very simple adjustments and produced very consistent results. I was wrong, and the chronic adjuster once again chronically adjusted as the Angels crawled to another sub-500 season. If you saw several of his openings, you saw the entire Kikuchi spectrum. It almost certainly included a game or two where he clearly didn’t get the results he wanted and couldn’t get a decision in his favor, resulting in an awful lot of walks and/or an unlucky home run.

Still, with this analysis, I’m somewhat inclined to give him a little more credit than his nine-point drop in Strikeouts-to-Walks ratio would suggest. His Average Pulling Position (ADP) went down the toilet, got flushed and ended up in the septic tank. It is essentially a backup selection or a final arrow in the early selection processes. His velocity remained at a normal level and he has racked up innings three years in a row. At age 34, each of these categories could decline, but there are worse candidates in that part of the draft.

Brady singerRed (ADP 348)

Singer finishes his fourth straight season with at least 150 innings. The results went in all directions. Global indicators like DRA and others relevant to fantasy leagues like WHIP rarely match what actually happens, and that makes it difficult to project. He saw an increase in the number of so-called soft zone pitches that was double the League average, with the 10th lowest percentage of those pitches at the top of the zone among our 59 qualifiers.

His repertoire isn’t outstanding and never has been, but we now understand how his arsenal works better than before. Of the five pitches he throws, all of them could be confused with his sinker or slider. It is the type of arm that shows a lot of variation from season to season. He’s seen as a backup arm and I doubt that will change much, especially with half of his games being played in Cincinnati and him throwing a fastball that barely tops 91 mph (146 km/h). A few more rulings in his favor would help him build another viable campaign.

Spencer StriderBraves (ADP 88)

Strider will be a fascinating and extreme case this year due to his injury. When he returned from his second Tommy John surgery last year, he rarely looked like his old self, though he continued to try to pitch exactly the same. He missed an average number of strokes in the upper zone compared to the population, but had more balls on the fields in the diffuse zone than two-thirds of the group. Without the same speed as before the surgery, it was probably easier for hitters to call certain pitches and for umpires to call them a ball, but that doesn’t explain everything.

There are countless variables in Strider’s case that could swing his season in either direction. Drafters respond accordingly: He’s the 30th pitcher selected on average, but with a range of more than 50 picks between his lowest and highest positions. The list of players with two TJ surgeries is very small; certainly not enough to predict how they might perform the season after returning. It would be foolish to deliberately target him, but depending on what happens in the early rounds, drafting him could be a perfectly acceptable risk.

Bono: Christopher Sanchez, Phillies (ADP 36)

It’s a bit strange to recommend a player going into the third round as a buying opportunity. That’s not exactly what I want to do with Sánchez, but I do want to acknowledge that he had the lowest number of called balls of anyone in the diffuse zone in the top third of the zone, even though he had a slightly above average number of calls against at the edges. As an intimidator who attacks the zone with downward action, he could still have something more to offer despite having completed a Premio-caliber campaign Cy Jong. Getting a few extra called strikes on borderline pitches can change at bats, and they can change entire outings.