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86 days until Opening Day …New Year, New Me. 

Not really. I'm not much for the new year resolution thing for myself, though I'm happy to come up with some for everyone else. And that's the theme of today's newsletter, the last one of the year. 

I've got some Fantasy Baseball resolutions here for you – some for Fantasy players such as yourself, some for specific MLB teams, and some for specific players. We all need to work on things, and these are eight things I've identified that I would like to see some work on in 2025. 

Alright, now, here's what we're hoping to change in 2025: 

Fantasy New Year's Resolutions 

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Resolution for me: Stick to your guns!

We'll start with me, and one of the most glaring mistakes I made in drafts: Not avoiding my bust picks because "the price was right!"

Now, to be clear, I am not clairvoyant, and I missed on plenty of my busts picks in 2024: Here, you can look for yourself to see that I went on the internet and called Elly De La Cruz (No. 7 player in 2024) a bust last year! Thousands of people saw that, and I just have to live with that fact now. But, on the whole, my bust picks were pretty right on, and I avoided the likes of Anthony Volpe, Ha-seong Kim, Cody Bellinger, and Lane Thomas amid pretty disappointing seasons. 

The exceptions? Nolan Jones and Joshua Lowe, who I ended up drafting in way too many leagues in 2024. With Lowe, it was because an injury just before the start of the season sent his price tumbling to a point where I thought there was "no downside" – if you don't count wasting a roster spot on a guy who didn't play until early May and didn't hit even his sixth homer of the season until Aug. 3 "no downside," I guess. I drafted a player more often after he suffered a spring injury – how dumb was that? 

In Jones' case, I just ended up liking him more than the consensus as drafts went on. I thought I would be out on him after his brief run of success in 2023 turned him into a player with a top-60 ADP, but then he kept falling in my drafts to 75th or later, and again, I thought that took much of the downside out of the picks. Not so much.

This is not to say I can't ever draft someone I call a "bust," but it probably needs to be at a more obvious discount than these ended up being, seeing as I still spent top-100 picks on players I didn't like. Jones had obvious contact issues, though in his case, injuries ended up making it almost impossible for him to ever live up to expectations, so I beat myself up about that one a little less. In Lowe's case, even when he was healthy, he wasn't always an everyday player, and his power from 2023 didn't carry over, two things I was really concerned about manifesting! He did at least provide some steals late in the season, but it was mostly too little too late. 

I outsmarted myself on a few of my bust picks, and I will try to avoid that in 2025. 

Resolution for all Fantasy Baseball players: Cool it on the rookies!

For the most part, we're doing okay on this front so far this season. In December ADP at the NFBC, Roki Sasaki's ADP sits at 75.3 – too rich for my blood, but hardly unreasonable, given his stuff and success in Japan. I wouldn't draft him there, but it's not so far off that I think it's obviously a mistake. Fine. After him, the highest-drafted rookie-eligible players for 2025 are Dylan Crews (140.4) and Jasson Dominguez (150.7), and those prices are … shockingly reasonable!

Let's keep it that way because in 2024, we sure didn't. While Evan Carter, Wyatt Langford, and Jackson Chourio's overall ADPs ended up outside of the top 120 in NFBC drafts last season, that doesn't quite capture how pricey they got toward the end of draft season – in our final Roto mock draft last spring, Langford went 77th overall, Chourio went 79th, and Carter was 93rd, and those certainly weren't outliers.

It ended up working out for Chourio – assuming you held on to him when he had a .581 OPS through the first two months of the season, no sure thing! Langford never really got going until September, while Carter's back injury made sure he never got the chance. At least two of those top-100 rookies were just flat-out failures for Fantasy, and Chourio might have been for at least the most impatient of drafters out there.

And it's just a reminder that, while rookies can and often do make an immediate impact, it is no sure thing these days. The jump from the minors to the majors has always been tough, but with minor-league contraction in recent years, there's reason to believe the talent gap is wider than it has been in a long time. It's fine to take a flier or three on talented young players, but it's a better idea to do it with whoever this year's version of Jackson Merrill will be, as Merrill rarely even broke the top-200 in drafts. Right now, that means names like Kristian Campbell (392.5) and Roman Anthony (349.1), and even, surprisingly, Jackson Jobe (340.1). The hype beasts might ruin those prices with a good spring, but right now, it looks like the 2025 rookie class will be much easier to buy into than last year's top crop. 

Resolution for the Orioles: Do something!

I went over this in my breakdown of the post-Burnes fallout, but the Orioles just seem weirdly rudderless right now. They have this young, cost-controlled core of offensive stars that is the envy of the entire league, and I think you could make a case that they aren't even the second-best team in their division, depending on how likely you think it is the Red Sox second base situation goes from "worst in baseball" to "roughly average" – and with Kristian Campbell on the verge, it could be much better than roughly average.

The Orioles aren't in a bad spot, but their unwillingness to aggressively spend money after running super-low payrolls for the better part of a decade is hugely frustrating. They should be poised to make multiple World Series runs – instead, they're still waiting for their first playoff win with this core and look like they are two starting pitchers away from being a legitimate contender. Don't drop the ball on this, Mike Elias. 

Resolution for James Wood and Dylan Crews: Jump in the pull!

(It's a joke about how I say the words "pull" and "pool" the same on the FBT podcast. I promise, it's funnier in an audio format.)

The Nationals pair of young outfielders could be one of the best combos in the majors in 2025 if they figure out how to optimize their swings. It's a bigger concern for Wood, who was better as a rookie but also had more glaring limitations. He hits the ball extremely hard (92.8 mph on average) but too often right into the ground, as he ran a 55.1% groundball rate; when he did hit the ball in the air, it was almost always up the middle or the other way, and even for a player with prodigious power like Wood's, that's going to be tough to make work. If Wood is just what he was last season, he's probably a fine pick around 50th overall, but if we want him to be a real difference maker in Fantasy – and especially if we want him to be worth that price when accounting for the risk things go wrong for a guy with pretty bad plate discipline – he needs to find a way to tap into that power upside more consistently. If he does, well, a 30-30 season isn't out of the question.

It might not be out of the question for Crews either, though admittedly, he has more work to do. His plate discipline is much better than Wood's, which gives him a higher batting average floor, in my opinion, and he surprised with his baserunning enough that I think you can project roughly similar totals there. But Crews is still figuring out how to turn his plus raw power into production in games, something he did frequently in his collegiate career, but less so since turning pro. It might never come, the way Kris Bryant settled in more as a good overall hitter than a fearsome power bat like we expected. But I'm very confident Crews will be at least useful as a hitter next season, and if he tunes his swing a bit, there could be an even higher ceiling here. 

Resolution for Oneil Cruz: Run more!

I have given myself this resolution before, and let's hope it goes better for Cruz than for me! Cruz has never lacked for athleticism (88th percentile in sprint speed last season), but he's never been quite as aggressive a base stealer as we'd like to see for Fantasy. In his first 185 MLB games, he had just 20 stolen bases on 28 attempts, a pretty underwhelming number. And then after last year's All-Star break, something clicked, and Cruz swiped 15 in his final 61 games.

There are still holes in Cruz's game. He maybe can't hit lefties, and he probably still strikes out too much to ever do more than break even in batting average. But it seems reasonable enough to project a .250-.260 average and 20-plus homers on him, so the upside comes mostly down to the steals. If he's just a 15-20-steal guy, that's pretty underwhelming and wouldn't make him a significantly better Fantasy option than Randy Arozarena, who goes about 80 spots after Cruz in current ADP; but if Cruz's 38-steal second-half pace was at all for real, then you're starting to talk about a profile that looks a lot more like Corbin Carroll or Jazz Chisholm, both of whom go well ahead of Cruz. 

Resolution for Reese Olson: Find a way to get to Strike Two!

Olson's got the putaway pitches. Two of 'em, in fact: The slider, with a 45.5% whiff rate last season, and the changeup, sitting at 42.9%. The problem? His fastballs are simply way too hittable, so he doesn't get himself in putaway situations as often as you'd like. 

That's a tough thing to change, and I have a couple of suggestions. First, it might be time to lean less on the four-seamer and more on the sinker, a pitcher with a similarly low whiff rate, but much better results on balls in play – a .357 xwOBA in 2024 for the four-seamer, compared to a .294 for the sinker. And then I would suggest perhaps working on a cutter, a pitch that could help him steal a few strikes and perhaps generate a higher rate of foul balls, both of which would help Olson get into situations where he can let his big swing-and-miss stuff fly. 

Resolution for Carlos Rodon: Cut out those old, bad habits!

To be fair, Rodon already did what I'm asking: He stopped throwing his cutter in his June 27, when he capped off a stretch of 20 runs allowed in three starts to drive his ERA for the season to 4.42. From that point on, he put up a 3.43 ERA with 103 strikeouts over his final 81.1 innings of work, and generally looked more like the guy we've been hoping he would be. There were still some issues – a 9.3% walk rate is too high, and 1.7 HR/9 is obviously way too high – but it seems like Rodon figured something out there.

The idea behind adding the cutter made some sense, of course. At his best, Rodon has been able to get by almost exclusively on his four-seamer and slider, but the fastball just isn't quite as dominant anymore as it was at his best. The cutter was meant to help overcome that, but it really didn't work – his fastball performed just as meekly as it did in 2023, and the cutter was somehow worse, sporting a disastrous .494 expected wOBA for the season. 

So, let's keep that one on the shelf. Rodon's changeup took a big step forward in 2024, sporting a massive 49.5% whiff rate and excellent results on balls in play, and while his curveball wasn't nearly as good, it has some value as an early-count strike-stealer. I don't think Rodon can ever rediscover that ace form he had before joining the Yankees, but with the right pitch mix, he can still be a top-20 pitcher in Fantasy. Let's hope he doesn't fall back on bad habits. 

Resolution for Nolan Arenado: How about a little self-awareness?

I fear Arenado may have already missed his best, and possibly only, chance to get back to Fantasy relevance when he turned down a reported trade to the Astros. His fading power hit a new low in 2024, as he clubbed just 16 homers, and taking aim at the Crawford Boxes would likely have been his best chance to get back to being a 25-homer threat. With the Astros moving on to trade for Isaac Paredes and sign Christian Walker, Arenado simply doesn't have a lot of other alternatives to turn to as the Cardinals look to move him.

Which begs the question: What exactly does Arenado want at this point? We asked out of Colorado a year after signing an eight-year extension, presumably because he wanted to go to a team with a better chance of winning. He got a couple of wild card appearances out of his time with the Cardinals, and with that team now looking to the future, he has already blocked a trade to the Astros, a team with a much better chance of winning in 2025 and a park much more conducive to propping up Arenado's flagging skill set – something that could be important as Arenado sits 59 homers short of 400 for his career, a number that would certainly help his Hall of Fame odds. 

Arenado's no-trade clause is obviously an obstacle to finding a new home, and it's one he should be much more willing to waive. There are still a few potential landing spots that could help his Fantasy value – the Dodgers seem like a stretch, but he would make sense in Philadelphia if they wanted to upgrade from Alec Bohm's glove, to name one – but after Arenado blew up the trade to Houston, it's just not clear what he's looking for. He earned that no-trade clause, so I won't begrudge him for exercising it, but that would have been the best-case scenario for Arenado's career in a lot of ways. I'm just not sure he realizes it.