Underdog MLB Best Ball: Undervalued Pitchers to Target (February 2026)

Drafting players that are going to return positive draft-day value is the name of the game in best ball, and it's even more important in MLB best ball, where positions blur together to give us a multitude of decisions on what player archetypes to construct our roster around.

Grabbing reliable players is great to balance out your team, but sometimes, you have to swing for the fences and find the players who, when we look back a year from now, we'll wonder why they were going so late in drafts.

Here are three of my Underdog MLB best ball undervalued pitchers that I'm targeting in drafts.

Hunter Greene, Cincinnati Reds

Current ADP: 81.2 (Mid round 7)

Earliest I'm comfortable taking him: Mid round 6

ERA isn't everything, but Hunter Greene might be the most quiet player to post back-to-back ERAs under 3.00 in decades.

There are injury and workload concerns - he hasn't been able to pitch over 150 innings at any point in his first four big league seasons. That's at least a portion of the discount. But guys like Chris Sale (just one season over 150+ innings since 2019) and Cole Ragans (only one season over 100 IP since joining the Royals and converting to a starter) are going nearly a round - or more - ahead with similar injury/workload concerns

Hunter Greene represents the drop-off point from legitimate SP1 pitchers to those I have non-injury question marks on. Taking him in round 7 is a priority consideration for me.

Tanner Bibee, Cleveland Guardians

Current ADP: 151.1 (Late round 13)

Earliest I'm comfortable taking him: Late round 11

There's no doubt that Tanner Bibee regressed last season relative to 2024, but look under the hood and rumors of his demise may be greatly overexaggerated. His xERA sat 0.6 lower than his actual ERA, and he's still primarily allowing soft contact, being above average in hard hit rate against and average exit velocity against. The larger concern is the strikeout rate dipping.

All that being said, we've seen these types of players get back to the mean many times before, and going in the bottom half of the draft, finding players who should return back to normal at discounted prices is paramount.

Yusei Kikuchi, Los Angeles Angels

Current ADP: 185.7 (Mid 16th round)

Earliest I'm comfortable taking him: Early round 15

A perennial appearance from one of my most drafted players of the years. Is Yusei Kikuchi a great pitcher? He's good enough!

There's a consistent track record of innings here and he averages around a strikeout per inning or more. That leads to at least spikes on a per-start basis, even if the overall track record looks meh at the end of it all. But we're looking for usable weeks this late, and there are usable weeks to be had here.

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