When it comes to fantasy baseball, the age‑old question of whether to trust a projection model or the crowd‑sourced Average Draft Position remains a hot debate.
To answer it, I examined five years of data spanning 2021 through 2025, pulling Steamer projections — a metric explicitly designed for fantasy contexts — and comparing them against ADP figures from the major draft platforms.
Projection Rankings Lead the Pack
The results show that projection‑based rankings have a modest but reliable edge in forecasting a player’s year‑end value, especially once you move past the first 50 selections.
Graphical analysis reveals that the projection line stays above ADP through the middle of the draft, only to dip below it toward the back end, indicating that ADP can capture late‑round sleepers that pure forecasts miss.
The Pitcher‑Hitter Divide
What’s particularly interesting is the positional bias: projections tend to elevate pitchers who have already posted strong statistics, while ADP leans toward hitters with higher upside potential.
This bias explains why ADP excels at spotting young, high‑ceiling players who may not yet have a track record but are projected to explode into impact performers once they break out.
Because past forecasts rarely came with pre‑assigned dollar values, I reconstructed those values from raw data, focusing on standard 5×5 rotisserie settings to keep the comparison apples‑to‑apples.
Why ADP Still Matters
The study also highlights a clear avenue for future research — understanding why projection models consistently favor better‑performing pitchers and how that bias can be calibrated to improve overall draft strategy.