Alex Chamberlain’s Seven Bold Predictions for 2021

Ah, yes — that time of year already. If I had more time recently (which I hadn’t) and if I were more consideration (which I’m not), I would have published these bold predictions sooner so you, the reader, could act decisively on them in drafts as you saw fit. But, alas — draft season is over. I gotta squeak in these predictions before or, uh, on Opening Day.

I say something like this every year: a bold prediction is worthless if it is either too bold or not bold enough. In my opinion, the perfect bold prediction is very bold but also achievable. Often it is bold because it features someone who is, to some extent, an afterthought in fantasy drafts, and often it is achievable because of (what I perceive to be) a gross market inefficiency.

Past successful bold predictions include José Ramírez (2016), Matt Chapman and Madison Bumgarner (2018), Jeff McNeil and Kirby Yates (2019), and Trent Grisham and Jose Altuve (2020), among others. Here’s to hoping I add a couple more to the mantle.

Any mentions of average draft position (ADP) will be in reference to National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) data from the last week (March 24 through 31), spanning 290 drafts. Salary cap-equivalent dollar values are based on 15 teams, 30 roster slots, and $260 budgets.

1) Josh Rojas is a top-12 second baseman.

Final week ADP: 387.5 | $1.3 | undrafted in 17% of leagues

Rojas was my favorite peripheral prospect in 2019. It’s not a stretch to say he was the high minors’ best hitter before the world shut down. It’s also not a stretch to say Rojas was one of MLB’s worst hitters in 2020. It was a small sample, sure, but it was a small sample for everyone. The duality is striking.

Few hitters were better in spring training this year, however, and the Rojas hype train (presumably conducted by yours truly) is gaining steam. I think Rojas still possesses legitimate five-category upside, although he will make bigger contributions in power and speed than he will in batting average. Something like 15-20-.260 is reasonable and would go a long way. Think of where you drafted similar slash lines this year, cut from the same roto cloth as a Cavan Biggio, Trent Grisham, or Tommy Pham type. They’re all top-150 guys — top-100, all of them, when Pham isn’t recovering from a stab wound.

I made a Rojas-themed prediction last year, but it needed an overhaul. Last year, Rojas wasn’t even guaranteed a spot on the roster, let alone anything resembling routine playing time. With Kole Calhoun destined for the Injured List, RosterResource projects Rojas as Arizona’s starting second baseman, having battled to win the role and pushing Ketel Marte back to the outfield.

2) Randy Dobnak is a top-30 starting pitcher.

Final week ADP: 559.8 | $0.0 | undrafted in 48% of leagues

I am, in fact, in command of two (2) hype trains this year. I featured Dobnak in my list of favorite 2019 peripheral prospects that included Rojas, Mike Tauchman, Biggio, and Jake Cronenworth. It’s a vaunted list!

Dobnak caught my eye for his absurd combination of ground balls and strikeouts. He paired the 2nd-highest ground ball rate (60% GB) in the high minors (minimum 100 innings) with a swinging strike rate (SwStr%) north of 13%. Only five other pitchers had ground ball rates higher than 55%, and all of their whiff rates were at least two percentage points lower.

It was curious then, that Dobnak arrived on the scene practically trying to not strike people out. His brief big-league cup of tea in 2019 was adequate, but last year he struck out only 13.5% of hitters in a span of 10 starts. That’s pretty bad, no matter how you cut it.

Fortunately, the ground balls were still there; Dobnak compiled a 62% ground ball rate, which helped him manage contact à la Dallas Keuchel. Moreover, no one with a 9.1% whiff rate deserves such a meager strikeout rate (K%). Dobnak added a slider last year; it and his curve have combined for a solid 18% whiff rate since he debuted. That’s just as much as, if not more than, Keuchel can say about his secondaries.

The Keuchel comparison is apt because he, too, features a bowling ball sinker and good-enough secondaries to make him a great, if underappreciated, fantasy asset. Heck, the guy has a Cy Young Award to his name. Per the transitive property, Dobnak has Cy Young upside. It’s just math, folks.

The Twins like what they see in Dobnak. It’s not just the dozen-or-whatever fantastic spring training innings (although they certainly helped, and it also caught the eye of many fantasy players as well). There’s a history of sustained excellence, even if the numbers aren’t eye-popping.

Now, it’s only a matter of time before the inevitable Matt Shoemaker injury opens up a starting role for Dobnak. When it does, I expect him to run with it. Fingers crossed that those K’s from March show up in spades this year. The “Cy Young upside” is a joke, but… only kind of.

3) Myles Straw is a top-35 outfielder.

Final week ADP: 275.5 | $4.3 | undrafted in 1% of leagues

The most popular (and, dare I say it, lazy) criticism of Straw is something along the lines of, “I don’t think he’ll hit well enough to hold the job.” This, honestly, is just wild to me, given the fantasy community’s recent fascination with Mallex Smith. Yes, that fascination was short-lived. But Smith’s brief tenure as a viable fantasy asset does not damn Straw to failure as well.

Let’s debunk this whole thing. If Straw falters, who replaces him? “Chas McCormick“? Have you seen the Astros’ minor league outfield depth? I bet Straw’s leash is significantly longer than folks are letting on.

Now, compare Smith’s and Straw’s minor league numbers. They’re eerily similar! They both routinely posted 60-SB full-season paces with double-digit walk rates and contained, above-average strikeout rates. No one would say Smith had much of a hit tool, but at least he could make enough contact and let his wheels do the rest.

What separates Straw from Smith is the bat-to-ball skills: while Smith’s lowest minor-league whiff rate was 8.4%, Straw’s highest minor-league whiff rate (outside rookie ball, where pitch data is dubious) is 6.4%. That was in Single-A in 2016, and he has only improved since then.

Straw might be lucky to hit even one home run in 2021. But it’s worth betting that a combination of frequent contact, low launch angles, and elite speed will generate some outcomes resembling Mallex Smith circa 2018: a top-100 finish featuring 40 stolen bases and a .296 batting average buoyed by a .366 batting average on balls in play (BABIP). Straw could hit .250 with 30 stolen bases — he’d still be [groan] a steal at his latest ADP. Like the two players preceding him on this list, I’ve grabbed him nearly everywhere I could.

4) Anthony Misiewicz and Scott Barlow lead their teams in saves.

Misiewicz’s final week ADP: 709.0 | $0.0 | undrafted in 99% of leagues
Barlow’s final week ADP: 700.3 | $0.0 | undrafted in 82% of leagues

Nothing like pivoting to undrafted relievers.

The Greg Holland situation is interesting. That dude was legit toast for going on four years before suddenly rediscovering the strike zone. I’m betting he loses it again. That leaves Josh Staumont up next, according to RosterResource. Staumont boasts strikeout potential, but he also never walked fewer than 15% — fifteen percent! — of hitters at any minor league level. I don’t know if this guy is cut out for an actual MLB job, let alone a high-leverage relief role. (The whiffs were also never as elite in the minors as they were last year. While that could be a legitimate development, it could also be as simple as a small-sample mirage. Anything can happen in 26 innings.)

That leaves us with Barlow, who actually does appear capable of sustained success, despite his 4.20 ERA last year possibly indicating otherwise. Walks have never been his strong suit, either, but at least he’s capable of keeping them in check. Toss in a slider-first approach supplemented by a fastball and curve that also generate whiffs at elite rates and you have a very interesting relief weapon — one that, frankly, is much more intriguing to me, and also possibly less volatile, than Holland.

And, hey, the Rafael Montero situation is also interesting. Much of the analysis I’ve read is, like, yeah, he’s bad, but the bullpen is bad, so he probably has a decently long leash to be bad. I mean, yeah! I guess that’s true. The bullpen isn’t great. But also, clearly you haven’t heard of (or you don’t care about) Misiewicz.

A starter in the minors, he was converted to a relief role and will probably stay there. Unlike everyone mentioned prior to him, Misiewicz actually does boast solid command and gets whiffs at a decent clip. It appears that, like many before him, his stuff plays up in relief: he generated a 14.2% swinging strike rate en route to a strikeout rate north of 30% and more than four times as many K’s as walks. It wasn’t elite or anything, but it was much better than his 4.05 ERA suggests.

All four of his pitches induced double-digit whiff rates in his debut. His cutter, which headlines his repertoire, featured a 15.7% swinging strike rate all on its own. Only his slider allowed a single barrel last year. He’s an extreme fly-ball pitcher — it’ll come back to haunt him every now and then — but there are worse places than Safeco (or whatever that park is called now) to be a fly-ball pitcher.

Should the cream rise to the top — indeed, it nearly always does — Misiewicz could easily upend Montero and outduel Kendall Graveman, Casey Sadler, and Keynan Middleton. In my mind, only Middleton poses a real threat, but he could not take command of a truly awful Angels bullpen during his time with Seattle’s divisional rival. Misiewicz is an afterthought everywhere — the data shows I’m literally one of the only people drafting him — which means he is a perfect guy to monitor closely. Just don’t wait too long to pounce if Montero shows cracks in his already-brittle armor.

5) Ryan Yarbrough is a top-40 starting pitcher.

Final week ADP: 259.5 | $4.8 | undrafted in < 1% of leagues

This prediction is dedicated to fantasy baseball Twitter’s unofficial cheerleader, Yancy Eaton. He’s a Florida-based Rays fan. He loves the Rays. He also tweeted this the other day:

Ryan Yarbrough is discount Kyle Hendricks. pic.twitter.com/zqte70Xn0p

— Ｙ Ａ Ｎ Ｔ Ｓ🍦 (@YancyEaton) March 30, 2021

It’s haunting, yes. It’s a cursed image. But it’s also… a great statement. Yarbrough is, indeed, a poor man’s Kyle Hendricks, which effectively makes Yarbrough a middle-class man’s Marco Gonzales.

When I wrote about Hendricks back in January, I sought to quantify which pitchers bear the most “influence” on opposing hitters’ exit velocity (EV) and launch angle (LA). Through this lens, Hendricks was elite. Anyone who pays any attention to him would not be surprised by this development, that he might be the best starting pitcher in baseball at suppressing opposing hitters’ contact quality (among the many other things at which he is also elite).

What I didn’t include, however, is if you relaxed the thresholds to include relievers, Yarbrough actually beat out Hendricks. Granted, Yarbrough has thrown fewer innings, and there’s a reason why excluded innings compiled in relief. But it’s still quite important, in this author’s eyes, to be spoken in the same breath as Hendricks — heck, to be regarded as his superior in something at which he might be the very best of his generation.

Yarbrough’s combination of contact management, modest strikeouts, and excellent command make him exactly what Eaton described him. Yarbrough finally has a prominent role in the rotation, one I think he will have a very hard time losing. If you expect health and vaguely Hendricks-esque performance (hence, the Gonzales comp), you can expect something like a top-40 finish among starting pitchers. Right now, he’s roughly 80th off the board.

I’m tired — a 7-month-old has stolen most of the free time I might have normally wasted on fantasy baseball this offseason — so I’ll make these last few predictions much quicker.

6) Adam Duvall is a top-30 outfielder.

Final week ADP: 379.6 | $1.5 | undrafted in 14% of leagues

He did it before, and he can do it again. Probably the biggest mischaracterization about Duvall — a trap I, as a former Duvall fan, fell into — is that he’s bad. Maybe he is in real life. But, since he first earned full-time reps in 2016, Duvall boasts a .237 isolated power. That places him 17th among 120 hitters with at least 2,000 plate appearances in that span. The power is legit.

Moreover, the career .233 batting average undersells his abilities in that particular category. His stock cratered in 2018, when he just .195 with only 15 home runs in 427 PA. In every other season? As low as .237 but as higher as .267 with no worse than a 30-homer pace. Between the 2019 and 2020 seasons, he hit 26 home runs in just 98 games — while hitting .248.

He’s not going to win you any leagues by himself, but he should give you 30 homers and a .240 average in a guaranteed spot in the heart of the Marlins’ batting order.

7) Josh Naylor is a top-50 outfielder.

Final week ADP: 558.0 | $0.0 | undrafted in 49% of leagues

Naylor just missed the cut as one of my favorite peripheral prospects; I actually highlighted him in a separate post to acknowledge as much. A fringe prospect having escaped the clutches of San Diego’s farm system littered with similarly fringy prospects, Naylor finds himself the leading candidate for the right field job in an otherwise depleted Cleveland lineup.

Naylor reminds me of Tauchman a bit: above-average power with excellent plate skills. Unlike Tauchman, Naylor is a legit minus runner (whereas Tauchman might be plus). As such, Naylor would be lucky to steal more than one base in 2021. But the possibility is 20, hopefully 25, home runs with a solid batting average that is helped by excellent discipline and contact skills but hurt by his excruciatingly poor foot speed. Part of me wonders if he can drum up an above-average BABIP despite it.

“Top-50 outfielder” doesn’t feel particularly bold to me, but his draft stock suggests no one is really thinking about him despite him having credentials as a legitimate fringe prospect (our Eric Longenhagen slapped a 50-FV tag on him and ranked him just outside his top-100 prospects of 2019, at 124th).