For many of us, our fantasy baseball seasons are effectively over. It wasn’t our year. But instead of sulking, something many of us do so well is to immediately turn to draft prep and the next season.

In doing that, part of the process is looking back at the season to see some of the emerging young players and ascertain whether or not their emergence was real and repeatable. One of the classic ways to do this is by looking for comparisons of these young players to established major leaguers to serve as proof of concepts. 

Scouts have done this forever and it has worked in the recent past. Hunter Brown’s association to Justin Verlander foreshadowed the former’s rise to ace status. Many in the industry connected Parker Messick’s arsenal and style of pitching with Hyun Jin Ryu, and Messick has had similar results so far. Chase Burns’ reliance on the fastball and slider was compared to a young Spencer Strider’s prior to the former’s debut, and Burns has been just as good as the vintage version of Strider. 

Over the course of the next few months, I’ll provide a handful of starting potentially instructive comps we can make to help illuminate this growing crop of young starting pitchers.

Part 1: Max Fried & Kade Anderson

Part 2: Sandy Alcantara & Walbert Ureña

Today, I’ll compare Garrett Crochet and Payton Tolle, a comparison I think captures the ceiling case for Tolle to be drafted as a top-15 starting pitcher in drafts in 2027. 

I believe that Tolle in 2026 is having a more polished version of Crochet’s 2024 season with the White Sox, reaching a similar innings level, experimenting with new pitches, and finding lots of success against major league hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

“Billy, we’ve got 38 home runs, 120 RBIs to make up for…”

“Guys, you’re still trying to replace Giambi. I told you we can’t do it. What we might be able to do is recreate him. Recreate him in the aggregate.”

It’s so tempting to head into draft prep season thinking like this. We all have our GM hats on, though we may not all pull it off quite so well. 

We scour over projections, building out potential lineups based on how many of each Roto categories we need to fill to finish near the top of the table. Or we look at certain hitters with disdain when they fall underneath our perceived thresholds when it comes to counting stats.

There’s, of course, a lot more that goes into it. Otherwise, what would we be doing here?

But the so-called “back of the baseball card” numbers still matter to us, it’s how we were trained to think about players.

In this series, I’ll point out two starting pitchers and two hitters who I think could fall victim to a bias away from low volume players, depressing their draft day costs for 2027. 

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For many of us, our fantasy baseball seasons are effectively over. It wasn’t our year. But instead of sulking, something many of us do so well is to immediately turn to draft prep and the next season. 

In doing that, part of the process is looking back at the season to see some of the emerging young players and ascertain whether or not their emergence was real and repeatable. One of the classic ways to do this is by looking for comparisons of these young players to established major leaguers to serve as proof of concepts. 

Scouts have done this forever and it has worked in the recent past. Hunter Brown’s association to Justin Verlander foreshadowed the former’s rise to ace status. Many in the industry connected Parker Messick’s arsenal and style of pitching with Hyun-Jin Ryu, and Messick has had similar results so far. Chase Burns’ reliance on the fastball and slider was compared to a young Spencer Strider’s prior to the former’s debut, and Burns has been just as good as the vintage version of Strider. 

Over the course of the next few months, I’ll provide a handful of potentially instructive comps we can make to help illuminate this growing crop of young starting pitchers.

For Part 1 of this series, where I find comps for today’s young emerging aces, I took a look at the Mariners’ Kade Anderson, comparing his arsenal, arm slot, and potential prospect arc to that of perennial All Star, Max Fried. 

Today, I’ll compare two Dominican flamethrowers in Angels’ rookie Walbert Ureña and Marlins’ veteran Sandy Alcantara. Read the rest of this entry »

In the immortal words of Sugar Ray, sometimes, all we need is to “turn tomorrow into yesterday.”

For many of us, that time is right now. Our fantasy baseball seasons are effectively over. It wasn’t our year. But instead of sulking, something many of us do so well is to immediately turn to draft prep and the next season. 

Which of your waiver wire adds will you want to bring back next season? Who were you envious of that you want to target in drafts next year? You’ll spend the offseason asking yourself these questions. So will I, and it will be my goal to help you answer some of these questions. 

But before the season ends, I want to slow down just a hair, to enjoy the rest of this season. Late Wednesday night, I found myself falling asleep to highlights of Kade Anderson’s first truly successful outing for the Mariners, holding the Rangers to one run over six innings and collecting his first win in the majors. 

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Sitting here in early September, with papery leaves beginning to find themselves underfoot and with the A’s and Angels getting ready for next season, things really do feel pretty normal. 

There have certainly been some surprises, like the oddly Tucker-shaped hole in the Dodgers’ lineup, but for the most part, it’s been a season that has largely matched our expectations.  

But there was a time, not all that long ago, when many of us were panicking. When our early round picks were faltering and our “sure thing” sleepers were seemingly still sleeping. Let’s call this time by a cute and breezy name, something deceivingly blissful and carefree like “May.”

In this article, I’ll look back at some of the hitters whose starts were so rough that fantasy managers may have overlooked them as they have rebounded this summer and may still undervalue them heading into next year’s drafts.

I want you to be sure to look at these players favorably when doing your draft prep. If you really trust me, maybe even bookmark this page to come back to during draft time, so that you don’t take one look at Rafael Devers and get a sour unripe picked-in-April-but-ripe-in-August orange taste in your mouth (I know this isn’t the citrus timeline, please forgive me). 

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If you’re a nineties baby playing in the majors, I think your time has passed. Make way for Gen Z. The 2000’s babies. Even the 2005 babies are starting to make a real impact. 

Bye bye Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and hello Junior Caminero. So long Juan Soto and welcome Pete Crow-Armstrong. Sal Stewart, yes you’ll be taking over for Mr. Manny Machado. And Fernando Jr. of Tatis fame? The McGonigle and Wetherholt party will take it from here. 

So many of our favorite young stars from the last five years have aged out of rising stardom and seem to be either plateauing or, even worse, skiing down the final hill, and fast. 

Here’s a quick collection of players I’d consider consensus picks to become generational stars a few years ago who are currently between 27 and 29 years old. To me, this captures the players many of us would have confidently said were entering the primes of their careers as recently as two years ago. Not yet on the hill, and surely not over it.  Read the rest of this entry »

I sat down to write this article at the start of the Cubs-Reds game on a sunny Sunday afternoon. It matched my disposition. Earlier in the day, I’d clinched an enviable first round bye in my home league. But the final game of the day was a game of consequence for a few of my league mates in a less privileged playoff position. 

Their two teams were separated by just a game in our head-to-head categories league. 

Both were in matchups where Cubs hitters had the chance to make or break their seasons. A run scored by Michael Busch or Nico Hoerner would send a surging Cinderella story packing and let a team that looked to be a shoo-in a few months ago limp into the playoffs. A stolen base by Ian Happ would have had the same effect, but was not really much of a consideration.  

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Earlier this week, some of you joined me on a jaunty little trip down through Fantasy Seasons Past, stopping to admire some of the plucky league winners that never seemed to amount to much afterwards.

From Nolan Jones who burned you the next year to Shed Long who you can only remember fondly, there have been league winning hot hands for as long as there has been fantasy baseball.

This year, shouldn’t you be the one to add the league winning Joe Schmo? Or should I say, “Schwindel”?

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Every year it seems a handful of players go on a September heater and change the destiny of their fantasy teams. Some of those players are flashes-in-the-pan, but some have staying power. Last year’s class of league winners did produce some solid breakouts, with Ben Rice leading the charge, and Iván Herrera and Daylen Lile not far behind. For players like Michael Busch and Jo Adell, strong seasons were capped off by big power outputs to end the year, helping us believe in their power carrying over to this season.

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Earlier this week, prompted by a Foolish Bailey dive into Jake Bennett and optimal contact prevention, I looked into the stickiest stats for starting pitchers since 2002 that mattered for predicting next season ERA. The four measures that, together, outperformed previous season ERA and did not vary much for pitchers from season to season were Zone%, Z-Contact%, GB%, and, a Rotographs favorite, K-BB%. 

In that article, using a method recently popularized by Ben Clemens, I highlighted the best starting pitchers from this season in those four metrics, using weighted z-scores to compare across the metrics. Below are the top twenty starters.

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