In every draft you join in 2027, someone will draft Austin Riley.
They will pay the lowest draft day cost for Riley since before his full breakout in 2021.
Will it be a worthwhile gamble?
I’ve avoided the question over the last few seasons, but with what is sure to be his lowest ADP in years, the value proposition caught my attention.
The A’s best bats didn’t get to bop this summer. Or doo-wop. Or even bunny hop!
Instead, the stars sat injured. Shuttered. Locked indoors while the kids got to play. And predictably, most of the kids didn’t play all that well for the A’s, though bright spots like Henry Bolte gave us something to dream on in Sacramento.
With all of this missed time, there may just be a buy low opportunity for A’s sluggers in drafts this year, and perhaps especially in the earlier drafts, before we get to see mammoth Nick Kurtz Spring Training clips right before draft day.
It’s kind of like stocking up on pool noodles and swim trunks and beach towels right in the dead of winter. On Black Friday even. You’re not paying the price that your buddies will pay in May and June when the gloom shakes itself off and blooms. Read the rest of this entry »
Decorated rookies can present draft day challenges for fantasy managers. When a new player bursts onto the scene with a limited track record, it can be hard to know exactly how to value the newer player relative to an established field.
Determining which sophomores are worth drafting with their more established counterparts is fun, it’s the strategic itch we want to scratch. We all fall somewhere along the risk tolerance spectrum, which means ADP for these potential sophomore studs often fluctuates dramatically.
Debuts from Jackson Chourio and Jackson Merrill in 2024 put them up at the top of draft boards the following season. Nick Kurtz and Junior Caminero lifted themselves into the top two rounds this year after electric 2025 rookie years.
Developing star Sal Stewart could find his way near the top of boards in 2027, coming off a rookie season with 32 homers and 112 RBI in hitter-friendly Great American Ballpark.
Deferring the obvious top round talents, though, and moving into the middle rounds brings up one of the hitters I am most excited to draft in 2027. Chase DeLauter.
Park ‘er behind down and stay awhile. Let’s talk about drafting skills versus drafting roles.
I’ve only ever lived in California, so my ability to write poetically about the changing seasons is limited, at best. Hamstrung, to borrow from a Buxtonian turn of phrase.
For me, the easiest way for me to notice the changing seasons has never been snow.
Growing up, it was the change from playing baseball to playing flag football. Exchanging ripped pants for ripped knees.
As I got a little older, and as the Dodgers actually started making the playoffs, shedding the Aaron Miles brand of baseball for Manny Ramirez, and then Hanley Ramirez, I cared less about flag football. But the fall did still have a shining bright spot. Playoff baseball.
Fantasy baseball is a drama. And as such, it follows Freytag’s pyramid. Naturally.
For the uninitiated, think of Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy, not unlike most of our seasons.
The exposition sets the scene. Rising action builds your interest, as the characters you’ve been introduced to start moving and shaking. Then the climax. Violence, betrayal. Injury and breakouts. From there, the falling action is lines you up for the third act, by which point, you’ve already tuned out. Because you’re not making the playoffs. Or getting in the money.
Fantasy baseball is entertaining because it’s set up the same way.
The Exposition takes place within the span of a few minutes as you mourn the end of your season. We already know all of the players. The Rising Action is the rest of the offseason. The anticipation that feeds your late nights of research, making you closer to an angsty teen than you’ve been since high school. Draft prep is your studying now. This all leads up to the Climax. Draft Day. Nothing during the season lives up to the Draft.
That’s why the rest of the season is Falling Action. Your expectations for your team fall. The slope is steep. You stumble through May, rumble through July as your team stretches for its last gasp, and crumble in September, when illusions of this being the year finally fade.
Since we’re in the Rising Action of draft prep… “Already?” some of your leaguemates may respond. But since we, you and I, are already in draft prep, it’s time to use our neatly wrapped 2026 and see what lessons we can take away.
Earlier this season, in the midst of Davis Martin’s ascent, Fernando Tatis Jr.’s slump, and after more than two months of Cal Raleigh’s big dumper of a follow up season, I wrote an article pointing to an interesting trend.
Through May this season, hitters were busting more frequently than pitchers relative to their draft cost. More specifically, ADP was less predictive of hitter performance than it was starting pitcher performance. This goes against a premise analysts and casuals alike repeat throughout draft season, that “pitchers are riskier than hitters.”
In my first article for Rotographs, I dug into a premise that always puzzles me at the beginning of the season. What do you do with the seemingly low end starting pitchers who are off to hot starts?
I noted how sometimes, they can stay hot for the full season, citing Rick Porcello’s Cy Young season in 2016 and more recently, 2025 standouts like Kris Bubic, Shane Smith, and Tyler Mahle.
I set the parameters for this type of pitcher around a variety of the statistics that fantasy managers look to when determining the staying power of a starting pitcher.
“We want to find pitchers who are suppressing runs and locating, but who may be considered unsustainable due to underlying metrics, specifically around the GIF making Stuff+ and K-BB%. To capture this, we’ll focus on pitchers with Stuff+ below 100, a Location+ above 100, a K-BB% of 17% or less, and an ERA below 3.00.”
Here was that list as of May 1 this season.
The so-called “back of the baseball card” numbers still matter to us. No matter how many new-fangled metrics are concocted, we can’t keep our eye from straying towards the .300 AVG/30 HR/100 RBI hitter. That’s the ideal. It’s how we were trained to think about players.
In this article series, I’ll point out two 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.
While it’s still too early to tell what their cost will be, I’d argue that given their numbers, paced out to 162 games, make them some of the best players in fantasy, and they’re unlikely to cost what they’re worth.
Last week, I covered Logan Henderson, who was the second-ranked pitcher on a per-162 basis via the Fangraphs Player Rater this season, slotting in right behind Jacob Misiorowski.
This week, I’ll cover Jeremy Peña. The franchise shortstop for the Houston Astros is still just 28 years old and I think he’s quietly been starting to make good on the first impression he made during the 2022 playoffs.
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.
