The 2019 season is here.  Let’s get right to it.

1 – Dan Vogelbach will finish with a wOBA higher than Vladimir Guerrero, Jr.

You could say that to date neither Dan Vogelbach nor Vladimir Guererro, Jr. have accomplished anything in the major leagues.  While true, that’s where the comparison ends.  Vogelbach is 26 years old and has less than 150 major league plate appearances on his resume (career 78 wRC+). Vlad, Jr. just turned 20 years old, is the consensus #1 prospect in baseball, and is the son of a beloved Hall of Fame player.

I have absolutely nothing against Vlad, Jr. and am as excited as anyone else to watch him carve out what is likely to be a stunning career with the bat.  However, as I tried to express recently, the expectations are so high here that we may all be setting ourselves up for a little bit of disappointment.  As we are often reminded with even elite prospects, baseball is hard, and the game has a funny way of humbling even the most talented athletes in the world, at least for a time.  Patience will be prudent with Vlad, Jr., but most of us will have none of it.

Vogelbach has posted a minor league slash of .282/.391/.472/.864 over eight seasons, including a .907 OPS in 342 AAA games.  He’s a professional hitter, but up until this point he’s had Nelson Cruz blocking his path to SEA.  That roadblock is now removed, and as of this writing it’s all but certain Vogelbach will get a shot to stick on the Mariners’ roster to begin the season.  From the write up for the 2019 Seattle top prospects:

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I went just 2.5/10 last year, but I’m smashing that mark this year and going 3/10!!! For me, the real value in these is putting some names on your radar in a context you might not have considered. I’d love to be right, but these are bold predictions meaning they are unlikely to come to fruition without major skills development (I went all positive this year) and a good bit of luck. Getting the stars to align like that on one player and one pitcher is hard enough, let alone five of each. But there is still wiggle room between these bold predictions and the player’s projections to be wins for us and contribute to our fantasy titles. So without further ado…

Ramon Laureano goes 25 HR/40 SB

This is the culmination of a winter spent gushing over Laureano. I just didn’t see how I could leave him out of this piece. Same with another Oakland Athletic coming up. It’s no surprise I’m a huge fan, but I wanted to express just exactly what I think the high end could be with a bold prediction for each. Laureano’s elite defense should absolutely secure his playing time and he’s a premium speedster with emerging pop. He matched Dee Gordon’s 29.0 ft/sec sprint speed last year and stole 36 bases per 600 PA in the minors. Hopefully the A’s let him maximize the wheels.

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Another year, another set of bold predictions, and another introduction to The Process^TM. I did well last year, hitting on Matt Chapman and Miles Mikolas out-earning their teammates Matt Olson and Luke Weaver despite enormous divides in National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) average draft position (ADP) as well as Madison Bumgarner being worse than a not-top-20 starting pitcher (with an asterisk for his late start in 2019). I might’ve hit more bold predictions last year than in my previous three seasons combined.

Bold predictions can but don’t have to be a frivolous exercise. As fun as it is to slap a 40-homer prediction on Franmil Reyes (…should I do that?), I don’t find it particularly illuminating unless it’s supported by evidence (…which exists for Reyes?!). You can make bold predictions without being outrageously bold — it’s exactly what I intended to accomplish last year simply by leveraging what I observed to be extreme market inefficiencies at play. I stuck my neck out for Chapman and Mikolas and Bumgarner, but not as far as folks might think. There was enough evidence in their (and, where applicable, in their teammates’) bodies of work for me to make objectively bold predictions on the basis of draft price or market consensus without them feeling particularly bold to me.

While endeavoring to go 6-for-10 this year just to match last year’s hit rate would be absurd, I do think I can hit another three, at least, in 2019 if I pick my spots correctly. So, here goes: my 10 bold predictions for 2019.

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One of us happens to live hard by a Goodwill Super Store, and he occasionally drops in just to see what people are giving away. All right, he sometimes buys stuff too, but it’s nice stuff, and the price is right. And we like to think of ourselves as the Goodwill Store of Fantasy Baseball, setting out a rack of bargains for you while others urge you to pay full price for name brands.

Hence our annual feature: not the humdrum Ten Bold Predictions you might find elsewhere, though of course never on Rotographs. Rather they are the outre, gauche, and louche Ten Bold Predictions in which we specialize. This year, we’ve tried to concentrate on players that you might take, either for a dollar or in the reserve rounds, in even a relatively shallow draft—say the 30-player NFBC Main Event. But we wouldn’t be the Birchwood Brothers if we didn’t offer at least one Ouija Board longshot, and since we are in fact the Birchwood Brothers, we did. And, as always, we add an eleventh Bold Prediction, about a guy who’ll cost considerably more than a dollar. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah yes. Predictions. While they might not always be accurate, they sure are fun to make. So comin’ in hot just ahead of opening day in Japan are my boldest ideas about what will happen during the 2019 baseball season.

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I did not pack quite enough boldness into my Bold Predictions column, so I am branching out into a second column. This time around, I’ve got fewer predictions but I’m going more in-depth for these final ones.

I could just go with the short versions for my final two predictions: I’m not a Belieber, and it could be a new dawn for Orlando Arcia. But I’ll explain why I’m bearish on a top 40 starting pitcher in ADP but intrigued by a shortstop being drafted outside the top 400.
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The other day, my wife asked me what my next column was going to be about, and I told her it would be my annual Bold Predictions piece. She wanted to contribute a prediction, and when I asked her what it would be, I realized it would be the perfect addition to this column.

So the first-ever Bold Prediction for Mary Beth Melchior is this: J.T. Realmuto will break the all-time single-season record for home runs for a catcher.
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So here it is – my first bold predictions piece. I love making bold predictions, and all of these will probably turn out to be wrong, but here goes.

1. Yasiel Puig finishes in the top-5 of the MVP Voting.

Expecting Puig to break out in the friendly confines of the Great American (Launching Pad) Ballpark isn’t bold, but I think this is. Last year, Puig posted his best wRC+ since 2014, and the best major league .ISO of his career. Even better, his strikeout (19.6%) and walk (8.1%) rates stayed pretty much in the range of his career marks (19.2% and 9.2% , respectively), meaning he wasn’t selling out for power. Puig also raked at a .270/.329/.546 rate in the second half, suggesting that he might have even more power than what he showed this year. Moving to a hitter-friendly ballpark in a division with weaker pitching, a deceptively good lineup, and in a contract year, I expect Puig to obliterate his career highs in just about every counting stat except stolen bases. I expect 30 homers, 100 RBIs, and an OPS better than .900, and a .300/.400/.500 season with 40+ homers wouldn’t surprise me.

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It’s time. Dust off your salty #NotBold hot takes because it’s bold prediction season at RotoGraphs. This year, we’re mixing things up by adding… *checks notes* ah, excuse me that was the script for the MTV reality spin off of Bold Predictions. It’s still the same game as past years. I try to name 10 things that are implausible but might happen. Later I lament about how badly I missed.

Last year I went waaaaaay too bold. This time, I’m going back to skirting the bold/not bold line. In my experience, negative predictions are massively more likely to turn out correct than positive ones. To increase the challenge, I’ll be focusing on upside more than downside.

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When introducing my 2018 bold predictions, I talked about “not being bold just to be bold.” I sought to demonstrate that, by “abiding by The Process ^TM,” I could make bold predictions that, frankly, didn’t feel all htat bold to me. In hindsight, it’s easy to say how they really weren’t bold. But back when I made them, based on available average draft position (ADP) data, they were, by definition, bold.

It would sound arrogant for me to say my bold predictions this year could be used as a clinic on extracting value in drafts (especially with the social baggage that “putting on a clinic” carries these days). However, it might not be untrue: I hit three of my five predictions, all of them relating to guys who played key roles in the drafts of successful teams this year. Please, do forgive the arrogance, then; I’ll do my best to explain how the strategies I employed this year are repeatable.

All end-of-season values will rely on ESPN’s Player Rater.

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