Every season, in addition to posting my standard bold predictions (which I’ll publish next week), I up the ante with my bold league leaders. If you thought nailing a bold prediction was tough, the bold league leaders are even more difficult! Just getting one right is worthy of celebration. Because these are bold, I automatically disqualify players I don’t personally believe would be considered bold or is already projected to finish top five in the category. So I challenge myself and it typically causes me to bat .000, though I actually have hit on a couple over the years. This is more for fun and dreaming of what could be, rather than any serious attempt at being right. Naturally, I use my Pod Projections to identify players with that 80th-90th percentile upside to vault to the top of the category mountains.

Today, I’ll start with the bold hitting league leaders in each of the five categories, split up by league. Next Monday I’ll move on to the pitchers.

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1) Zach Eflin is the Matthew Boyd of 2020.

Matt Boyd had a lot of buzz coming into the 2020 season. He had a stellar first half of 2019 and the high strikeout rate seemed like an intriguing option. Well, this year it seems like Zach Eflin is being touted by several analysts in the fantasy baseball Twitterverse. Last season overall Eflin produced a 3.97 ERA, 3.39 FIP, and an impressive 28.6 K%.

Of course, any time a pitcher raises their strikeout rate by 10% it will bring excitement. I’m here to temper those expectations. On the surface level let’s look at what he did in two months compared to his career average.

A ton of improvement compared to his career numbers. Eflin is only 26 so growth can occur but with improvements on surface stats, we have to look deeper to figure out why he improved.

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For the shortened 60 game season, I wasn’t in the mood to post 10 bold predictions, so I settled with six. The upside of the fewer games is greater potential for the random and unexpected to occur, which means a higher rate of bold prediction hits…hopefully. Let’s see if that turned out to be true.

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With two ratio categories as opposed to one for hitters, a shortened season is an even better opportunity for me to get a bold pitcher league leader correct! Let’s see if I did.

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Every year I take the bold and daring adventure known as bold league leaders. I rarely get any of these right, but it’s fun to decide on the names, and might give you the little nudge you need to roster a chosen player. In a shortened season, it’s a little easier to get one of these right since more luck is involved, which I need a lot of if I’m not picking the obvious choices. So let’s see how I did with my 2020 Bold Hitter League Leaders.

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At this point, when it comes to bold predictions, you should know the drill. Yet it feels increasingly cliché to lead with, “you know the drill.” Nevertheless: you know the drill. We make bold predictions before the season and we review them after the season.

One thing I make a point of highlighting I try to make my predictions sufficiently bold while also actionable. “David Fletcher will hit 50 home runs” is a certifiably insane prediction, but it is not actionable because what do you do with this information? You over-draft him, sure, but by how much?

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The 2020 MLB regular season has now concluded. In most years, this introductory sentence would be a simple fact. One ordinarily would not pay much attention to such an evident truth. However, in 2020, the consequence of baseball completing the year without a major full stop is a sparkling achievement.

Yes, the Marlins and Cardinals did not play for the course of about a week due to team COVID infections. Yes, there were more make-up doubleheaders played in 2020 than in any season during my lifetime. Yes, there were a few teams that made the playoffs despite a losing record. Yes, the league-wide batting average of .245 was the 6^th lowest full-season mark since 1900.

But baseball made it through, and now embarks on their expanded playoffs journey.

As such, it is now time to check back on how we fared in the fantasy season. For me personally, it was a rather positive one. I did not finish below 6^th place in any league that I played in this year. Amazingly, I was crowned as the 2020 Tout Wars Head to Head League Champion, my very first expert league title. 2020 showed that the ATC projections work well, even in smaller sample sizes.

In today’s article, I will recap my 2020 bold predictions. To remind the reader, the goal at the outset was to predict 70^th to 90^th percentile events (10% to 30% likely occurrences). I don’t expect to get the majority of these correct. If I wanted to achieve a higher success rate, I would simply have predicted that Jacob deGrom would win the Cy Young award, and the like.

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We have a shortened season which brings a lot of bold predictions into play. In fact, it might actually keep them from being bold which means we’ll have to amp up the boldness. I’ve got five I think are bold enough to qualify here. Let me know what you think in the comments and include your own big time bold prediction. Again, it has to be feasible but not obvious. Franmil Reyes isn’t projected to lead baseball in homers, but it’s not terribly bold to pick him, either. My boy Frankie Montas is a legitimate AL Cy Young candidate so while he’s far from the favorite, picking him wouldn’t really catch anyone’s attention.

Ramón Laureano is the #1 OF

The 25-year old power-speed stud for the A’s broke out with a 126 wRC+, .288 AVG, 24 HR, and 13 SB in 481 PA last year, good for 32nd on the Auction Calculator at the position with volume no doubt holding him back. With health, he’ll play close to all 60 games as a stud defender in center for Oakland which will give him a real chance to be tops at the position. He’s projected to finish 32nd again in the ATC projections thanks to a major dip in AVG, but I think he can deliver something special like a .320 AVG, 18 HR, and 15 SB with 37 R and 30 RBI.

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These hallowed pages have borne (bore? beared? how am I even a writer?) witness to many bold predictions — some good, most bad. Last year’s hits and near-hits include Kirby Yates, Jeff McNeil, Mike Tauchman, and Domingo German; previous hits include Jose Ramirez, Madison Bumgarner (not being an ace), Matt Chapman, and Miles Mikolas, among others, as well as other near-hits not worth repeating.

Sometimes, bold predictions aren’t entirely so. I try to make my predictions legitimately bold (bordering on impossible), actionable, and strategic. It’s not helpful for someone to boldly predict Giancarlo Stanton will hit 25 homers in a 60-game season, however fun a prediction that may be.

It’s (less than) half a season, so you get half the predictions, although I’ll include some less-bold low-hanging fruit at the end, for posterity.

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I’m going to do a standard Bold Predictions later (maybe even on Friday since I don’t think two games on Thursday will invalidate anything), but first I wanted to pick some super outliers. Projections keep us level with our expectations, but our recently added 60-game leaderboard shows us that some wild stuff can go down in a two-month run.

I focused on the skill-based fantasy categories so I’m not doing anything with wins, saves, runs, or runs batted in. There will be some crazy results with those four categories, but role and team context are so important for those that options would be too limited. For the pitching ratios, I’ll be picking starting pitchers.

25+ HR GUY | Franmil Reyes, CLE

He ripped off a 21-homer run in a 60-game stretch last year that saw him hit .273/.316/.598 in 225 PA. That’s undoubtedly a great run, but I don’t think it’s the best he can do. I feel like Reyes’ best would include an OPS north of 1.000 for sure. He almost certainly won’t play all 60 games so he’ll need to push a 1.000+ OPS to smash 25+ homers in 50-55 games.

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