About two and a half weeks in, we know it’s way too early to panic about slow-starters, yet many of you are itching to click that drop button. While I won’t be advising you to drop any of the players I discuss here, let’s evaluate their skills during their slow starts to see if there’s anything worrying to monitor over the next couple of weeks. I’ll stick with hitters that CBS ranked within its top 100 in the preseason.
Spring is the time for optimism. That’s why you see a lot more articles about breakouts and sleepers than busts. It’s easier to see the good in a player and how things can go right. But not today. It’s time to journey over to the dark side.
The truth of it is that many flops have some sort of injury component tied to them. The obvious ones are where they miss a ton of time and don’t really perform once they return. But then there’s ones like Brian Dozier’s 2018. We didn’t learn until late in 2018 that played most of the season with a deep bone bruise that undoubtedly played a role in his 90 wRC+, a six-year low. Sometimes a player just falls back and fails to meet expectations, though.
I’ve identified 10 players within the top 100 that I’m fading. Cost plays a major role here as I could see myself buying some of them if they became available several rounds later. In addition to their draft cost, I’m going to focus on their skills profile for reasons why I’m fading them and not just lean on potential injury.
Few aspects of fantasy baseball deviate more from the reality of major league baseball more than the speculation of prospects. Like most aspects of market-based economics, you often have to buy early on limited information if you want to get the best return on investment before the rest of the industry influences supply and demand. Perception is reality until prospects actually get the chance to contribute (or fail) on a major league field, and the outcome of those small but important samples can swing values wildly in short cycles.
The goal today is to identify up and coming talent well before the masses of most leagues, so here are five prospects primed to see a big increase in value in 2019. You won’t find these prospects sitting on many Top 100 lists (yet), but you’ll want to at least keep them on your radar as they rise in the future.
Yesterday, I discussed seven of last year’s breakouts and concluded with a verdict on whether I expect each to hold onto at least 80% of their 2018 end of season (EOS) dollar value this year. Today, I will discuss nine of 2018’s busts and conclude each blurb with a decision on whether they are likely to rebound.
A year ago during Fantasy Baseball Week at The Hardball Times, I researched whether last season’s breakouts were solid investments the following year. Spoiler alert: they are actually terrible investments. Of course, that’s as a group. That means that not every breakout from the previous season is going to fall flat the following year. So let’s discuss some of the big breakouts from 2018 and decide whether each ends up as part of the poor investment bust group or they hold onto their gains.
The 2018 season opened my eyes to the risk of young players losing playing time because of massive platoon splits. Usually, it’s the established major league veterans like Matt Adams who get platooned. Manual Margot was such a player who usually led off against lefties but was dropped in the batting order or even to the bench against righties. Those lost plate appearances can add up over the course of a season whittling away a hitter’s value. Today, I’m going focus the most talented hitters who are most like to be platooned.
For Tanner’s and my book, The Process, Steamer projections were kind enough to include every hitter’s projected OPS versus right and left-handed pitchers. From the book’s research, we found teams have historically started platooning hitters when one side of the platoon’s OPS drops below .650 and definitely at .600. Here are some the hitters who may end up in a platoon situation if their team decides to go that route. Besides the risk of sitting out games, some teams move these players up and down the lineup based platoon differences. I’m likely going to give some of these hitters a playing time adjustment.
Note: The projected platoon OPS are league and ballpark neutral and may seem off compared to the current projected OPS.
One of the keys to fantasy success involves finding when projections can be systematically off. The hard part for fantasy owners is that most of these findings, like pitch velocity, get quickly incorporated into projections. Since it’s difficult to find these discrepancies, I was intrigued when I saw this quote by Mitchel Lichtman (MGL) in an article he wrote:
So, the substantial under-projections seem to occur when a player gains speed but his wOBA remains about the same.
And by substantial, it was a 22 point difference is wOBA. This is a major difference and could point owners to some nice upside plays. I decided to go ahead and dive in.
Looking back, Jesus Aguilar had so many forces working to hold down his pre-season value, I’m amazed some teams rostered him (566th in NFBC ADP). While he had the tools for a breakout, it’s tough to find actionable pre-season moves to prevent similar players from slipping through the cracks. Once he got the opportunity to play, owners should have jumped in to roster him.
The first item to consider in the miss is that Aguilar’s projections weren’t glowing. Of all projected hitters in our pre-season depth charts, he came in at 245th by OPS. Not the best ranking for a 1B, especially compared to his teammate Eric Thames.
Here are the pair’s various OPS projections coming into the season.
| ZiPS | Steamer | ATC | The BAT | Average | Actual | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eric Thames | 0.855 | 0.834 | 0.865 | 84% | 85% | 78% |
| Jesus Aguilar | 0.734 | 0.728 | 0.818 | 77% | 76% | 89% |
In the #2earlymock drafts run by our own Justin Mason, Javier Baez is going 17th and Trevor Story is going 20th among all hitters. The picks are quite high considering Baez was the 58th hitter taken, and Story was 65th in NFBC drafts last year. The pair didn’t have must-draft preseason hype and their suspect plate discipline limited their perceived value. Both exceeded all expectations as they came in at 6th and 7th overall this year. This was a huge miss by the industry and I’m going to see if some traits point to why some low plate discipline players break out and others don’t.
For every Baez and Story, other bad plate discipline hitters failed like Byron Buxton (.383 OPS), Chris Davis (.539 OPS), Miguel Sano (.679 OPS) and Jonathan Schoop (.682 OPS). No obvious difference stood out. While Chris Davis is old, Buxton, Sano, and Schoop should be in their primes. To find out who may break out, I decided to start with the 2018 Bad Plate Discipline Class.
Every fantasy owner should sit down in the next week or so and reflect on what went right and wrong in their leagues. More than reflecting, they need to take a few notes on the journey to help themselves improve next season.
The process doesn’t need to take a while but an owner should at least get a couple points, good and bad, on each league. It’s time for a little humility because some owners need to continue to take positive small steps forward. The rest of us need to start catching up. Hopefully, the following will nudge a few owners to take some notes before going into offseason mode.
Overall, my season was a huge disappoint and I knew it was going to be a rough finish a couple months into the season. I made so many preseason and early season mistakes, I could never recover. Here are my leagues in order of finish.