Last year was an ugly season at 1B. It’s usually a power-focused position, filled with homers and RBIs aplenty, both categories often coming from several players. The 30+ HR hitters at first base were sliced in half last year, dropping to just seven after 14 in 2017. The number of 100+ RBI guys at the position has been dwindling for a while now but sank to just three in 2018. There were a whopping 13 in 2009 followed by 9, 9, 8, 7, 7, 6, 5, and 5 before only Jesus Aguilar, Edwin Encarnacion, and Anthony Rizzo reached the mark last season.

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On Wednesday, the Angels signed Justin Bour to a one-year deal. After a mini-breakout in 2017 when he hit .289 with 25 homers, his batting average dropped to .227 with only 20 home runs in more plate appearances last season. This signing made perfect sense for the Angels who will have Shohei Ohtani rehabbing from Tommy John surgery and Albert Pujols being a member of the walking dead. Overall, this move just about killed what little value any fantasy the three had in weekly leagues but could make them sleepers in daily lineup leagues.

The biggest key is to understand the risk behind each player and let’s start off with the one who has the most questions surrounding him, Ohtani. He’s also considered a safe pick by some analysts. According to reports, he should be able to contribute sooner than the normal nine to 10 months timeline for most hitters returning from the surgery because he’ll only DH.

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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.

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Contrary to popular belief, the secret to rebuilding (and winning) your fantasy league is not hoarding prospects. This season, you could be waiting patiently for the arrivals of Michael Kopech, Willie Calhoun, and Luis Urias to save your team, or you could have jumped on pop-up producers like Max Muncy, Jesus Aguilar, and Ross Stripling. Last year, Aaron Judge, Luis Severino, and Charlie Morton were universally available if your timing was right.

The thing about prospects is that sometimes they pan out, and sometimes they don’t. Even a “successful” one like Ronald Acuña has just a 114 wRC+, with a rest-of-season projection slightly below that. In real life, that’s fantastic for a 20-year-old and Acuña is a likely future star. But in the meantime his production is nothing special.

And again: Acuña is a success story. Owners might wait years for the likes of Byron Buxton, Dansby Swanson, and Alex Reyes to carry their teams to relevancy. All the while, players like the following four who are owned in less than 40 percent (well, actually, 43 percent) of Ottoneu leagues have been quietly carrying contenders: Read the rest of this entry »

We’re about to flip the calendar to July and many of us have teams that are floundering in the middle-to-low end of the standings. If there’s any hope to contend, not only will your current players have to turn it around, but you’re going to need some gems to emerge either off the wire or via trade. Acquiring elite assets will cost elite assets and if you had those, you wouldn’t be in this position in the first place so it’s time to take some gambles. Here’s a list of affordable assets who could perform well beyond their cost based on previous performance, skills, and/or improved health.

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If there’s one thing I truly excel at — and that’s a pretty big “if” — it’s being way, way too early when deeming players ready for fantasy relevance. For a perfect example, I’d like to present as evidence the fact that I wrote this glowing piece on Jesus Aguilar over four years ago, back in April of 2014. Over the next three seasons, Aguilar picked up a whopping 64 total plate appearances in the majors, hitting .172/.234/.190 in this extremely limited sample.

Last season, Aguilar finally got a chance to show what he could do at the game’s highest level. While he hit quite well — registering a triple slash of .265/.331/.505 with 16 home runs — his playing time was still limited by a combination of the Brewers’ organizational depth and his own substandard defensive skills, as he picked up just 311 PA in 113 games. Eric Thames started 103 games at first base for the Brew Crew last year, leaving Aguilar to pick up the scraps where he could — he got 53 starts at 1B, with the rest of his playing time coming as a pinch hitter, or as a designated hitter in American League parks.

Coming into 2018, it looked like Aguilar’s path to playing time was as unclear as ever. Milwaukee’s outfield was so stacked that it appeared their first-base playing time would be split between Thames and Ryan Braun, leaving Aguilar as the odd man out again. However, when Thames went down with a torn thumb ligament in late April, Aguilar took full advantage of the chance to play nearly every day.

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Saying that Dan Vogelbach is on the verge of fantasy relevance takes some storytelling cues from “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Back in 2016, it seemed like only a matter of time until Vogey was a regular fantasy contributor. In the first half of 2016, Vogelbach hit .318/.425/.548 in Triple-A Iowa, with 16 homers and 18 doubles in 89 games. However, with Anthony Rizzo entrenched at first base, Vogey didn’t seem to have a role with the Cubs, so they dealt him to Seattle in exchange for Mike Montgomery.

Mostly because of his poor defense — but certainly also due in part to his non-athletic body — Vogelbach was never a darling of top prospect lists, but for fantasy purposes he seemed like a relatively sure thing for production in Seattle. As it turned out, he slowed down a bit after joining the Mariners system, hitting .240/.404/.422 over the final 44 games of 2016, and with Adam Lind performing at an okay-ish rate for the major-league club, it seemed Vogey would have to wait until 2017 to strut his chubby stuff in the big leagues.

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Real baseball starts next Thursday. Let’s wrap up the final full week of the offseason by checking in on an old sabermetric darling.

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Our staff composite rankings are back! We’re kicking things off with Catcher and we’ll be rolling out a new position each day over the next week-plus. I will still be doing my commentary by position rankings to give a quick little thought, but those will be separate posts.

We’re using Yahoo! eligibility requirements which is 5 starts or 10 appearances. These rankings assume the standard 5×5 categories and a re-draft league. If we forgot someone, please let us know in the comments and we’ll make sure he’s added for the updates. If you have questions for a specific ranker on something he did, let us know in the comments. We can also be reached via Twitter:

• Paul Sporer
• Jeff Zimmerman
• Mike Podhorzer
• Justin Mason

There will be differences, sharp differences, within the rankings. The rankers have different philosophies when it comes to ranking, some of which you’re no doubt familiar with through previous iterations. Of course the idea that we’d all think the same would be silly because then what would be the point of including multiple rankers?! Think someone should be higher or lower? Make a case. Let us know why you think that. The chart is sortable. If a ranker didn’t rank someone that the others did, he was given that ranker’s last rank +1.

You can also check out my 1B rankings with commentary here.

Key:

• AVG– just the average of the seven ranking sets
• Adj. AVG– the average minus the high and low rankings
• SPLIT– the difference between the high and low rankings

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3/1/18

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 19, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER19!

Follow us on Twitter

• @sporer – Host
• @justinmasonfwfb – Producer/Co-Host
• @jasoncollette – Co-Host

Follow The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational info here!

Logo designed discussed in the show can be found here: 78_AllStar

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