As you may have guessed, the following is a list of five players who deserve to be monitored. In most cases, you probably won’t want to draft or rush to the wire for these guys. Just keep an eye on their stock.

Juan Nicasio – SP/RP

Chances are, you’ve heard some buzz about Nicasio this spring. What he’s done is pretty buzz worthy – 15 innings, 10 hits, five walks, and 24 strikeouts. Nicasio returned to major league relevance last summer. He pitched out of the Dodgers bullpen, averaging 95 mph with his fastball and also using an average slider. Over his career, he’s mostly been a fastball-slider guy with a few changeups and sinkers mixed in for variety.

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When your leaguemates start paying too much for closers, there’s only one thing to do – queue up your closer sleepers. The following is quick analysis of my favorite closers-in-waiting. You can use these guys as elite sources for holds or handcuffs to unstable closers. Yesterday’s post covered the NL, today we move to the AL.

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Each week until the start of the season, we’re looking at deep league options currently going late in drafts or not at all. Last week we covered catchers and this week we’re onto first basemen. In addition to the two titular-featured players, I’ve thrown in a third as a bonus who’s being drafted in the middle rounds of standard leagues but going well outside the top 12 at the position.

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When your leaguemates start paying too much for closers, there’s only one thing to do – queue up your closer sleepers. The following is quick analysis of my favorite closers-in-waiting. You can use these guys as elite sources for holds or handcuffs to unstable closers. We’ll do the NL today and the AL tomorrow.

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I am a huge San Francisco Giants fan. However, if you have followed my work prior to joining Rotographs, you know I hate Gregor Blanco. I will explain further. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m always torn when setting a draft date for a fantasy league, particularly a redraft one. Most people I play with generally want the draft to be as close to the start of the regular season as possible, which makes sense – the longer you wait, the more information becomes available, and the more certainty players have, especially when it comes to playing-time estimates.

Depending on your level of risk-seeking, the depth of the league, and your confidence in finding early-season waiver-wire sleepers, an earlier draft might be your preference. It’s certainly mine. In those cases, I’m comfortable using picks in the later rounds on sleepers who may or may not make a team, trusting that if they wind up optioned to the minor leagues (or designated for assignment, as it were), I’ll be able to plug someone in out of the free-agent bin comparable to a “floor” pick I could have otherwise used that selection on.

The longer you wait to do your draft, the less opportunity there is to take those playing-time-uncertain fliers. Either those players will be deemed to be without a job, or others will have grown wise to their hold on a job, bidding the price up.

My favorite example to illustrate the impact of draft timing this year is Trea Turner, the No. 2 prospect of the potential NL East-champion Washington Nationals.
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Everyone loves value, and paying down at pitcher is quite popular — even in writer/expert leagues. Waiting on pitchers puts some extra pressure on hitting on value plays to offset the lack of a “true” ace. That’s not to say the following pitchers will perform like fantasy aces, but they do appear poised to outperform their draft positions — some by a significant amount, in my opinion. Each of the five pitchers highlighted below is being selected outside of the top-50 starting pitchers in NFBC drafts, just one is being selected inside the top-200 picks on average, and three of the five are being selected, on average, outside of the top-250 players.

*NFBC ADP data current as of March 10th. Read the rest of this entry »

So here you are, a month from Opening Day, reading a Deep League Waiver Wire column. If you’re actually perusing the wire, it’s either because you’re one of the few fantasy owners who’s already drafted or, like me, you’re frantically patching holes in a sinking fantasy Spring Training team that’s been decimated by injuries.

I’m writing this weekly column to help those of you looking at rather threadbare free agent pools find suitable replacements, Plan Bs, and maybe if we strike gold together, some…gold. This week, we focus on a couple overlooked catchers who are either going late in drafts or not at all. So, let’s go digging.

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Perhaps our very worst prediction of 2015—there’s intense competition for the honor– was that Jordan Schafer would lead the American League in stolen bases. As it developed, he tied for last in the AL, with zero. You can grasp our reasoning, though. Schafer, a year ago, was 28, was among the all-time top 100 in stolen base percentage, had stolen more than 100 bases over the previous four seasons of decidedly part-time play, and was the Twins’ center fielder of choice. He somehow contrived, over the course of April and May, to play himself not only out of the Twins’ starting lineup but out of professional baseball entirely. A .217/.250/.261 slash line, plus three caught-stealings and no stolen bases when your principal asset is speed, will do that to you.

So of course we’re eager to tell you who the 2016 version of Jordan Schafer is. By this, we mean the player most likely either to steal far more bases than anyone envisions or to put the quietus on his career. As we wrote last year, our mistake with Schafer was not taking seriously his spring training record, which was short on speed and long on slow. Thus, our recommendation this year comes with a sub-recommendation: Watch this guy during spring training (or let us watch for you; we promise to report back). If there’s evidence that he can’t run, and you haven’t already got him, don’t take him; if you’ve got him, jettison him, as his team will presumably get around to doing. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t even know what “special cloth alert” means, but I do follow DJ Khaled on Snapchat so I say it a lot to Charlotte. And she’s just all like, wtf are you talking about now? OK then, jeez. Anyway, I’ve interpreted it as a positive based on the many special cloth alerts that Khaled has issued in 10-second bits of majesty. So now I’m offering up a special cloth alert on two power-speed hitters who have a real shot at improving upon their 2015 seasons and exploding into early-round assets.

Odubel Herrera | PHI | OF

Did you catch Herrera’s 2015? It’s easy to miss good-not-great seasons on terrible teams. Plus, he was a Rule 5 pick so he wasn’t super well-known coming into the season. He came up through the Texas org. as a light-hitting speedster with a .294/.354/.377 line, 3 HR, and 30 SB per 600 PA. He was given grades of 40 hit, 50+ speed, 50+ defense, and 20 power (35 raw). So how did he pop 8 HR – 60% more than his previous career high? Must’ve been a bunch wall-scrapers.

Orrrrr… he was a monster?

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