Let’s get right back to our odyssey around MLB in search of the underestimated and the overlooked. This week, the final  installment, covering the NL Central and the NL West. Numbers in parentheses are the Average Draft Positions of the players in question, derived from draft results in National Fantasy Baseball Championship Draft Champions leagues since the start of the year. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s continue our reconnaissance through MLB in search of reserve-round picks—the more camouflaged the better–whom we expect to outperform the market’s expectations. This week: AL West and NL East. The numbers in parentheses are the average draft positions in the 68 National Fantasy Baseball Champions Draft Champions (15 teams, 50 players a team, no FAABs) completed since the start of the year.

Angels: Jared Walsh (350) is to 2023 as Christian Walker was to 2022: a power hitter with a doctor’s note. Through June 21^st last season, Walsh hit .265 with 13 home runs in 266 plate appearances. Thereafter: 188 PAs, 2 home runs, .144, until he packed it in for the season in late August. He then had surgery for thoracic outlet syndrome, and while he’s still a bit under the weather, he says he’ll be fine by opening day. We envision a Walkeresque season of 30 or so home runs and a .260 BA.
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One downside I have noticed in this stat-heavy era of fantasy baseball is that we sometimes struggle to see potential breakouts from guys who don’t have clear indicators in their underlying data. I understand why, but it can lead to glossing over growth candidates who take development strides beyond what their numbers suggested.

Trent Grisham | SDP, OF | 271 ADP – 63rd OF

It was an unquestionably bad season at the dish for Grish. He posted a career-low 83 wRC+ with 17 HR, 7 SB, and a career-high 29% K rate in 524 PA. He played enough strong defense to net a second Gold Glove win and put up a third straight 2-WAR season. He had the desired 100-point AVG/OBP split but that’s less impressive when he hit just .184! He values his walks with an 11% rate this past season and for his career, but perhaps being a bit more aggressive would favor him.

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Okay, just one-nneee more look at a couple of early sleepers, and then we’ll take this poor horse to the upstate farm it’s always dreamed of. This time out, let’s get heavy with the dongs, searching for some of that elusive late-draft power. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back, fearless readers! With another week of cold and dark, fantasy-less days behind us, let’s look at a few more players who might just fulfill the exact criteria of what a sleeper truly is. Because if we’re not planting early flags, what are we even doing?

Last time out we looked at a couple of sleepy fellas for 2023, so if you want to check them out or go over our value criteria, please feel free to do so here. But considering that my two young children have equaled me going to no less than five Halloween events over the next four days, we should really go ahead and get down to business. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I examined some of the reserve round picks in the AL LABR auction. Today, I’ve moved to the NL auction. To put it simply, the player talent took a significant step down from the AL options. So many players were rostered who will never make it to the majors this season or are just plain bad. For example, Nomar Mazara, who has yet to sign with a team and never had a productive major league season, was rostered.

Here are all the reserve picks

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Every year, USA Today’s Steve Gardner hosts four LABR drafts and auctions. The LABR draft happened a couple of weeks ago with the three auctions (12 team AL, NL, and mixed) happening this past weekend. I was lucky enough to participate in the 12-team mixed auction (more on it later), but the most useful information is digging into the reserve picks. Sometimes I’ve never even heard of them. I’m going to dive into some of these end-game players from the AL auction and look for any hidden gems.

Here are all the reserve picks

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Back for the third and final segment of our spin through the underrated, underused, and underperforming, in search of candidates for your, and our, deep-league drafts. The numbers in parentheses are NFBC Average Draft Positions.

Milwaukee: This is a real good team, but its players are by and large underrated by the market. If you need an instant draft strategy, you could do worse than just draft the best available Brewer. Our favorite may be Keston Hiura (443). We’re not sure what happened to him the past two years, but one thing that certainly happened is that he got unlucky, by virtue of his low BABIP and HR/FB while sustaining a (relatively) high hard-hit percentage. What won us over was the precipitous drop in HR/FB (26% to 10%) coupled with a big bump in average fly ball distance (171 feet to 189 feet). We expect that anomaly to correct itself. We also note that JC Mejia (750) did nothing wrong last year except accede to Cleveland’s attempts to make him a starter. He was superb as a reliever in both Cleveland and the Dominican, and may have a future as a multi-inning guy.

St. Louis: This is a rather thin team that nonetheless offers very few late-round bargains. As long as you don’t fetishize strikeouts, Dakota Hudson is certainly worth getting earlier than ADP 433. Likewise Jake Woodford (748), who, but for one atrocious outing against Minnesota, pitched pretty well.

Cubs: Even if they don’t trade Willson Contreras, Yan Gomes will play enough and hit enough for you to take him before his ADP of 361. We wouldn’t say we actually like Jason Heyward (705), but he should remain in the lineup all season, and figures to have what has become his typical season; .240 or so, 10 home runs, 5 stolen bases. You could do worse than have him around as a plug-in when an A-Team outfielder goes down. And we are baffled as to how Brad Wieck can be at ADP 750 after his 17 scoreless innings last year. Yeah, he was hurt, and his control’s a problem. But he’s apparently healthy now, he gets a ton of strikeouts, and he has a legitimate shot at winding up as the team’s closer.

Pittsburgh: Not many guys on this team excite us. Anthony Alford (569) won’t hit more than .240, but if he plays every day, as Roster Resource indicates he might, he could well hit 15 home runs and steal 15 bases. Also here is Greg Allen (718), who has long been one of our favorites, though our love has gone largely unrequited. It’s easy to imagine him beating out Alford for the left field job or Ben Gamel for the right field job, and hitting about .250 with a ton of stolen bases.

Cincinnati: There are an awful lot of question marks on this team. Can Jesse Winker stay healthy? (Doubtful.) Is Eugenio Suarez done for? (Wish we were confident of a comeback, but we’re not.) Is TJ Friedl really a major league caliber center fielder? (He looks more like a bench player to us.) We’ve been looking, so far in vain, for complete and accurate information about Nick Senzel’s health. If in fact he’s healthy, he might be worth getting at ADP 470. It also appears to us that Vladimir Gutierrez just wore down towards the end of the season, and that his good three-month run before that makes him a solid pickup at ADP 598.

Arizona: Contemplating this team fills us with lassitude—so much so that we can’t get a clear take on them. We can imagine them winning, say, 85 games, and we can imagine them being even worse than they were last season. One guy we like is Christian Walker. He’s got a doctor’s note covering both 2020 and 2021, when his power just disappeared. We can envision it returning, and the possibility that it will makes him worth getting at ADP 445. We can certainly all live full and productive lives without acquiring any of this team’s pitchers, but the chance that new pitching coach Brent Strom, dear to our hearts as one of the few guys in uniform who’s decisively older than we are, can work his accustomed magic might make it worth your while to get, say, Luke Weaver (456), Merrill Kelly 켈리 (466), or Caleb Smith (647).

Dodgers: The only guy we see who’s not obvious is Alex Vesia (708). It’s possible Kenley Jansen will re-sign with the Dodgers—that’s what he did last time he was a free agent—but having watched his walk-heavy high-wire act last year, when he was erratic and, we think, very fortunate to post the numbers he did, we’re not so sure that, at 34, he’ll keep his balance for another season. Yes, we know that Blake Treinen is here, and that he was magnificent last season. But we also know that he’s had a career-long tendency to follow magnificent seasons with decidedly non-magnificent ones. So we can imagine Vesia taking over as the closer pretty early in the season. If only the obvious Dodgers will do for you, there are Edwin Rios (599) and Matt Beaty (643), whom you might obtain on the theory that they will replace injured guys, play a fair amount, and hit a little.

San Francisco: We have spent more time than we should have trying and failing to ascertain what “procedure” Tommy La Stella had on his Achilles tendon. We are, unfortunately, connoisseurs of Achilles surgery, and we know that there are some procedures that leave you good as new and some procedures that leave you unable to manage anything more demanding than over-40 slow-pitch. If La Stella had the former sort, he may well be ready to rock, and if so, he will lead off, which makes him worth getting at ADP 535. As for pitchers: we are forced to admit that Sammy Long (645) had never even creased our consciousnesses before we did our preparation for this season. But now that he has, we are intrigued enough by his minor-league record to put him on our list of possible late draftees.

San Diego: We can’t explain why Austin Nola is at ADP 350, since he will start and is an above-average hitter for a catcher. He was hurt most of last year, but he’s not notably injury-prone, so we regard him as a bargain. We also think that Ha-Seong Kim 김하성 isn’t as bad a hitter as he appeared to be last year, though he may not get a chance to prove it if no one gets hurt. But someone will, so ADP 379, in light of his multi-position eligibility, is an okay price, though not a wonderful one.

Colorado: It looks to us like Elehuris Montero (724) is a better hitter than Colton Welker (696), and thus should be the first guy called up when a third baseman is needed, but it’s not clear that the Rockies share that view. The danger of getting a Rockies closer is that even the really good ones are likely to blow up in a couple of games and impair your ERA and WHIP. Nonetheless, we were satisfied owners of Daniel Bard last season, and won’t mind getting Carlos Estevez (484) in the 30th round or so. However: Robert Stephenson (694) came around really nicely last season. We think he’s a better pitcher than Estevez and might even emerge from spring training, assuming there is one, with the closer’s job.

Last week, I investigated fastball pitch values as provided by Pitch Info on our Pitch Value leaderboards. Here’s an interesting thing about pVal from our glossary that you probably already knew:

“If you have a great fastball, you’re going to usually have a great wFB, but if you also have a great slider, there’s a good chance it will help your wFB too. Pitch values are about the change in run expectancy against various pitches or the production against those pitches. You can’t leap from performance against a pitch to the quality of the pitch.”

From a fantasy perspective, it seems like a good play to find pitchers with good fastballs. But, what about pitchers with good fastballs and good secondary pitches? Think of Max Scherzer’s fastball/slider combo. Or, how about Trevor Rogers‘ fastball/changeup? That was good, right? In this article, I’ll take a look at pitchers with a nice one-two punch and try to determine if we can use this as a tool for the upcoming season.

I’ll be referring to a “plus” pitch as one with a pVal of one standard deviation or greater above the average. Of all pitchers who threw at least 100 innings in 2021, only four had a plus fastball and two plus secondary pitches. There were seven pitchers in this group who had a plus fastball and one other plus secondary. Here they are in table form:

The table above is full of great pitchers who threw a lot of innings last season. Does anyone surprise you? My guess would be no. Does this help you prepare for your draft? Probably not. But I don’t really know of anything that will tell us how good a pitcher’s curveball is expected to be next season. I suppose Eno Sarris’ Stuff+/Pitching+ is predictive in-season and becomes predictive quickly, but beyond that, how can we tell if Walker Buehler’s cutter will still be good? For now, I’m going to put the whole ‘is predictive’, ‘isn’t predictive’ talk to the side, and just focus on what happened last year. Let’s now look at the pitchers who showed a “plus” wFB in 2021 but did not post a “plus” secondary. This will allow us to imagine what they could be if they add a good secondary:

Anthony DeSclafani and Robbie Ray both just barely missed the wSL “plus” designation which is at 10 with the above player pool. Ranger Suarez also comes close to getting a wCH “plus” designation which is 4.2. However, all of these hurlers accumulated great value with the fastball and we can put our money on a few of them with some caveats. First, they have to repeat that fastball value, and second, they have to improve one of their secondary offerings. If you feel confident that that can happen, you may want to bump these pitchers up a few slots. Not that you had Robbie Ray pinned as a sleeper, but maybe you passed right over DeSclafani in your mock draft, and now, he’s got your attention.

Projecting pVals is probably as difficult as projecting CBA negotiation outcomes, but what happened in the past can inform us of what will happen in the future, even if it is not “sticky”. Regardless, this examination just gives you one more thing to think about when there’s a run on the catcher position in your draft, leaving you with too many great SP values to choose from.

Let’s return without delay to the task at hand, which we began last week: our attempt to identify at least one lightly-regarded (cheap or reserve-round) player who might do something this season, assuming with unwarranted optimism that there’s a “this season” that isn’t next season. This week, we’ll look at the AL West and the NL East. The numbers in parentheses are NFBC Average Draft Positions for all drafts.

Angels: As we mentioned in our first article of the year, we like Michael Stefanic (not taken), who could be in the lineup if either something ill befalls David Fletcher or the team doesn’t sign a free-agent shortstop. He’ll hit .270, possibly with a bit of power. And we are struggling to overcome our repeated disappointments in Justin Upton (586) over the years. It’s not clear that he’s got a significant role on this team, but we can imagine him getting the same 250 or so PAs he got last year before he got hurt, and hitting about the same (14 HR, .247) minus some age-related decline, which makes him worth getting at ADP 586.

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