One of the things I’ve really had to spend time on as I’ve transitioned to much deeper, dynasty-style leagues over the past few years is relief pitching. In a standard league, I can get away with taking one or two weaker closers towards the back end of drafts, fill out RP slots with some high upside guys, and churn the wire for the next flavor of the week. However, if you’re playing in a 16-team dynasty league with 40-man rosters, you can’t quite get away with that strategy. Danny Farquhar is the new closer? Taken. Looks like Jim Henderson has taken John Axford’s job? He’s been gone for weeks. Koji Uehara is the new ninth inning guy? Please, he was drafted months ago.

So while I still don’t pay heavily for guys with the closer(TM) tag, I have become much more interested in trying to snag high-upside, late draft relievers. If possible, I also try and grab guys on their way up, since we know fastball velocity is strongly tied to reliever strikeouts and said fastball velocity peaks early. Very early. There are a few names that stand out in 2014 who may be interesting options. All three have massively suppressed stocks after iffy seasons last year as well as the added benefit of being barely old enough to legally purchase a case of Coors Light. Yes, they may not be as high on the projection-based rankings as a guy like, say, Steve Delabar, but their lottery ticket upside is more intriguing. Not to mention having more upside for 2014 is great, but beyond is even better, too.

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Here’s a super easy post, I’ll admit it. All I did was take the difference between my rankings and the consensus rankings (which you can find on the right-hand nav bar) and sort. But I’ll do a little writeup for each group of hitters so you can know why I like them. The numbers listed for each player are steamer projections, which aren’t exactly what I used, but can give you an idea of how useful the player will be in your league. Good luck drafting.

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The 2014 Baseball America Prospect Handbook left outfielder Taylor Dugas off the Yankees’ Top 30 prospect list, and the New York system isn’t particularly well regarded, coming in 18th in BAs system rankings and 23rd in Baseball Prospectus’. It’s not hard to understand why he was omitted: Dugas turned 24 earlier this offseason and has yet to play in the upper minors. Across 172 games in three different levels in the low minors, he has a career .351 slugging percentage. The 5’8″, 170-pound lefty swinger certainly isn’t built to grow into a lot more power than that, either.

But those who consider Dugas an afterthought rather than a prospect are missing the boat.

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Abraham Almonte has overcome a veritable minefield of obstacles on his way to the majors, the most obvious of which being his height. Originally signed by the Yankees as a 17-year-old, the diminutive Dominican stands just 5’9″. Upon acquiring him, the Yankees tried Almonte as a second baseman in rookie ball before quickly shifting him to the outfield.

For the next seven years, he worked his way slowly through the organization, finally reaching Double-A in 2012. By that point, Almonte was generally viewed as a quick, switch-hitting outfielder who lacked the power to play in a corner spot at the major-league level and had never hit .300 in the minors. He was still more than just organizational depth, but not enough of a prospect to land on any top prospect lists.

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The Marlins, as bad as they are, have an entertainingly wanton disregard of service time considerations for their top prospects. Marcell Ozuna is one example of this philosophy (or lack thereof). In late April of last year, despite having no chance of either contending or selling tickets, Miami called up Ozuna, who had logged a grand total of 47 career plate appearances above A-ball. For those of you wondering, Ozuna will now very likely get the Super Two tag on him, making him arbitration-eligible in 2016.

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After a far too long three week break from publishing my first Pod Projection, it’s time to get back on the saddle. Today I’ll take you through my projection for the young Rockies third baseman, Nolan Arenado. He’s a man who is sure to be considered a sleeper by many, which of course immediately jacks up his price and no longer qualifies him as a sleeper.

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With the proliferation of analysis available to fantasy players, the gap between the worst and best owners has shrunk. It’s much more rare to see an owner put together a truly awful draft or auction today than it was even ten years ago, simply because it’s seemingly impossible to use the internet without stumbling across some scrap of fantasy analysis. Even Jimmy from accounting, who knows next-to-nothing about fantasy baseball, can print off a few cheat sheets and put together a team that isn’t a total abomination.

Much like its real-life counterpart, fantasy baseball is a game in which one must constantly be searching for new market inefficiencies. One theory that I’m a big proponent of is capitalizing on reactions to small samples, specifically bad ones. As it turns out, Travis d’Arnaud is just the example I was looking for.

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It isn’t quite fair to say that Clay Buchholz broke out because of his change-up. In fact, Colin Zarzycki found a much more reasonable explanation and wrote about it in his FanGraphs+ player cap. Buchholz also threw the pitch less than he’d ever thrown it before, so it’s kind of weird to focus on it. But the pitch is pretty excellent, and maybe it could have told us that more swinging strikes were on the way. And if it did tell us that, perhaps we can use that knowledge to spot a couple more pitchers that under-performed in the strikeout category last year.

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One of my strongest beliefs as a prospect/minor league writer is that there is far too much absolutism in most discussions of prospects in the online community. Part of the reason for this is simply a matter of demand–as you read about a minor league player (or, really, any player) at a place like FanGraphs or RotoGraphs, you’re likely interested in some sort of bottom line about how good the player is and might be. As such, there is a lot of pressure on the arbiters of the players to come up with a concrete answer–to make an actual prediction of their futures. In reality, though, prospecting is all about shades of gray, particularly in the low minors, which are my main focus. Just about every player in full-season ball has something going for them, but likewise, almost every player below Double-A has several aspects which need refinement before he has a chance at big league success. Predicting the eradication of those problems and the amount to which the strengths are realized is largely an exercise in probability, not one of guessing “good,” “bad,” or “okay” and clinging to it…to say nothing of the factors of injuries, regression, and the like. Any glance at a top prospect list from five years ago, regardless of the authors or their credibility, should drive this point home soundly–many of the top players go on to struggle, whereas several off the list entirely go on to have excellent careers.

For all of my relativistic outlook, though, occasionally I run into a player who’s just so impressive that my mind can’t help but jump directly to concrete thoughts of stardom. Of the couple hundred pitchers I saw in person last year, nobody evoked those thoughts more strongly than Cardinals pitching prospect Alex Reyes.

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Last week, I wrote about Eddie Butler and how Colorado’s volatile starting rotation could open the door for Butler, and fellow prospect Jonathan Gray, to contribute earlier than expected. That got me thinking about how Matthew Wisler is in a similar situation with the Padres, especially following the news that Cory Luebke will miss all of 2014.

Ian Kennedy, one of baseball’s most durable pitchers over the last several years, is assured a spot in the rotation, as are Andrew Cashner and Josh Johnson. Cashner finally managed to stay healthy for a full season last year, and was quite good in his 175 innings, finishing the season with a 3.09 earned run average and 1.13 walks plus hits per inning. The problem with Cashner is that he had thrown a total of 316.2 innings in his five previous professional seasons.

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