Author Archive: Jack Dorfman

Fantasy baseball is a drama. And as such, it follows Freytag’s pyramid. Naturally. 

For the uninitiated, think of Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy, not unlike most of our seasons. 

The exposition sets the scene. Rising action builds your interest, as the characters you’ve been introduced to start moving and shaking. Then the climax. Violence, betrayal. Injury and breakouts. From there, the falling action is lines you up for the third act, by which point, you’ve already tuned out. Because you’re not making the playoffs. Or getting in the money. 

Fantasy baseball is entertaining because it’s set up the same way. 

The Exposition takes place within the span of a few minutes as you mourn the end of your season. We already know all of the players. The Rising Action is the rest of the offseason. The anticipation that feeds your late nights of research, making you closer to an angsty teen than you’ve been since high school. Draft prep is your studying now. This all leads up to the Climax. Draft Day. Nothing during the season lives up to the Draft. 

That’s why the rest of the season is Falling Action. Your expectations for your team fall. The slope is steep. You stumble through May, rumble through July as your team stretches for its last gasp, and crumble in September, when illusions of this being the year finally fade. 

Since we’re in the Rising Action of draft prep… “Already?” some of your leaguemates may respond. But since we, you and I, are already in draft prep, it’s time to use our neatly wrapped 2026 and see what lessons we can take away. 

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Earlier this season, in the midst of Davis Martin’s ascent, Fernando Tatis Jr.’s slump, and after more than two months of Cal Raleigh’s big dumper of a follow up season, I wrote an article pointing to an interesting trend. 

Through May this season, hitters were busting more frequently than pitchers relative to their draft cost. More specifically, ADP was less predictive of hitter performance than it was starting pitcher performance. This goes against a premise analysts and casuals alike repeat throughout draft season, that “pitchers are riskier than hitters.” 

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In my first article for Rotographs, I dug into a premise that always puzzles me at the beginning of the season. What do you do with the seemingly low end starting pitchers who are off to hot starts? 

I noted how sometimes, they can stay hot for the full season, citing Rick Porcello’s Cy Young season in 2016 and more recently, 2025 standouts like Kris Bubic, Shane Smith, and Tyler Mahle. 

I set the parameters for this type of pitcher around a variety of the statistics that fantasy managers look to when determining the staying power of a starting pitcher. 

“We want to find pitchers who are suppressing runs and locating, but who may be considered unsustainable due to underlying metrics, specifically around the GIF making Stuff+ and K-BB%. To capture this, we’ll focus on pitchers with Stuff+ below 100, a Location+ above 100, a K-BB% of 17% or less, and an ERA below 3.00.”

Here was that list as of May 1 this season. 

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The so-called “back of the baseball card” numbers still matter to us. No matter how many new-fangled metrics are concocted, we can’t keep our eye from straying towards the .300 AVG/30 HR/100 RBI hitter. That’s the ideal. It’s how we were trained to think about players.

In this article series, I’ll point out two two starting pitchers and two hitters who I think could fall victim to a bias away from low volume players, depressing their draft day costs for 2027. 

While it’s still too early to tell what their cost will be, I’d argue that given their numbers, paced out to 162 games, make them some of the best players in fantasy, and they’re unlikely to cost what they’re worth. 

Last week, I covered Logan Henderson, who was the second-ranked pitcher on a per-162 basis via the Fangraphs Player Rater this season, slotting in right behind Jacob Misiorowski.

This week, I’ll cover Jeremy Peña. The franchise shortstop for the Houston Astros is still just 28 years old and I think he’s quietly been starting to make good on the first impression he made during the 2022 playoffs.

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For many of us, our fantasy baseball seasons are effectively over. It wasn’t our year. But instead of sulking, something many of us do so well is to immediately turn to draft prep and the next season.

In doing that, part of the process is looking back at the season to see some of the emerging young players and ascertain whether or not their emergence was real and repeatable. One of the classic ways to do this is by looking for comparisons of these young players to established major leaguers to serve as proof of concepts. 

Scouts have done this forever and it has worked in the recent past. Hunter Brown’s association to Justin Verlander foreshadowed the former’s rise to ace status. Many in the industry connected Parker Messick’s arsenal and style of pitching with Hyun Jin Ryu, and Messick has had similar results so far. Chase Burns’ reliance on the fastball and slider was compared to a young Spencer Strider’s prior to the former’s debut, and Burns has been just as good as the vintage version of Strider. 

Over the course of the next few months, I’ll provide a handful of starting potentially instructive comps we can make to help illuminate this growing crop of young starting pitchers.

Part 1: Max Fried & Kade Anderson

Part 2: Sandy Alcantara & Walbert Ureña

Today, I’ll compare Garrett Crochet and Payton Tolle, a comparison I think captures the ceiling case for Tolle to be drafted as a top-15 starting pitcher in drafts in 2027. 

I believe that Tolle in 2026 is having a more polished version of Crochet’s 2024 season with the White Sox, reaching a similar innings level, experimenting with new pitches, and finding lots of success against major league hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

“Billy, we’ve got 38 home runs, 120 RBIs to make up for…”

“Guys, you’re still trying to replace Giambi. I told you we can’t do it. What we might be able to do is recreate him. Recreate him in the aggregate.”

It’s so tempting to head into draft prep season thinking like this. We all have our GM hats on, though we may not all pull it off quite so well. 

We scour over projections, building out potential lineups based on how many of each Roto categories we need to fill to finish near the top of the table. Or we look at certain hitters with disdain when they fall underneath our perceived thresholds when it comes to counting stats.

There’s, of course, a lot more that goes into it. Otherwise, what would we be doing here?

But the so-called “back of the baseball card” numbers still matter to us, it’s how we were trained to think about players.

In this series, I’ll point out two starting pitchers and two hitters who I think could fall victim to a bias away from low volume players, depressing their draft day costs for 2027. 

Read the rest of this entry »

For many of us, our fantasy baseball seasons are effectively over. It wasn’t our year. But instead of sulking, something many of us do so well is to immediately turn to draft prep and the next season. 

In doing that, part of the process is looking back at the season to see some of the emerging young players and ascertain whether or not their emergence was real and repeatable. One of the classic ways to do this is by looking for comparisons of these young players to established major leaguers to serve as proof of concepts. 

Scouts have done this forever and it has worked in the recent past. Hunter Brown’s association to Justin Verlander foreshadowed the former’s rise to ace status. Many in the industry connected Parker Messick’s arsenal and style of pitching with Hyun-Jin Ryu, and Messick has had similar results so far. Chase Burns’ reliance on the fastball and slider was compared to a young Spencer Strider’s prior to the former’s debut, and Burns has been just as good as the vintage version of Strider. 

Over the course of the next few months, I’ll provide a handful of potentially instructive comps we can make to help illuminate this growing crop of young starting pitchers.

For Part 1 of this series, where I find comps for today’s young emerging aces, I took a look at the Mariners’ Kade Anderson, comparing his arsenal, arm slot, and potential prospect arc to that of perennial All Star, Max Fried. 

Today, I’ll compare two Dominican flamethrowers in Angels’ rookie Walbert Ureña and Marlins’ veteran Sandy Alcantara. Read the rest of this entry »

In the immortal words of Sugar Ray, sometimes, all we need is to “turn tomorrow into yesterday.”

For many of us, that time is right now. Our fantasy baseball seasons are effectively over. It wasn’t our year. But instead of sulking, something many of us do so well is to immediately turn to draft prep and the next season. 

Which of your waiver wire adds will you want to bring back next season? Who were you envious of that you want to target in drafts next year? You’ll spend the offseason asking yourself these questions. So will I, and it will be my goal to help you answer some of these questions. 

But before the season ends, I want to slow down just a hair, to enjoy the rest of this season. Late Wednesday night, I found myself falling asleep to highlights of Kade Anderson’s first truly successful outing for the Mariners, holding the Rangers to one run over six innings and collecting his first win in the majors. 

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Sitting here in early September, with papery leaves beginning to find themselves underfoot and with the A’s and Angels getting ready for next season, things really do feel pretty normal. 

There have certainly been some surprises, like the oddly Tucker-shaped hole in the Dodgers’ lineup, but for the most part, it’s been a season that has largely matched our expectations.  

But there was a time, not all that long ago, when many of us were panicking. When our early round picks were faltering and our “sure thing” sleepers were seemingly still sleeping. Let’s call this time by a cute and breezy name, something deceivingly blissful and carefree like “May.”

In this article, I’ll look back at some of the hitters whose starts were so rough that fantasy managers may have overlooked them as they have rebounded this summer and may still undervalue them heading into next year’s drafts.

I want you to be sure to look at these players favorably when doing your draft prep. If you really trust me, maybe even bookmark this page to come back to during draft time, so that you don’t take one look at Rafael Devers and get a sour unripe picked-in-April-but-ripe-in-August orange taste in your mouth (I know this isn’t the citrus timeline, please forgive me). 

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If you’re a nineties baby playing in the majors, I think your time has passed. Make way for Gen Z. The 2000’s babies. Even the 2005 babies are starting to make a real impact. 

Bye bye Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and hello Junior Caminero. So long Juan Soto and welcome Pete Crow-Armstrong. Sal Stewart, yes you’ll be taking over for Mr. Manny Machado. And Fernando Jr. of Tatis fame? The McGonigle and Wetherholt party will take it from here. 

So many of our favorite young stars from the last five years have aged out of rising stardom and seem to be either plateauing or, even worse, skiing down the final hill, and fast. 

Here’s a quick collection of players I’d consider consensus picks to become generational stars a few years ago who are currently between 27 and 29 years old. To me, this captures the players many of us would have confidently said were entering the primes of their careers as recently as two years ago. Not yet on the hill, and surely not over it.  Read the rest of this entry »