Should You Pay for Recent Draftees in Ottoneu?

	Player	HS/College?	Current Level	FG Top 100 Rank	THE BOARD ETA	Ottoneu Roster %	Ottoneu Median Salary
1	Jackson Holliday	HS	AA	5	2024	98.40%	$3
2	Druw Jones	HS	A	13	2026	62.50%	$2
3	Kumar Rocker	College	A+	N/A	2026	8.65%	$1
4	Termarr Johnson	HS	A	40	2027	25.32%	$1
5	Elijah Green	HS	A	N/A	2027	6.41%	$2

In addition, two 2022 draftees – 13th overall pick Zach Neto and 3rd-round pick Ben Joyce have made their MLB debuts. Neto has looked quite good and if you grabbed him a year ago, he looks like he will pay off, though a poorly-timed injury has put a damper on his rookie season. Joyce doesn’t look ready or all that exciting, to be honest.

There are some other first-round picks who have some hype around them these days, including Cade Horton, Brooks Lee, Drew Gilbert, Kevin Parada, Dylan Lesko, Cole Young, and Cam Collier. Of that group, only three are more than 10% rostered (Lee at 42%, Gilbert at 22%, and Horton at 10% and none has a median salary of more than $1.

Basically, from this group, if you grabbed Holliday right after the draft, you would still be happy to sit on him and if you are paying him $5-$7 right now, that isn’t a problem, though you likely have to wait until mid-2024 to really get value from him.

The rest of that list? No way. Johanson, Neto, and Lee are the next two most interesting to me right now. Jones will be exciting but he is just too far away right now. The rest might become exciting – some might even be worth rostering now – but you can grab similar prospects for free off the wire. Paying even a dollar for any of those players at this time last year would have been a mistake.

2021 Draft

The 2021 draft gives us more data to look at, as more of those players have had a chance to make a professional impact.

This group has already returned some value, though it is pretty limited. Davis and Cowser are both up, but not doing a ton, just yet. Both are still exciting and it’s no surprise they are nearly universally rostered – they should be! But had you grabbed them in 2021, right after they were drafted, even at $1, you would be sitting here having rostered them for two full years at a total cost of $6, and would have nothing to show for it so far. You wouldn’t even have them at particularly low prices, since you’d be paying their $3 median salary anyway.

There is other value from this draft – Matt McLain, Gavin Williams, Tanner Bibee, Bryce Miller and Andrew Abbott are among those who have graduated to the bigs and performed at a high level, even if it is still a small sample. But none of these players were highly sought after immediately following the 2021 draft and some (Abbott and McLain come to mind) really only entered the Ottoneu consciousness this year.

Other such as James Wood, Jackson Merrill, Andrew Painter, and Jordan Lawlar are currently top-25 prospects on THE BOARD. But of those, only Lawlar was a top-ten pick and had some interest in Ottoneu leagues around his draft time. If you had a strong feeling about Wood or Merrill (or McLain or Williams or Bibee, etc.) at the draft, you could have picked them up and benefited, but you also would have been using a roster spot on a guy who was freely available a year later.

And had you gone all-in on a top-5 pick, you would either have wasted your money entirely or be greatly overpaying for what you are getting.

2020 Draft

If you are excited about signing recently drafted players, you would expect a class that included five college players in the first five picks, including of the best college hitting prospects ever, to have returned some value within three years, right?

Wrong. Torkelson was the clear star of this class but even today he is not doing a ton for Ottoneu teams – he has turned into a solid 1B, but not much more – and in most leagues he has turned over rosters quite a few times. Across my five leagues that were playing in 2020 and still are playing now, Torkelson has been cut twice on average. In none of those leagues has his price gone up by the $5 it would have if he had been kept (or traded) consistently, rather than being cut.

As for the others – Kjerstad still looks good, but his median salary is half what you would be paying him had you picked him up for $1 after his draft. Meyer is hurt. Lacy and Martin have lost their luster before they even made the majors. There are other success stories in this draft – Bobby Miller, Jordan Walker, Reid Detmers, Logan Allen, Evan Carter – but most are still more projection than production at this point and only Detmers was a top-10 pick and even he didn’t have much hype in the Summer of 2020.

Again, if you were the one manager in on Walker or Detmers or Allen you would likely be pretty happy right now, but only after spending $10 over four seasons waiting on them. And you could have just as easily picked them up in 2021 or in some cases 2022 (or 2023) without a fuss.

2019 Draft

And now we finally get to a draft that has produced some All-Star talent from the first round.

Let’s start with this – four of these five players are guys I would like to have on my roster right now. There is no arguing with that. This first round also produced Josh Jung, Nick Lodolo, Alek Manoah, Corbin Carroll, and more players actively producing right now.

But it is worth noting that even the extremely advanced Rutschman didn’t produce for fantasy managers until the last two-thirds of the 2022 season, meaning you waited nearly three full seasons to get production from him. Witt was up last year, but not good. Vaughn has been up for three years, but has yet to produce a season over 5.0 P/G. Greene might be breaking out right now.

Among the others in this draft, a few were producing value last year and one – Alek Manoah – was helping as early as 2021.

Once again, there are two things we can see pretty quickly. First, paying any kind of premium for these players immediately after the draft would be costly, even for a guy like Rutschman. If you got him at $5-$7, and could stomach using up the roster spot for 2019, 2020 and 2021, you would have spent at least $18 those three years, plus $18 more last year and this year to have him at $10 right now. You would be thrilled with that, but the cost would be very high. And among the 20 top-5 picks we looked at, Rutschman is an outlier.

Second, if you could have predicted Corbin Carroll’s rise or Alek Manoah’s quick assent, you would have done well picking them up early. But neither was a top-10 pick and they weren’t the guys grabbing headlines when contracts were signed in 2019.