Archive for sleeper

Anyone within arm’s reach of my Twitter account is so. bleeping. tired. of me talking about Mike Tauchman.

But I have to bring him up. Tauchman was literally the first Peripheral Prospect. He led off the inaugural post. It’s imperative we revisit our old friend, because guess what? He is the 7th-best fantasy hitter the last 30 days, per ESPN’s Player Rater.

Seventh-best. Not out of just Yankees, not out of just outfielders — out of all hitters. His recent success alone has made this entire series worth it.

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Behold! Another installment of Peripheral Prospects, the low-price, off-brand fantasy baseball version of Fringe Five. Brad Johnson and I have brought something on the order of five minor leaguers per week who make us feel — like, really feel. These players tend to be unloved and unheralded but very much deserving of love and, uh, herald, not unlike the two authors of this series.

Some quick housekeeping, per usual:

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Another week, another installment of Peripheral Prospects. Through six weeks — three from me, three from esteemed colleague Brad Johnson — we have featured 26 different players with whom one or both of us express(es) some degree of infatuation.

The aim is simple: identify players who (1) have little to no hype as a prospect, having missed all major top-100 lists; (2) have not exhausted their rookie eligibility yet; and (3) are reasonably close to the majors, such that you’re not dreaming on talent that projects dubiously from the low minors. The rules are not hard-and-fast; it would be a shame to not mention certain players who we think exceed the credit they’ve been given. Accordingly, we will relax the constraints every now and then to make accommodations.

Before I dive into my weekly five, some quick housekeeping, per usual:
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This is the Fantasy Fringe Five, but is no longer named as such. This is the last time you’ll see Brad or me use that alliterative phrase to describe this series. And that’s it! Keepin’ it cryptic. This is now, until or unless we come up with something better, Peripheral Prospects. (We welcome recommendations! Leave a comment.)

That said, we might start steering this ship more deliberately in our own direction. In the spirit of Carson Cistulli’s series after which this is now loosely modeled, we will sometimes follow its self-imposed restrictions and other times elect to deviate from them — most probably, the one underlined below:

In light of same, eligibility for The Fringe Five will require (for the present, at least) the following:
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Mike Tauchman deserves nothing less than the clickbaitiest of headlines. He’s my favorite player nearly no one has heard of or cares about, a name I draft that genuinely forces people to Google his name, a Triple-A hitter not only too old to be a prospect but also maybe too old to be a post-hype prospect, if he ever were a prospect, which he never was.

No one has heard of or cares about him because of any combination of: (1) he is not and never was a prospect; (2) there are a fair number of actual prospects in Colorado’s actual farm system who are actually exciting; (3) prospect status notwithstanding, he has no path to playing time because the Rockies habitually bury their actually exciting talent. At 28, Tauchman ain’t getting any younger, and I ain’t either. He deserves all the hype he can get, and I’m here to dish it out.

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No need to fret. The unofficial conductor, who is also the author of this post, does not expect the cabin to reach capacity. Not prior to April, at least.

Brett Lawrie’s time with any organization, not just the White Sox, was ticking away; more writing was scribbled on more walls with each passing year since his debut. So when the White Sox released Lawrie, the first thought on most fantasy owners’ minds was not Where will Lawrie end up? but, rather, When will Yoan Moncada get the call? Moncada, a consensus top-5 prospect, changed socks and is now the marquee name of the South Side’s now-promising future.

Yet one could argue Moncada’s not quite ready for the big show. After raking and running absolutely wild in High-A in 2016, Moncada graduated to Double-A and, well, his performance is open to interpretation. On one hand, his 11 home runs, nine stolen bases and .277/.379/.531 triple-slash in 207 plate appearances amounted to a batting line that was more than 50% better than the league. On the other hand, he struck out more than 30% of the time — and that lack of contact carried over into his Major League debut, during which he struck out in 12 of 20 PAs. The tools are immense, but, at 21, he could definitely use some polish, and the White Sox have no incentive to rush him along.

Allow me to (re)introduce you to Tyler Saladino.

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I’m an Alex Dickerson fan, but I don’t know if anyone else is. He at least appears to have gone largely without fanfare thus far, as evidenced by his lowly ownership rates (4.7 percent at ESPN, 5 percent at Yahoo!). He never projected to be much of anything; former FanGraphs prospector Kiley McDaniel graded Dickerson’s tools below-average across the board, with exception to his plus raw power, and Dickerson led a weak crop of Padres prospects prior to the 2015 season in terms of projected WAR.

Fast forward to 2016, and Dickerson doesn’t look so meager. In 240 Triple-A plate appearances, he generated the Pacific Coast League’s 3rd-best wOBA. In fact, it eerily resembled that of the lauded Willson Contreras, and it only trails by a nonzero margin that of the seemingly powerful Mitch Haniger. Dickerson not only cranked up the power, posting a career-best .240 isolated power (ISO), but also shaved more than 7 percentage points off his strikeout rate (K%). The hit tool that once graded out well-below-average suddenly looked like a solid asset. While some hitters sacrifice power to refine their plate discipline or contact skills, Dickerson’s 3-year ISO of .199 from 2013-15 increased about 40 points.

The best news is the gains have carried over to the Major League level. To attest, Dickerson’s plate discipline, by definition, is above average:

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Here are the RotoGraphs Staff Picks for the 2015 season. Because we like to pick things! We collected all preferred players (and busts) and assembled them in one place for your reference and viewing pleasure.

Last year, we posted staff picks a couple of weeks earlier in the month as a complement to your draft planning. It’s a little late now, unless you’re drafting right before Opening Day, but hey! You can still use it as an in-season waiver wire tool and additional reasons to praise or ridicule us, if that’s your thing.

The categories are fairly self-explanatory, but I’ll try to illuminate the ones that are less clear. A sleeper is an undervalued standard mixed-leaguer, whereas a deep sleeper is a player who maybe isn’t drafted in mixed leagues but eventually succeeds, if not excels, in a starting role. Best flyers are players typically undrafted in most leagues but end up being great waiver wire additions mid-year.

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An unambiguously true fact: Matt Holliday is an old man in baseball years and in dog years. Another unambiguously true fact: Holliday has been remarkably consistent throughout his career. Hear ye:

• He has hit at least 20 home runs in nine straight years, a streak currently matched only by David Ortiz and Miguel Cabrera;
• His walk rate has hovered between 10 and 12 percent for the better part of a decade, and his strikeout rate has always resided in the mid-teens;
• He has averaged 647 plate appearances per season dating back to 2006;
• And honestly, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a batted ball profile so absurdly consistent.

Yet a slight dip in power and a career-worst batting average (.272, aka what some players can only dream of hitting) in 2014 couldn’t have come at a worse age, and it all has fans and projection systems alike running for the hills, as shown below.
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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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