Understudies, Standbys, and Swings: Reserve-Round Targets, Part 1

Time to begin our sweep through the major leagues, looking for reserve-round players who might be good enough to grab in a deep draft like NFBC’s Draft Champions (50 rounds, no FAABs). Some of these guys probably won’t play unless someone gets injured, but someone always does. Some of them are next in line behind shaky frontliners. Some of them had apparently-bad records last season that we think mask actually-good records. And some of them are starters whom, we think, the market just disrespects. So let’s have a look. This week, it’s the AL East and the AL Central on which we lavish our attention. The numbers in parentheses are the Average Draft Positions in the 53 completed Draft Champions drafts since the start of the year:

Toronto: We don’t see how a genuine contending team can keep Yusei Kikuchi in its rotation for a whole season. People seem to think that his replacement will be Nate Pearson, who is indeed a promising pitcher, but very delicate. His arm probably can’t take a lot of five-inning outings before it falls off. So our candidate is Yosver Zulueta (748). His control deserted him in the minors last season, but he was coming off a three-year hiatus (TJ/pandemic/knee surgery) and still did pretty well.

Baltimore: The obvious guy here is Ramón Urías (378). He’s scheduled to start at 3B, but it’s by no means clear that Adam Frazier, the team’s new second baseman, is still on the right side of the hill, in which case perhaps Urias shifts over there. (He qualifies at both positions.) If he gets 400 plate appearances, he’ll hit .250 with 15 home runs, and his glove should keep him in the lineup somewhere in the infield. We’d also be remiss in failing to mention Austin Voth (671), whom we recommended last year, but so ambivalently that even we couldn’t bring ourselves to draft him. He pitched quite well as a starter last year. He’s got a plentiful assortment of pitches, avoids hard contact, and is a fly ball pitcher in what is now a pitcher’s park. He’s scheduled to begin the season in the bullpen, but we doubt he stays there long.

Tampa Bay: As usual with this team, it’s hard to find reserve-round bargains. Its replaceable-parts offense is deep, but everybody’s talents are so well-established and well-deployed that the market already knows what the players will do, and prices them accordingly. Best we can do here is Josh Lowe (456). Manuel Margot is the incumbent right-fielder, but (1) his speed doesn’t play at the MLB level; and (2) he’s more a lefty-masher than a full-service hitter. Lowe is a former first-rounder and left-handed hitter who hasn’t impressed in 200 MLB plate appearances. But his minor-league equivalents suggest he’ll get on base as often as Margot, steal more bases, and hit home runs, which Margot doesn’t. He would, at the very least, make a good platoon partner for Margot.

Boston: It’s hard to evaluate Boston’s roster in the wake of their January dollar-store shopping spree. It’s conceivable that Enmanuel Valdez (710) will find himself starting at second base before long. Trevor Story, coming off TJ surgery, won’t be back for a while, and quite possibly longer than a while. Adalberto Mondesi, penciled in as the second-base starter for the nonce, is a black box if not a black hole after three injury-filled seasons in the wilderness. You can’t hope for much more than .250 or .260 from Valdez, but if he gets 400 plate appearances he’ll hit 15 home runs. The Red Sox rotation is aged, fragile, and includes Nick Pivetta, so there should be a vacancy before long. Brayan Bello’s (341) won-lost record and dismal July disguise the fact that he was pretty effective (3.07 ERA, 2.45 FIP) during August and September. Similarly, Kutter Crawford’s(684) horrible record third time through the order disguises the fact that, between mid-June and mid-August, he was a pretty effective starting pitcher.

Yankees: Clay Holmes is the closer, and he’s good. But he is a right-handed, extreme ground-ball pitcher—exactly the kind of guy who’s most vulnerable to the new shift rules. Jonathan Loaisiga is probably the first-call setup guy, but he, too, is a right-handed extreme ground-ball pitcher. That brings us to Wandy Peralta (738). Also an extreme ground-ball pitcher, but he is a left-handed extreme ground ball pitcher, which of course matters, shift-wise. He also rains devastation on left-handed batters, and had the lowest hard-hit percentage of the 253 pitchers who had 30 or more innings as relievers. It isn’t utterly fanciful to imagine that he winds up the closer.

Cleveland: We don’t get why Myles Straw is at ADP 408. He’s scheduled to start in center field, he was 21 for 22 in stolen bases, which he gets even when he’s batting ninth, he’s got the kind of glove that keeps center fielders in the lineup even when nothing else does, and though he hit .221, he’s got enough of a track record that none of the projection systems envisions him hitting less than .250.

Kansas City: There aren’t a lot of reserve-round picks on this team that we like. In fact, there aren’t a lot of picks on this team that we like, period. We’re unimpressed with their kiddie-corps outfield. Wish we could recommend Daniel Lynch, whom we loved going into last season, but the sad fact seems to be that he isn’t very good. So we landed on Angel Zerpa, who’s been taken in none of the 53 drafts. His mediocre record in AA wasn’t so bad when you look at how the rest of the pitchers on that team did, he was lights-out as an opener during a brief stay in AAA, and was very effective, albeit without strikeouts, in three starts in MLB before going down with a torn patellar tendon and then staying down with some arm trouble. There will certainly be room in the rotation.

Detroit: We watched this team’s 2022 season unfold with horrified fascination, and not just because we had drafted both Javier Báez and Eduardo Rodriguez. The Tigers weren’t good in any aspect of the game, but their hitting was so bad, and so many players did so much worse than they were expected to do and/or had done within living memory, that it felt like there was some negative synergy. Or maybe somebody shot an albatross. We don’t expect a complete turnaround this season, but there are a couple of hitters we like more than the market does. Jonathan Schoop (424) played Gold-Glove-level defense at second base last year, but his hitting fell apart. We’ve tried to find signs that it was better than it looks, but we can’t. Schoop’s 31, and it may be time to roll the credits, but he’s bounced back from atrocious seasons twice before, so maybe he can do it again. We liked Ryan Kreidler (722) last season, coming off a big 2021, and he disappointed. But he was actually hitting rather well in the minors until he broke his hand on an HBP. He’s very fast (17 of 18 SBs in the minors last year), and should be able to claim a starting job if the real Kreidler is anything like the 2021 model.

Minnesota: We’re doubling down on Trevor Larnach (573). We loved him last season—we posited that the power he showed in college would reappear. This hypothesis wasn’t fully tested last season. He hit quite well (.313/.365/.448) during the first three weeks of the season before getting hurt, but with no home runs. After he returned, and before he went down for the season in late June, he did pretty much nothing (.162/.274/.376) but hit home runs (5 in 93 at-bats). Now he’s supposedly good as new after core-muscle surgery, and ADP 577 seems like a good price for a chance that he’ll do both at the same time and play enough in the outfield and at DH to make a difference.

White Sox: We understand why the White Sox want to give Romy Gonzalez a shot at second base. We just don’t think it will work, because we just don’t think Gonzalez can hit. It’s possible that Lenyn Sosa will supplant Gonzalez, but his dismal record in last year’s cup of coffee indicates that (to mix our metaphors, unless you season your coffee) more seasoning is in order. So the guy we’re going with is Hanser Alberto (749). He doesn’t walk, he has no power, and his speed is nothing special, but he does hit for average, and his glove is okay. If he were in Oakland, we wouldn’t be interested. But surrounded by a potent lineup and playing in a hitter’s park, we are.