Understudies, Standbys, and Swings: Reserve-Round Targets, Part 3

Let’s get right back to our odyssey around MLB in search of the underestimated and the overlooked. This week, the final  installment, covering the NL Central and the NL West. Numbers in parentheses are the Average Draft Positions of the players in question, derived from draft results in National Fantasy Baseball Championship Draft Champions leagues since the start of the year.

Milwaukee: We think the Brewers will be disappointed in new catcher William Contreras’s defense, and sometimes use him at 1B and DH to keep his bat in the  lineup. This should open up some playing time for Victor Caratini, who has become a decent defensive catcher, and is useful enough against right-handed pitching to make him worth getting at ADP 623. Brice Turang is supposed to start at 2B. He won’t hit more than  about .240, but will  get you a ton of stolen bases, and his glove may  keep him in  the lineup. There’s a fair possibility, it’s true, that he’ll hit, say, .150 over the first few weeks of the season and lose his job, for which the Brewers have several other competent candidates. Overall, ADP 411 seems like a good-not-great price for him.

St. Louis: Dylan Carlson (324) has lost a lot of hits to the newly-discarded shift, and of course was an elite prospect within living  memory. We’d risk a dollar on him as our OF5 on the chance that he’s not iron pyrite. We’re unimpressed by the various guys who would stand in for the Cardinals’ front-line starting pitchers should stand-ins be necessary, and hope they’ll instead use Jake Woodford (750). He’s strikeout-impaired, and he doesn’t go deep into games, but he’s had only one bad start in the 9 he’s made over the past two years.

Cubs: We think people are outsmarting themselves with Nick Madrigal (626). He hits for average and can get a few steals, and in due course the Cubs should find him a place to play. That place, we speculate, is third base, where Jed Hoyer has proposed using him and where Christopher Morel, the incumbent, seems to have been figured out by the league’s pitchers. Another guy we like is the surprising Adrian Sampson 샘슨 (707), who seems, at last, to be the real thing. He stopped giving up home runs because he stopped getting  hit hard, and he stopped getting hit hard because he finally figured out how to get hitters out with his fastball.

Pirates: Carlos Santana is 37, and of course he won’t hit for average, but he still has power and on-base skills, and should benefit significantly from the change in the shift rules, so ADP 421 seems about right. As for pitchers: Mitch Keller (387) has been so disappointing for so long that people appear  not to have noticed that he started doing last year what he was supposed to be doing all along. He’s not an ace, and he continues to have trouble Third Time Through the Order, but he’s much improved, and way better than he used to be against hitters of the right-handed persuasion.

Cincinnati: Kevin Newman (477) qualifies at both 2B and SS and will play at one or the other of them, because 2B Jonathan India arguably has the worst glove of  any 2B regular in the majors, and is hurt constantly. (They should move him to the outfield.)  Newman will hit for a decent average and get you some stolen bases. One of the most interesting pitchers in all  MLB is Connor Overton (746), as long as he’s fully recovered from his stress fracture. He was a pretty effective starting pitcher before he got hurt. But what catches our eye about him is his left/right splits. He’s a fly ball pitcher against left handers and a ground ball pitcher against right handers. We don’t know how he does this or even why, but we figure anyone who can do it has the ability  to be really good.

Dodgers: Trayce Thompson (432) is kind of intriguing. He’s not a lock to hit as much as .200, and he’ll strike out a bunch, but playing every day (as he may) in a hitter-friendly park (as Dodger Stadium now is), he’s quite capable of hitting 40 home runs. The Dodger starting pitchers are, as you know, all terrific if they stay healthy, but do any of you imagine that they all will? Among the possible replacements, the guy who looks like the best value is Ryan Pepiot (525). His control is an issue, but game by game he gets better with it.

San Francisco: J.D. Davis at ADP 413 might offer some value. He’ll play a good deal, and it looks to us like his decline in batting average is due to conscious decision to swing for the fences. That’s not a good idea in San Francisco, and perhaps, with his career possibly at stake,  Davis has figured that out. We also like Mike Yastrzemski (357). The quality of his seasons seems to vary directly with his BABIP—there’s not that much year-to-year difference in his granular stats. So if the BABIP regresses to the mean and you factor in some age-related decline, even if he gets only 400 PAs  he’ll  hit .240 with about 15 home runs, which makes him worth getting as your first outfield reserve.

San Diego: Trent Grisham (316) is worth getting for a buck as your OF5. It looks like he was trying too hard to hit home runs last season, and we envision him going back to whatever worked for him before and hitting .240-.250 while still showing some power. If he does, he hits left-handed pitchers well enough not to get stuck in a platoon, plus he has plenty of speed, though when you hit .184 you don’t get much chance to deploy it. We also like Matt Carpenter (467). People are going to think that his big numbers last season were attributable to Yankee Stadium and that he came back to earth in the second half, but (1) Petco Park is at least as hospitable to left-handed hitters as The House That Jeter Built, and (2) Carpenter was injured in the second half. He’ll be the strong side of a left-field platoon for at least the first month of the season, while juvenile delinquent Fernando Tatis Jr. finishes his PED suspension, and new DH Nelson Cruz is so plainly on his way out that Carpenter could have a substantial role all season.

Colorado: As we mentioned in our first article this season, we like Harold Castro (659). He qualifies at 1B/3B already, and should qualify at 2B and SS before long. Anyone who was able to hit .270 with the malaise-stricken 2022 Tigers can hit—we’re not kidding–.350 in Coors. If he does that, he’ll play, and will be worth plugging in your lineup even though he doesn’t bring anything except batting average to the party. We’re not especially crazy about Yonathan Daza (552),  but the various pundits’ projections for him are low because they underestimate his playing time, which last year was affected by a very late arrival at spring training due to visa problems. We envision him as an everyday player, and he destroys left-handed pitching.

Arizona: Nick Ahmed’s (638) shoulder was plaguing him for the past two seasons, and his surgery last year may have corrected the problems. There’s a decent chance he’ll return to something like his 2019 level, so he’s worth a speculative pick at the price, especially if he stays in one piece as spring training develops. It also seems to us that the market is giving up on Kyle Lewis (570) a bit too soon. He had just a few games at AAA between recovering from his knee problems and getting a concussion, and he did pretty well, so there’s reason for hope.