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| Tuesday, February 27, 2024 |
| Most Fantasy Baseball players only draft one team. I know those of us with a dozen leagues to manage every year are the outliers. Hey, we're the weirdos. But I'm gonna guess if you're subscribed to a daily Fantasy Baseball newsletter in February, you might be one of those weirdos too. |
| The way you approach Fantasy Baseball should be very different when you're only drafting one league, vs. when you're drafting a dozen or more. When you're playing out that many leagues, you probably want to diversify your portfolio, making sure you spread your risk around and don't have too many eggs in one or two baskets, lest those baskets suffer an untimely knee injury that wrecks your entire season in one go. |
| Now, that's not always true, of course. If I get the No. 1 overall pick 12 times this season, you can bet I'm taking Ronald Acuña 12 times. And, if Riley Greene, a player I rank roughly 50 picks ahead of ADP, falls outside of the first 150 picks 12 times, I'm gonna take him 12 times, too. |
| Conversely, if I was only playing one league this season, I'm not sure I'd be able to bring myself to invest a second-round pick in Elly De La Cruz; that's where he's going in NFC leagues right now, and while I can certainly see the upside, that's too high a price to pay for too risky a player if I only have one second-round pick to play with. He could absolutely be worth a second-round pick, but De La Cruz could also be back in Triple-A by June and I wouldn't be too surprised, given the holes in his game. |
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| But … I can't go the entire 2024 season without having a player as fun as Elly De La Cruz on my roster, right? The fear of missing out is simply too strong to fade him entirely. |
| That's what today's newsletter is all about – identifying the players I'm not necessarily in love with at their cost, but whose upside is simply too tantalizing not to draft them at least once. If you're playing in one league, you may not want to pick any of these guys – several of them are on my busts list! But it's worth acknowledging what you might be passing up on by not drafting them, and what the case for them is. |
| Before we get to that All-FOMO team, I want to remind you that we'll be doing another FBT Mailbag later this week, and we're looking for some of your questions. Keeper questions, rankings questions, thoughts on Spring Training storylines – Scott White wrote about 10 of them here to get you started, along with the 30 position battles you need to be following here – or anything else you've got, send them my way at FantasyBaseball@CBSi.com with the subject line "AskFBT" to be included. |
| And now, here's the All-FOMO team: |
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| The 2024 All-FOMO Team |
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| Francisco Alvarez, C, Mets – ADP: 149.23 |
| What I might be missing on: Legitimate 35-homer upside from a catcher. |
| Alvarez might be the best power prospect at the catcher position since Gary Sanchez, which is also the cautionary tale here – Sanchez only really had two seasons where he fully lived up to the potential, and Alvarez sure looks like a similar batting average liability, with a .209 xBA last season. But Alvarez is a blue chip prospect who was just 21 years old throughout his rookie season. Sanchez wasn't a regular until he turned 23. |
| Vladimir Guerrero, 1B, Blue Jays – ADP: 29.1 |
| What I might be missing on: Another MVP season. |
| Guerrero took another step back in 2023, hitting 22 fewer homers than he did in 2021. Guerroer is averaging 29 homers, 84 runs, and 96 RBI with a .269 average over the past two seasons, which is basically what Christian Walker has done at about a five-round discount in 2024 price. But Guerrero has shown that elite upside in 2021 that maybe three other active 1B have ever shown. And, while the overall production didn't show it, Guerrero actually had the second-best expected wOBA of his career in 2023, as he started lifting the ball more consistently. It didn't lead to a big improvement in production, but it's a sign that Guerrero still might be able to tap into that elite upside. He's not my favorite third-round pick, but I'm going to have to draft him at least once, just in case. |
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| Matt McLain, 2B, Reds – ADP: 65.0 |
| What I might be missing on: One of the league's elite power-speed combos. |
| I have my concerns about McLain, who was a bust pick for me back in early February . I think he might be a batting average liability, with a combination of poor in-zone contact rates (83% in 2023, a 28th percentile mark) and middling pop (50th percentile average exit velocity; 27th percentile max exit velo) give him a pretty low floor as a hitter. But the thing is, he's in maybe the best park in baseball for taking advantage of middling raw power, and a 30-30 outcome is not out of the question here – he got to 28-24 in just 129 games between Triple-A and the majors last season. The Reds might be one of those lineups that takes a big step forward all at the same time, ala the Blue Jays a few years ago, and making sure you get some pieces of that is important, too. |
| Royce Lewis, 3B, Twins – ADP: 48.9 |
| What I might be missing on: The next Manny Machado. |
| Is that aiming too high? Machado was entering his fifth season when he was the same age Lewis is, so that's one way the comp falls apart. But I think the context of Lewis' career is important to consider – he lost the 2020 season to COVID, and then lost the 2021 season due to a torn ACL, but made the majors by 2022 and looked more than ready … until tearing his ACL again. As a result, he's played just 118 games since the end of the 2019 season. In that time, spent exclusively at Double-A, Triple-A, or the majors, Lewis has 28 homers, 23 steals, and a .314/.384/.567 line. The degree of difficulty of what Lewis has managed is incalculably high, and while I recognize the risk of betting on a player with his injury history and lack of track record, it's a bet I want to make given what he's already accomplished. |
| Elly De La Cruz, SS, Reds – ADP: 24.76 |
| What I might be missing on: The next Ronald Acuña. |
| Okay, that's probably overstating it. De La Cruz probably isn't going to ever be anywhere near as complete a hitter as Acuña, who had two top-12 MVP finishes by the time he was De La Cruz's age. But De La Cruz might be the only player who could realistically challenge Acuña's power/speed combination. He might be the fastest player in the league, and a 70-steal ceiling is relatively easy to project for De La Cruz. De La Cruz's swing isn't geared for maximizing in-game power yet, and he may never get there, given his massive swing-and-miss issues. But he was already 79th percentile in average exit velocity at 91.2 mph, and only Acuña and Giancarlo Stanton hit a ball harder than De La Cruz's 119.2 mph max exit velocity. I could also have gone with CJ Abrams and Oneil Cruz here, because I definitely want both of them on at least one team this season. But De La Cruz is probably the poster boy for this team, so how could I pick anyone else? |
| Aaron Judge, OF, Yankees – ADP: 10.24 |
| What I might be missing on: 2022. |
| I mean, that's it. That's the case. Judge followed up his 62-homer 2022 with a 55-homer pace, with quality of contact metrics that were very similar to his MVP season. He's the single best bet in baseball for 50 homers, and should drive in and score tons of runs in that Yankees lineup. Or, he might miss 50-plus games for the fourth time in seven seasons. This is one of the simplest risk-reward profiles in baseball, although the recent quote from Judge stating that his toe will require "constant maintenance" definitely seems to tip things back toward the "risk" side of the profile. |
| Wyatt Langford, OF, Rangers – ADP: 144.2 |
| What I might be missing on: A future MVP. |
| Langord went from the No. 4 pick in last year's draft to arguably the top prospect in baseball, and it's hard to overstate how impressive his 2023 was. He played 108 games between the best conference in college baseball and four levels of the minors, hitting .367/.491/.741 with 31 homers, 21 steals, 92 walks, and 78 strikeouts. Now, that production is inflated by his time in college, but he more than held his own in brief cameos at Double-A and Triple-A, where he had four homers in 17 combined games with 17 walks to 13 strikeouts. It's not clear if Langford has a place in the Rangers Opening Day plans just yet, but you won't find many scouts who don't think he's already basically MLB ready. He'll make an impact at some point this season, and uncertainty as to when is the only thing keeping his price down. |
| Byron Buxton, OF, Twins – ADP: 222.4 |
| What I might be missing on: A healthy Byron Buxton season. |
| It's probably not going to happen at this point, right? He hasn't played even 100 games since 2017, which is an awfully long time. But there's one specific reason to be more optimistic about Buxton's chances than we were this time last year, at least; the Twins are having him play center field, after he was slated to be their full-time DH due to knee issues. And the thing with Buxton is, even if he just makes it to 100 and nothing more, he can still be a hugely valuable player – from 2019 through 2022, he averaged 25 homers and 11 steals per-100 games. There are some Fantasy players who say they'll never draft Buxton, but at his price, it's all upside. |
| Tarik Skubal, SP, Tigers – ADP: 52.9 |
| What I might be missing on: The best pitcher in baseball. |
| There are reasons to be skeptical about Skubal, who pitched just 80.1 innings after recovering from flexor tendon surgery. But it was an unbelievably 80.1 innings, as he had a velocity spike coming back from the injury and had the fourth-best expected ERA of all pitchers who faced at least 100 batters – the only better pitchers were Jacob deGrom and a couple of elite relievers. That's the kind of company he was keeping. Skubal might be the very best pitcher in baseball this season if last season was for real. Or he might go back to being a fringe Fantasy option if his velocity dips back down and he goes back to the pitcher he was prior to 2023. I'm ranking Skubal as a top-12 pitcher, so I think the upside is worth it even at cost. |
| Yoshinobu Yamamoto, SP, Dodgers – ADP: 43.4 |
| What I might be missing on: The best pitcher in baseball. |
| Let's not overcomplicate this. Yamamoto was better than Shohei Ohtani was as a pitcher in Japan, so we can start there. Over the past three seasons, Yamamoto posted a 1.42 ERA, less than half the league's 3.26 mark in that stretch. There's no guarantees that Yamamoto hits the ground running, because he doesn't have much experience starting every fifth day and used a different baseball in Japan, but there's a reason he got a $300 million contract from the smartest organization in baseball. The various stuff models already view Yamamoto as one of the best pitchers in the world, and at just 25, with an arsenal major-league hitters have never seen, his chances of just flat-out dominating on a very good team are higher than any pitcher with no MLB experience we've ever seen. |
| Cole Ragans, SP, Royals – ADP: 103.9 |
| What I might be missing on: The best pitcher in baseball. |
| I'm a little worried Ragans' price is going to climb to the point where the risk-reward profile tips too much to the "risk" side after people were reminded of how dominant he can be in his spring debut over the weekend . But the good news from his spring outing is that it confirmed that the offseason did not diminish the stuff that fueled Ragans' breakout after he got to the Royals last season. There are enough concerns about his health (two Tommy John surgeries in his past), workload (no seasons over 135 innings), and control (4.1 BB/9 in his minor-league career), that I'm not quite there on calling him a top-15 SP like Scott White is. But the upside for that and significantly more is clearly here, and I don't want to go into the season without him on at least one of my teams. |
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