Wake up!
Oh, I'm sorry. Did you doze off waiting for the page to load? Yeah, the autoplay will startle you if you're not ready for it. But not nearly as much as the late rounds of your draft will.
That's where you'll find some of the best bargains, you know, but only if you've studied up. If you panic and reach for the first name you recognize, you may be settling for assured mediocrity.
Of course, not every one of these players will last until the late rounds on Draft Day, but all figure to slip through the cracks to some degree, whether it's because they're coming off a down season or simply haven't established any name value yet.
These aren't the only bargain picks either. For some higher-end choices, be sure to check out my breakouts column. I'll be updating both a little closer to the season, when we have a better idea exactly where players are being drafted.
One look at Gio Gonzalez's 1.42 WHIP last year will tell you the guy isn't what he used to be. Except every one of his other numbers will tell you he absolutely is.
Particularly those he has the most direct influence over: the walk, strikeout and home run rates. Yup, he's still sub-par at the one but terrific at the other two, bringing last year's FIP -- which estimates ERA based on those three rates -- to a cool 3.05.
You know what it was his first three years with the Nationals? Try 2.82, 3.41 and 3.02. And as you already know, his actual numbers (as opposed to his theoretical ones) were already in line. He even won 21 games in 2012.
So what went wrong? While I'm of the opinion that the batting average a pitcher allows isn't all luck, Gonzalez's was unusually high last year, especially given how few of those hits were leaving the park, which most likely accounts for the spike in WHIP. Given that he's still a candidate for 200 strikeouts year-in and year-out, it seems like a hypothesis to pursue.
With the walks he allows, he won't be a great source of WHIP, but he could be Francisco Liriano, only eight rounds later.
It's pretty simple with Raisel Iglesias. Once he shook off the rust from his long layoff and regained command of all four of his pitches, the Cuban defector showed exactly why the Reds gave him a seven-year contract in the summer of 2014.
But it happened in a small enough window before reaching his innings limit that it may not have reverberated throughout the Fantasy-playing world.
Just look at his final nine starts. He had a 3.13 ERA, 0.90 WHIP and 10.2 strikeouts per nine innings, which is impressive just at face value. Then you look at the ratios and see that in addition to that strikeout rate, he kept the walks low. His home run rate wasn't even so bad considering he pitches half his games at Great American Ballpark. Because he's a sinkerballer, it has a chance to go down from here, which would mean he delivers on all three legs of the FIP triangle, excelling in the three areas a pitcher directly controls. That low-threes ERA is pretty much on the mark.
But again, it didn't get much attention at the time it was happening, so he's not going to get the appreciation he deserves on Draft Day. He has a real chance of delivering top-30 numbers with a late-round pick.
You may be thinking we've already done this with Byron Buxton. He already had his chance, and so to continue to pursue him is a fool's errand. But then, you may remember Mike Trout hit only .220 in his first partial season in the majors.
Why should we expect any newcomer, no matter how highly regarded, to immediately measure up to the best the world has to offer? In case it wasn't obvious, the learning curve for the majors is steep -- and that's especially true for Buxton, whose brief minor-league career was frequently interrupted by injuries, from a strained shoulder to a sprained wrist to a concussion to a sprained thumb just last year.
With those interruptions, he didn't transition smoothly from one level to the next, but with enough time in a new location, his talent would eventually break through. Over his final 143 minor-league at-bats last year, he hit .385 with three home runs, 12 stolen bases and an OPS right around 1.000, looking much like the player who could seemingly do no wrong in the lower levels of the minors, before all the injury troubles.
As recently as last year, some publications rated him the top prospect in baseball for a second straight year, ahead of even Kris Bryant. He has that combination of power, speed and plate discipline that often leads to first round-type production, and if this is the year it translates to the majors, Buxton could be the reason you win your league.
At this time a year ago, Jeff Samardzija looked like he had finally established himself as a no-questions-asked Fantasy ace, coming off a dominant season split between the Cubs and Athletics. So for him to qualify for this list now, he would have had to have suffered a complete meltdown in 2015.
That is basically what happened in his one season with the White Sox. He was always vulnerable to home runs, so the move to a hitter's park couldn't have helped. But it doesn't explain his strikeout rate dropping from 8.3 to 6.9 per nine innings.
No, something must have happened to his actual arsenal to account for that change, and -- looky there -- he suddenly started throwing a cutter more. It's a specialty for White Sox pitching coach Don Cooper -- he basically made Esteban Loaiza's career off it -- but it serves some pitchers better than others because when it doesn't cut like it should, well, it's basically a slower, fatter fastball -- one susceptible to, yup, flying out of the ballpark.
Samardzija has also said he was tipping his pitches most of the year and corrected it just before his final two starts, when he allowed two earned runs over 16 innings, so there's another possible explanation.
Clearly, major-league teams weren't deterred by his numbers. He had no shortage of suitors and nearly got a nine-figure deal with the Giants. San Francisco is a great place for a homer-prone pitcher like him, too. But the truth is I would have liked him going anywhere that would de-emphasize his use of the cutter, which is hopefully anywhere but Cooper's domain.
If Jonathan Schoop is going to amount to anything in Fantasy, it'll be because of his power. Normally, one-trick ponies don't make for the most reliable selections, especially ones who walk as rarely as he does, but this one trick is especially rare among middle infielders. And as late as you'd be drafting Schoop, reliability isn't what you're after anyway.
So how much power are we talking? Well, his ISO -- which is simply slugging percentage minus batting average, neutralizing the impact of singles on slugging percentage -- was .203 last year. Among full-time second basemen, only those of Brian Dozier and Rougned Odor were higher.
In other words, he has 30-homer potential at a position that hasn't seen a 30-homer player since Robinson Cano in 2012, and sure enough, if you project his numbers last year over 600 at-bats, making up for those three months he missed with a torn ligament in his knee, he would have finished with 29.5 home runs.
At age 24, he's still coming into his own, and considering he was also known for his high contact rate in the minors, the one-trick pony label may ultimately sell him short.
Blocking an up-and-comer with an old retread is a typical Yankee move, so if you had any enthusiasm for Robert Refsnyder entering the offseason, you couldn't have been too surprised when the Yankees acquired Starlin Castro from the Cubs.
Here's the thing, though: This particular retread is only a year older than the up-and-comer.
Forget what that says about Refsnyder for the moment. For Castro, it should kill the notion that his best years are behind him. We forget just how young he was to start out. He made an All-Star team at age 21. Only seven players in all of history have done so at such a young age and then not returned after their 25th birthday. For as much as Castro has disappointed the last couple years, time is on his side, and his performance the first three years was so promising that you have to think the change of scenery -- going to an organization that actually believes in him as opposed to one that treated him like he was in somebody else's way -- could make all the difference.
It's not like he has profiled as a different hitter over the last three years. He hasn't struck out substantially more and hasn't been hitting more fly balls, which turn into outs more often than ground balls and line drives do. He just hasn't hit for as high of a batting average, so it really comes down to which three-year period you believe was the fluke.
Taking into account Castro's age and pedigree, I'm going to say the last three years were, brought about by untimely slumps and diminished confidence. He seemed like he might already be getting back to form over his final 25 games last year, batting .378 with five home runs and a 1.080 OPS in 82 at-bats. Given that he was an early-round shortstop just two years ago, the opportunity to take him with your last-round pick should be an appealing one.
Aaron Altherr is exactly the kind of player who can give those who stuck with baseball all the way through September a leg up on those who didn't, coming out of nowhere to contribute something worthwhile for a team going nowhere.
The 25-year-old was finally able to get something out of his special tools last year, and at the major-league level, they manifested as a relevant number of home runs and stolen bases as well as extra-base hits galore. His batting average was only .241, which is another reason why he might fly under the radar, but the sum of his contributions gave him more Head-to-Head points per game than J.D. Martinez, Carlos Gonzalez and George Springer.
Now obviously, drafting him on the same level of those three would be a mistake, but any player who's capable of that kind of production over a quarter of a season deserves an extended look, and it's not like he'll have to contend for playing time on the rebuilding Phillies.
He's the perfect high-reward pick as a fifth outfielder spot in Rotisserie leagues or a final bench spot in Head-to-Head.
If you saw the deal Rich Hill got this offseason, you might have just assumed Billy Beane had a screw loose again, handing $6 million to a player who had gotten mostly minor-league deals the last few years. But that's probably because you stopped paying attention in September, when Hill did his best impression of Chris Sale.
Not only did he join Sale in becoming one of just seven pitchers in 2015 with three double-digit strikeout efforts in a row (an especially impressive feat considering he made four starts total), but one of those starts was a shutout and, between the three, he allowed a total of 10 hits over 23 innings.
You want to get a penny-pinching data-driven organization to shell out for a small sample size? Have one like that.
Now, for a little history. Way back in 2007, a soft-tossing lefty with a wicked curveball took the majors by surprise, striking out about a batter per inning to give the division-winning Cubs the ideal complement to hard-throwing Carlos Zambrano. He lost command of his pitches the following year, turning them into live batting practice when the wind was blowing out at Wrigley Field, and spent the next few years bouncing from organization to organization until one finally realized that he needed Tommy John surgery.
That soft-tossing lefty was, of course, Hill, whose squandered opportunity put him back on the Island of Misfit Toys for the Athletics to rescue as only they can. If last September is any indication, the wicked curveball is back, and if his command goes south on him again, he might just survive it pitching half his games at O.co Coliseum.
The Athletics' faith should count for something here as well. They usually sign players they expect to outperform their contracts.
Island of Misfit Toys, right? Danny Valencia also met the Athletics' standard of imperfection as a corner infielder with no power, at least not against the right-handed pitchers, when they plucked him off waivers from the Blue Jays last August.
But a funny thing happened when they began playing him every day: He mashed. It didn't matter that he was facing righties regularly or playing in a bigger home park than ever before. He homered 11 times in 183 at-bats for Athletics, giving him 18 home runs in 345 at-bats overall.
Project that over 600 at-bats, and you get 31 homers -- or more than all but four third basemen (the ones you'd expect -- Nolan Arenado, Josh Donaldson, Manny Machado and Todd Frazier) hit in 2015. And it's not like he stopped hitting doubles during that time. His ISO in 2015, which is simply slugging percentage minus batting average to make sure that the latter doesn't skew the former, was .229. Kris Bryant's was only .213.
No power, you say? Turns out Valencia was one of the best power hitters at his position last year -- and in enough at-bats for you to take notice take notice. It helps that the Athletics don't seem to be making contingency plans, actually unloading one in the form of Brett Lawrie this offseason.
The Nationals acquired Trea Turner from the Padres last offseason anticipating he'd take over for departing free agent Ian Desmond this season. So then why did they spend the winter trying to fill the need some other way, first with their failed pursuit of Ben Zobrist and then with their reluctant endorsement of Danny Espinosa?
I'm calling it an overabundance of caution -- or maybe an effort to placate new veteran-loving manager Dusty Baker. In any case, it's temporary. The 22-year-old is clearly more talented than Espinosa and might actually be an upgrade over Desmond as well, at least the version we've seen the last couple years. He won't hit as many home runs, probably, but he's a more complete hitter, having batted .322 with a respectable strikeout rate between Double- and Triple-A last year.
Of course, expecting those numbers to translate right away might be unreasonable, but Turner's steals potential at a weak position should help you navigate whatever going pains he endures. For this year, whenever he does take over, I'm expecting sort of a more powerful version of Elvis Andrus, who'll be a middle-round pick in most leagues.
Truth is I was prepared to call Vincent Velasquez a sleeper even before the Astros shipped him to the Phillies in the Ken Giles deal. His opportunity wasn't as clear in Houston, but his potential sure was.
This is a guy who averaged more than 10 strikeouts per nine innings in each of his five minor-league seasons -- and without any glaring control problems. He averaged more than nine strikeouts per nine innings in his first taste of the majors last year while throwing arguably his best pitch, the changeup, less than 10 percent of the time.
And best of all, because that first taste came primarily as a reliever, that's where he'll be eligible to begin 2016. In a year when the most notable SPARPs (starting pitchers as relief pitchers) are the kind you wouldn't want in Fantasy otherwise -- hittable types like Doug Fister, Tanner Roark, etc. -- Velasquez actually offers something in the way of upside.
Technically speaking, the Phillies can fill a starting rotation without him and probably do hope to breathe some trade value into retreads like Charlie Morton, Jeremy Hellickson and Brett Oberholtzer, but like the rebuiliding Braves with the much more erratic Mike Foltynewicz last year, it's only a matter of time before the Phillies decide to assess what they have.
Particularly in Head-to-Head points leagues, where his relief pitcher eligibility is so valuable, you'll want to have Velasquez stashed for when that time comes.
At first glance, C.J. Cron's 2015 looks like a repeat of his underwhelming rookie season -- one where he was often compared to Mark Trumbo as another hulking first baseman developed by the Angels.
That may have been setting the bar too low.
It didn't seem that way until the Angels gave him a chance to play regularly over the final three months last year. In 263 at-bats, he hit .289 with 14 home runs and an .835 OPS. By comparison, Trumbo's career highs are a .268 batting average and .808 OPS. He has had a couple 30-homer seasons, but he isn't exactly a hot commodity in Fantasy these days, his power muted by his inability to make regular contact. Cron isn't exactly a contact hitter, but he struck out about one every five at-bats last year and had an even lower rate in the minors.
In other words, he figures to get some hits of the non-homer variety as well, which is what distinguishes him from the all-or-nothing Trumbo. Whether or not it translates to batting average remains to be seen, but considering he hit .262 with bad BABIP luck, I'm cautiously optimistic.
While Trumbo's biggest problem is making enough contact to tap into his power potential, Cron's has simply been playing time. That's going to change with Albert Pujols sidelined for at least a month because of foot surgery, making Cron a sneaky late-round corner infielder in Rotisserie leagues.
