2020 Fantasy Baseball Busts: Top-75 picks you'll regret on Draft Day, like Fernando Tatis and Shane Bieber
In every draft, you're going to have big misses. Here are seven to consider steering clear of on Draft Day.
By
Chris Towers
•
1 min read
In a perfect world, every player in MLB would have a career year in 2020. Every pitcher would set a new career-high in strikeout rate and ERA, and every hitter would fill up the stat sheet like Mike Trout. Think about how much easier playing Fantasy Baseball would be!
Unfortunately, this isn't a perfect world. If every pitcher had a career-best ERA, every hitter would post career-worst numbers; if every hitter was Mike Trout, every pitcher would probably just stop playing baseball altogether.
And, I hate to break it to you, but not all of your early-round picks on Draft Day are going to be stars. I'm sorry. I've been told I'm a pessimist, but that's just being realistic. Early-round pitchers are especially risky, but we'll have plenty of hitters who leave us in the lurch. That's just the nature of the game; it's what makes Fantasy so challenging.
Of course, trying to identify who those early-round disappointments will be is a tall task because if you're wrong about them, you're not gonna be wrong in a small way You're gonna be wrong while someone hangs an MVP trophy over your head. That's just the nature of the game.
However, not all early-round picks are created equal, and some have more risks than others. Here are six inside the top-75 picks I'm wary of, plus one of everyone's favorite breakout candidates who I've decided I'm avoided in the rest of my drafts. If you want more bust picks, Scott White has some warnings about Adalberto Mondesi and Madison Bumgarner, while Frank Stampfl isn't toughing Jose Altuve or Aaron Judge.
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This is the one that makes you feel queasy to even think about. Tatis is an incredible talent, with premium bat speed and athleticism who just put together an amazing rookie season. He's the kind of player who could be a top-five pick next spring. But that's not a guarantee, as Carlos Correa's second season showed us a few years back. It's not that Correa was bad, because he wasn't. The problem was, he was being pegged as an immediate early round contributor thanks to his power-speed combo, but he regressed as a power hitter and stopped running as he developed into a middle-of-the-order threat for the Astros. The same thing won't necessarily happen to Tatis — who, it must be said, was quite a bit better than Correa in their respective rookie seasons -- but it's a risk even before we get to the red flags in Tatis' profile itself -- the back and hamstring injuries, the elevated strikeout rate, the good-not-great batted-ball data. Tatis has immense upside if it all comes together, but there's very little margin for error when you're drafting him as a second-rounder.
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Bieber was last year's biggest starting pitcher breakout, but it hardly came from out of nowhere. His combination of elite control and above-average strikeout skills made him an advanced stats darling, and those skills only improved in Year 2. So, why's he here? It's those pesky advanced stats again. Bieber does an excellent job of limiting walks and producing strikeouts, which goes a long way toward making him an excellent pitcher. The problem comes when hitters do make contact, because when they do, the ball tends to get hit hard and it tends to go an awfully long way. Among starters in 2019, he ranked in the fourth percentile in average exit velocity allowed, in the fifth in hard-hit rate and in the 22nd in barrel rate allowed. In 2018, he underperformed his expected wOBA allowed by nearly 20 points; in 2019, he over performed by the same rate. If Bieber can remain an elite strikeout pitcher, that will mitigate the batted-ball issues. If that skill slips and he gets a bit worse luck than last season, things could get pretty ugly.
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First, a reminder of how good Alvarez was last season: 42 doubles, 50 home runs and a .325 average between the majors and minors, and it wasn't the minors numbers doing all of the heavy lifting. He dominated the bigs as a 22-year-old, and clearly has a long, bright future ahead of him. But I'm worried about the short term. I'm not actually too worried about Alvarez's absence from camp, though that's certainly something to consider as we're less than a week away from opening day. The bigger issue for me is that Alvarez is already dealing with seemingly chronic knee issues at age 23. He had some problems staying healthy in the minors, and there was talk in spring that he might have missed opening day had it gone as normally scheduled, and might be limited to DH duties exclusively. A utility-only player with bad knees going near the end of the third round is risky enough, even for one as talented as Alvarez; add that he hasn't reported to camp yet, and it's simply too much to stomach. Just take Nelson Cruz 30 picks later.
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I'm about the 4,000th person to call Greinke a bust over the past four years, and pretty much all 4,000 of them have been wrong. So, why won't I be No. 4,001? It's not that I think Greinke will be bad in 2020 -- he almost never is, so why would he start now? This is more a concern with the kind of player Greinke is and how the shortened schedule might impact his value. See, Greinke finished No. 5 last season at SP, but if you break the season out into two-month stretches (April to May, May to June, etc.), he actually averaged around the 12th-15th starter — and ranged from the top-five in one stretch to two stretches outside of the top 20. Which is to say, to at least some degree, Greinke was a compiler. And that's not an insult -- in 2020, you've gotta be pretty great to compile the kind of numbers Greinke does, and he is. Greinke is a bankable, stable option, who makes up for a low-ish strikeout rate by being a consistent 200-inning guy. The problem is, in a 60-game season, there's no such thing as stability for a starting pitcher — there's just too much volatility inherent in the position, and not enough time for a slow start to regress to the mean. And it'll be hard for volume to really be an edge, for the same reason. Greinke isn't the only example of this type of player — Jose Berrios and Mike Soroka have similar profiles I'm avoiding among pitchers, while the likes of Jose Abreu, Anthony Rizzo, and Whit Merrifield could also count in the "compiler" category. These players are unlikely to hurt you, so it's hard to call them busts outright; but their impact could be a bit muted in a shortened season.
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I don't discount the possibility that Machado could get back to his Baltimore days, but I'm losing hope with every game he plays away from Camden Yards, where he was a career .296/.353/.537 hitter. The problem is, he's a .267/.323/.449 hitter away from Camden, and that's pretty much where he's been since getting traded to the Dodgers midway through the 2018 season. That's not to say Machado was a product of Camden, but it is to say that he may be more of a good hitter in a neutral park context than the great one he was in Camden. And, of course, there's the little problem that Petco Park is one of the toughest hitting environments in baseball. Given the depth of shortstop and the fact that Machado doesn't run much anymore, and I'm just not sure the upside is high enough for me to pay to find out.
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I love Joey Gallo, but what's the justification for him going off the board more than 50 picks earlier than Miguel Sano? Gallo should steal a few more bases, but that's no guarantee to be much of an edge in this shorted timetable, so the gap has to come down to production or health. Sano has similar upside and similar apparent shortcomings to Gallo, except that the former has been a consistently elite BABIP hitter, while Gallo was one of the worst in baseball before his 60-game season in 2019. Gallo does have a cleaner bill of health, and hasn't shown the "optioned to the minors" downside Sano has, but 50 picks is an awfully steep price to pay for safety. Especially when that "safety" comes in the form of a guy like Gallo, who has as low a batting average floor as anyone in the game and missed significant time just last season. His price is an overreaction to a small-sample size of success in 2019, and his profile is one of the easiest to replace in Fantasy these days. Wait for Sano or Franmil Reyes.
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This one pains me, because I wanted Luzardo in every league back in the spring. Unfortunately, so did everyone else, and that hasn't really changed even after he tested positive for COVID-19. At this point it seems like he hasn't had symptoms and can hopefully return relatively soon, but there's no guarantee he's ready for Opening Day. But, that's not even why he's here; Luzardo was going to make this list long before that news came through. Luzardo is an unbelievably talented pitcher, and he's major-league ready right now; he was major-league ready last summer when he came up from the minors and dominated in a relief role. The problem is, I'm not sure he's ready for a major-league workload. He has thrown more than 85 pitches just once — once! — as a professional, and as a result has finished six innings just twice in 43 career starts. Of course, the fact that he's only made 43 starts since being drafted in 2016 is a red flag in its own right. Luzardo simply hasn't shown he can hold up to a significant workload, and now he's behind the pace in preparing for the season, which means he's likely to be even more limited when he does make it back to the rotation. If Luzardo is maxing out at five innings in most starts, he's going to have to be an absolute ace to be a must-start Fantasy option. I'd rather take a chance on breakout candidates like Zac Gallen or Frankie Montas in that same range on Draft Day who don't have those some workload concerns.
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