2021 Fantasy Baseball Draft Prep: Rating every player by downside or likelihood of being dropped

How likely is a player to be dropped within a month or two?

By Scott White

Mar 2, 2021 at 10:47 am ET • 1 min read

So much Fantasy Baseball analysis focuses on the upside of a player, how good he could be. And then there are projection systems that can pinpoint his most-likely scenario. Both exercises are useful, but they present an incomplete picture that might make for some head-scratching when you look at rankings or draft results.

What's too often missing is the downside assessment. How likely are things to go catastrophically wrong for said player, and what does catastrophically wrong even look like for him? The most elegant way to represent this, I think, is to assess how likely you are to drop him within the first few weeks of the season.

So I've done exactly that for every player you might think to question, measuring their likelihood with a meter ranging from low to high. This rating takes into account factors like injury risk, playing time risk, performance risk, etc. Not every player is explicitly shown here, of course, but for the ones who aren't, it's fair to assume the meter is maxed out.

This exercise presumes a league of fairly standard size (12 teams, let's say), fairly standard rosters and fairly standard scoring. As is always the case with a one-size-fits-off-lists, you'll have to assess the degree to which it's directly or loosely applicable to you. If you play in a league so deep that no one would ever dream of dropping Nick Solak, for instance, then you'll need to filter these assessments accordingly.

Just a cursory look at it will give you a clue as to how much risk you'd be taking on by selecting a player, perhaps even helping you identify some bust candidates. It may also be something to reference later, in those early weeks of the season, when you're trying to determine whether you should pull the plug on a struggling player. One with a lower downside rating would be more deserving of your patience.