I'll admit that my original list of sleepers was lacking in starting pitchers. The position is so deep in talent this year that you don't have to look hard to find value. But in the weeks since, I've identified some favorites worth highlighting here in Sleepers 2.0.
There are some hitter additions, too, with six new players being featured in all. I've also brought back my original list of 12 -- depicted here as The Holdovers -- but I'm sorry to say that most have moved up at least 30 spots in ADP since Sleepers 1.0. I'm a man of great influence, apparently.
- Sleepers 2.0: Scott | Chris | Frank
- Breakouts 2.0: Scott | Chris | Frank
- Busts 2.0: Scott | Chris | Frank
Does that mean they're not sleepers anymore? Look, most still have a lot of ground to make up before they get to where I rank them, and as such, I find that I'm still eager to draft them. The one who's verging on not being so discounted anymore is Cody Bellinger, but the reasons for his rise are so compelling that I think they're still worth reviewing here.
Get the Fantasy Baseball Today 2025 Draft Guide Here!
First, though, the newcomers ...
THE NEWCOMERS
Jake Burger, 1B/3B, Rangers
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 126.8
Back on the Burger bandwagon, am I? Actually, when the Rangers first acquired him from the Marlins this offseason, I thought it was the death knell for his Fantasy value. It didn't seem like there was a role for him other than power bench bat. But then when they traded Nate Lowe less than two weeks later, the Rangers' plan became clear: Burger was there to play first base. And Arlington must seem like Valhalla to him after four years with the White Sox and Marlins. The lineup upgrade alone figures to raise Burger's stock by an order of magnitude, with the Rangers poised to do for him sort of what the Dodgers did for Teoscar Hernandez last year.
If you drafted Burger last year, you may feel like he burned you with a .225 batting average and .635 OPS in the first half, but his strong finish brought his 2024 numbers nearly in line with the 2023 numbers that got us so excited in the first place. In a more competitive environment with an improved supporting cast, he might hit .260 with 35 homers, particularly given his top-of-the-scale exit velocity readings, but the biggest gains will be in his run and especially RBI totals. He's too much of a free-swinger to to serve as a sleeper in points league, but in Rotisserie, he offers a nice safety net for a couple of scarcities midway through the draft, being both a first baseman and a home run specialist.
Sean Manaea, SP, Mets
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 174.2
You might think Manaea's oblique strain, which promises to put him on the IL to begin the year, would be a deal-breaker for his sleeper appeal, but I, for one, am all the more emboldened. That's because his ADP in NFBC leagues has slipped to 255 since we first learned of his injury, putting him firmly in the he-might-as-well-be-free category. And a burgeoning ace in that category is something I wouldn't dare pass up.
Burgeoning ace? You mean a 33-year-old with a career 4.00 ERA, 1.20 WHIP and 8.4 K/9? That may be the Manaea who was, but the Manaea who is has so radically altered his delivery that his track record is effectively moot. The only part that matters is what came after July 25. That's the day he saw Chris Sale pitch firsthand and came away so impressed that he decided to adopt the same low three-quarters delivery. He took to it immediately, delivering a 3.09 ERA, 0.85 WHIP, and 9.9 K/9 over his final 12 starts. His swinging-strike rate, which was a modest 11 percent before the change, rose to ... well, a Chris Sale-like 14 percent after the change.
It's possible Manaea gives back some of those gains as the league catches up to the change, but with lower release height being on-trend in general right now and Manaea so quickly taking to his, I doubt he'll return to being what he was. Meanwhile, his oblique strain is considered mild, with the IL stint only being necessary because he'll have to restart his ramp-up after a couple weeks' rest. A setback is always possible, of course, but if he's already beginning to ramp up again by the time you get around to drafting, then you'll have every reason to be as emboldened as I am.
Joshua Lowe, OF, Rays
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 181.6
One of the main reasons why I thought Lowe could repeat or perhaps even build upon his big 2023 -- when he hit .292 with 20 homers, 32 steals, and an .835 OPS -- is that it seemed like the Rays were counting on him to be a centerpiece of their lineup. As such, he wouldn't be subject to their usual platoon machinations and could instead settle into full-time duty. That's all the more true now. Looking at the Rays' projected roster, I don't even know who they'd start over Lowe against left-handers. Jose Caballero, maybe?
But of course, opportunity is less of a concern for Lowe now than performance. He didn't live up to that big 2023, being derailed at first by hip inflammation and then two separate IL stints for a strained oblique. By the time he returned for good in June, his mechanics were all out of whack, causing his strikeout rate to spike and his batting average to plummet.
"I felt like I was swinging a different way, protecting my oblique or whatnot," Lowe said earlier this spring. "But [now], I feel great, and I feel like I can move freely and move how my body is supposed to move." Hitting coach Chad Mottola has noticed as well, saying Lowe "looks like two years ago."
Lowe's numbers two years ago were enough to make him the No. 12 outfielder in 5x5 leagues and the No. 24 outfielder in points leagues -- and that was with some of the playing-time tomfoolery that the Rays seem less likely to engage in now. Better yet, because Lowe is a left-handed hitter, he's well suited to take advantage of the Rays' new home at George M.Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, a Yankees minor-league facility with the same dimensions as the big venue in New York -- you know, the one with the short right-field porch. That porch figures to play even shorter in the Florida humidity.
Dansby Swanson, SS, Cubs
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 184.8
From where he's being drafted, it sure seems like Fantasy Baseballers are accepting Swanson's 2024 as his new normal. It was a little underwhelming, sure. His batting average was at the lower end of its usual range, he dipped below 20 homers for the first time in four years, and his run and RBI production suffered in association with everything else. But when you dig into the Statcast readings, the plate discipline data, and various other potential indicators of decline, you don't find much. More than likely, his swing was a little messed up because of the core muscle injury that required surgery after the season. Even playing through it, he managed to find his footing over the final two months, batting .283 with seven homers, 12 steals, and an .822 OPS.
That's more like the Swanson we know and the Swanson I suspect we'll see again on the other side of surgery. It's just that now he's the 181st player selected on average when, last year, he was 109th. Go back further, all the way to 2021, and the latest he was drafted in any of those years was 116th. That's what people are sleeping on. It's not that Swanson is about to do something he's never done before. It's that he's fundamentally the same player who typically goes inside the top 120. The surface-level numbers may have slipped last year, but for valid reason and with no concerning changes to the underlying data. A discount being applied for no good reason is exactly the sort that you should look to take advantage of.
Robbie Ray, SP, Giants
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 190.4
We may have a hamstring injury to thank for Ray's discounted price today. He was trending toward something special with his 16.2 percent swinging-strike rate in seven starts. For some perspective, only two pitchers with more than 100 innings had a swinging-strike rate over 16 percent last season: Blake Snell and Garrett Crochet. That's the kind of company Ray was keeping -- and not for the first time, mind you. He was, remember, the 2021 AL Cy Young winner, putting together a 2.84 ERA, 1.05 WHIP, and 11.5 K/9 for the Blue Jays that year.
You know what else Ray's seven starts last year had in common with that 2021 season? How hard he was throwing. Those two seasons represent the only ones in which both his average fastball velocity was over 94 mph and his average slider velocity was over 88 mph. And he did it while still struggling to regain his delivery fresh off of Tommy John surgery.
"I think everything just seemed so foreign because it had been a while since I'd been on the mound," he said early in spring training. "I was really just trying to go out and find out how everything moves again. Now that I've had time to kind of look back and reflect on it and build on top of it, I feel like I'm in a really good spot right now."
Sure seems like it from his early spring performance. So far, Ray has struck out nine in five innings, allowing just two hits and walking no one. If that's not encouraging enough for you, he's also introduced a new weapon, a changeup that he's learned from one of the best at throwing them, Tarik Skubal.
"I've always struggled with throwing a changeup, and I don't pronate very well," Ray said. "That's usually how you throw a changeup. The way that he taught me, you don't have to. It seems to be working pretty well."
Betting on ace form from a pitcher who's missed most of the past two years due to injury is generally unwise, but with as high as Ray is riding right now, health might be the only thing that could bring him down.
Nick Pivetta, SP, Padres
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 204.8
How many times can we go down this road with Pivetta only to end up back at the same four-something ERA? Well ... let's just say every time, because his career-best ERA is only 4.04. But 2025 promises something that all those other fakeout sleeper seasons didn't: half his games at a pitcher's park. Fenway Park and Citizens Bank Park are both famously hitter-friendly venues and have likely contributed to him falling short of his potential. To remind you why we keep going back to the well with him, here's where he ranks in some of the most evaluative measurements over the past two seasons:
Nick Pivetta for 4/$55 million is a steal! I know people aren’t exactly ‘moved’ but Padres fans should be excited!
— Joseph Cammisa (@jcammisabsbl) February 13, 2025
Since 2023 (min. 250 IP)
SIERA: 3.32 (4th in MLB)
BAA: .219 (13th)
K/9: 11.08 (4th)
K%: 30.0% (5th)
K-BB%: 22.8% (5th)
Stuff+: 126 (1st)pic.twitter.com/hKo29xHimG
Pivetta has always been a good bat-misser, ranking eight in strikeout rate among pitchers with at least 140 innings last year, and with the control gains he's made the past couple years, it's mainly just the home runs that are still holding him back. Those aren't going away completely, even with the move to Petco Park, but if the venue change could just bring his ERA in line with the 3.51 xERA he had last year, going along with his plus strikeout total and above-average WHIP, then he's not so far from being Joe Ryan, who's being drafted about 100 picks earlier.
THE HOLDOVERS
Cody Bellinger, 1B/OF, Yankees
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 89.8
How do I justify calling Bellinger a sleeper only a year after calling him a bust? Location, location, location. If there's one venue that can salvage a left-handed slugger whose exit velocities have gone down the drain, it's Yankee Stadium, home to the most famous short porch in baseball. The Yankees themselves must realize this, acquiring Bellinger from the Cubs this offseason, and just like that, I'm seeing his improbable 2023 -- when he hit .307 with 26 homers, 20 steals, and an .881 OPS to re-enter the MVP conversation -- in an entirely new light.
The prevailing sentiment going into last year was that there was no way he'd repeat it, hence the bust call. His average exit velocity ranked in the bottom quarter of the league, his max exit velocity in the bottom half, and his hard-hit rate in the bottom 10 percent. Home runs are still possible with that profile, but only when the hitter sells out for them, consistently lofting the ball toward the shortest part of the outfield fence. Bellinger has the lofting part down, his fly-ball rate regularly exceeding 40 percent, and pulls those fly balls at a nice rate as well, but Wrigley Field is notoriously deep at the foul poles, placing it among the worst venues for such a hitter. Isaac Paredes found this out last year (more on him in a bit).
Fittingly, Bellinger came back down to earth in 2024 as the same batted-ball profile yielded more mathematically feasible results, but again, that was at Wrigley Field and not Yankee Stadium, where Statcast estimates Bellinger would have hit six more home runs. I suspect it'll be more once he gets in a groove there, his swing being naturally geared for pull-side power. If he can get back to the 25-30 range and remain reasonably healthy, then the other numbers will improve as well, putting that 2023 stat line back within reach (only at a lower price tag this time).
Bo Bichette, SS, Blue Jays
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 133.8
Bichette has been more or less a stud since the time he entered the league six years ago, so what's he doing in a sleepers article? Hey, that's what I want to know. I actually thought he was overrated back when we were drafting him Rounds 1, 2, and 3 -- like, you know, just last year -- but to see him go in Round 12 all of a sudden makes me question my sanity.
I did say he's been more or less a stud from the beginning, and well, last year he was less. But normally, players with his sort of track record get a pass for the rare misstep. He'll only be 27 this year, for goodness' sake, and actually has a pretty good explanation in that he tried playing through a calf injury that twice landed him on the IL. The core metrics haven't changed. His contact quality was down a bit, but to a level where we've seen him thrive before (see 2020). He wasn't missing on pitches inside the zone or chasing pitches outside of it -- not any more than usual, anyway. Altogether, it seems like we should just chalk it up as a lost season and not look too much deeper into it.
So that's how I was approaching it before any ADP data became available, slotting Bichette about 70th in my rankings. Again, I thought he was overrated in Rounds 1-3 -- his base-stealing days are long behind him, and his emphasis on hitting the ball the other way has rendered him more of a 20-homer guy than a 30-homer -- but one thing we could always count on him to deliver was batting average. He had never hit less than .290 prior to last year, and with good health, I expect him to return to that standard. To see him go twice as low as I rank him -- behind Anthony Volpe, of all people, who's an obvious liability for batting average -- tells me that people believe Bichette is catastrophically broken. I don't see the evidence for it.
Brandon Nimmo, OF, Mets
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 137.8
Nimmo hit .224 last year, and because of that, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that he's a batting average liability now. But to that, I say, "Uh ... no?" We're talking about a guy who hit no less than .274 in the previous four seasons, who just set a career-high for average exit velocity, and who's regarded to have some of the best plate discipline of any hitter in baseball. Those plate discipline numbers were a little worse in 2024, but they weren't an order of magnitude worse, such that you'd expect him to go from a plus to a minus in batting average.
So what happened? Like Bichette, Nimmo was playing through injury, a case of plantar fasciitis that cropped up in May. He also appears to have fallen victim to plain old bad luck, his .267 BABIP being completely incongruous with his other batted-ball data and a huge departure from his career .333 mark to that point.
And yet ... he repeated as a 20-homer guy, holding onto his power gains from 2023. Despite the foot injury, he had double-digit steals for the first time, going a perfect 15 for 15 in what seemed to be a concerted effort to take advantage of the new pickoff limits for pitchers. He came within two runs of a 90-run, 90-RBI season as one of the top three hitters in the Mets lineup. He's rounded out his game so that he's now a five-category threat if he can only get the batting average back up. And I suspect he will, for the reasons I've already outlined.
My first inclination was to rank him in the same range as Seiya Suzuki and Bryan Reynolds. ADP has him going 50 spots lower than that.
Jurickson Profar, OF, Braves
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 155.6
It's completely obnoxious of me to call Jurickson Profar a sleeper when he just had far and away the best year of his career, placing as the 11th-best outfielder in 5x5 category leagues and sixth-best in Head-to-Head points after 10 seasons of what would politely be described as mediocrity. Some good this sleeper call does now, when everyone's fully aware of what he's capable of doing.
Here's the thing, though: Nobody's drafting him like that, and the truth is I don't really want to draft Profar either. Even though the Statcast data fully backs up what he did, with career-best exit velocities and a .282 xBA that's in line with his actual .280 mark, he seems like an obvious regression candidate just because ... well, where has this player been all this time? Considered the top prospect in baseball way back in 2013, Profar never showed much thump in the majors until his unlikely 2024 breakthrough, when he worked with former major-leaguer Fernando Tatis Sr. to add a leg kick to his swing.
"I love talking hitting and I love getting better so I put a lot of work in the offseason last year and then I took it to spring training and I keep working and working until it clicked," Profar said.
But will it hold? Braves president of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos sure thinks so.
"Based on last year, we had Jurickson as the second-best free-agent bat," Anthopoulos said. "We believe who he was last year is who he is going forward."
I thought I could avoid drafting Profar -- again, a top-12 outfielder last year -- by dropping him to 35th at the position, but apparently, everyone else has said 45th. OK, well, if a sleeper is a player whose upside is widely overlooked, and if Profar's upside is what he showed us last year, then he would seem to fit the description, wouldn't he?
Isaac Paredes, 3B, Astros
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 171.0
You remember how, when discussing Cody Bellinger, I said that Wrigley Field is notoriously deep at the foul poles? Turns out that was an especially big problem for Paredes, whose spray chart the past three years looks like this:
You wonder how a player with 13th percentile exit velocities can hit 31 home runs? That's how. Paredes basically just takes aim at the left field foul pole and puts the ball there often enough to be somebody. That is, until his trade to the Cubs last July ruined everything. He homered just once every 71 plate appearances during his short stay with them compared to once every 21 plate appearances in his 2 1/2 seasons with the Rays.
Houston, we have an opportunity. With the Cubs looking to graduate third base prospect Matt Shaw to the majors, Astros GM Dana Brown made sure Paredes was included in the Kyle Tucker trade, giving him a ready-made replacement for free agent Alex Bregman, another hitter who overcomes marginal exit velocities by battering left field. For all of Bregman's success in Houston, there's a good chance the Astros don't even miss a beat. Just as Yankee Stadium was the ideal landing spot for a hitter with Bellinger's profile, Daikin Park (formerly Minute Maid Park) is for a hitter with Paredes' profile. Compare it to the other places he's played:
On the left is Tropicana Field in Tampa, a cozy enough venue down the left field line. In the middle is Wrigley Field, a disaster. On the right is Minute Maid Park, which is as good as it gets for a hitter with Paredes' profile. In fact, Statcast suggests that if he had played every game there last year, he would have 26 home runs rather than the 19 he actually hit. And how many did Bregman hit in 2024? Why, 26.
Bregman has a slight edge in plate discipline and other areas that make it less than an apples-to-apples comparison, but describing him broadly as a .260-hitting, 25-homer guy, which is what he's been for the Astros the past three years, I'd expect about the same from Paredes in Houston. And yet his ADP is 60 spots lower, dragged down by his poor showing in Chicago.
Carlos Correa, SS, Twins
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 219.6
Y'all just cannot abide injuries, can you? Not even a little bit. It's true that a bout with plantar fasciitis limited Correa to only 86 games last year. It's also true that he has a reputation for being injury-prone. But I'm here to tell you that the reputation is overblown. How, you ask? Well, in the three years prior to last, he averaged 140 games. That's not perfect attendance, but it's not grounds for summer school either. Generally, if a hitter is playing that often, you're not going to rue the day you drafted him.
Correa was drafted pretty late in NFBC leagues last year, too -- 236th, on average -- but there were real performance concerns at the time. He had slashed .230/.312/.399 the year prior, and no one really knew why. With his injury history already a stain on his record, the 2024 season represented a crossroads for him in Fantasy, signaling whether he would regain his once favorable standing or fade into the background. And I thought it went pretty well. He slashed .310/.388/.517 for the 86 games he was healthy. His OPS was his highest since 2019, which was the juiciest year of the juiced ball era. He cut his strikeout rate by six percentage points, was an obvious choice to represent the Twins in the All-Star game, and ultimately averaged more Head-to-Head points per game (3.33) than Corey Seager, C.J. Abrams, and Willy Adames. He doesn't get any credit for that?
I could understand being extra cautious with him in an NFBC league. NFBC leagues don't offer IL spots and tend to be on the deeper side. These particulars make every injury twice as damaging because of the roster crunch it creates and the lack of alternatives it presents. It stands to reason, then, that the people who play in such leagues would be especially injury-conscious. That's not the typical Fantasy experience, where IL spots are used and waiver wires are plentiful, but NFBC ADP is cited enough that it has influence throughout the Fantasy Baseball world. Maybe you can't count on Correa lasting to Pick 220 in your league, but I was prepared to rank him 125th before his ADP became known, ahead of other far-from-a-sure-thing shortstops like Ezequiel Tovar, Xavier Edwards and Anthony Volpe. You can get Correa later than that, at least.
Brandon Lowe, 2B, Rays
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 225.8
So what, we're pretending Brandon Lowe isn't good now? Because that's a laughable assertion, you must know. He had the fourth-best OPS among full-time second basemen last year and trails only Ketel Marte and Jose Altuve at the position since entering the league in 2018 (minimum 1,000 plate appearances).
I get that he can be frustrating, having played in only 58 percent of his team's over the past three seasons because of injuries and occasionally taking a seat against lefties. I'd prefer if the Rays had traded him this offseason to a team more committed to playing him every day, especially since his career numbers against left-handers are actually quite good. I can find things to complain about, sure. But at a position that's light on power hitters, he's a genuine standout.
Even with an oblique injury costing him six weeks in 2024, his 21 homers were the third-most at the position. His 39 homers in 2021, his last healthy season, were the sixth-most ever for a second baseman. The guy's good! And there's a chance he gets even better this season with the Rays forced to play their home games at the Yankees' spring training complex, a field with the same dimensions as the big one in New York. You may know that left-handed hitters tend to fare well there, and that's without adding Florida humidity to the equation.
Shoot, I might call Lowe a sleeper if he was going 100 spots earlier. Seems to me like his best-case scenario is something like Pete Alonso, only at second base. As it is, he's going behind Luis Rengifo.
Ryan Mountcastle, 1B, Orioles
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 248.2
More fun with outfield fences! Why go find a better one, as Cody Bellinger and Isaac Paredes did, when you can fix the one in your own backyard? The Orioles made a gargantuan mistake when they moved the fences back 30 feet for almost the entire length of left field prior to 2022. This made Camden Yards arguably the hardest place for a right-handed hitter to homer, which should have been obvious because 30 feet is insane. They decided to moderate this offseason, moving the left field fence back in 13 feet in some places and 26 feet in others, which doesn't return Camden Yards to its old dimensions but does return it to the realm of the reasonable.
And it should be all Mountcastle needs. Perhaps no other Orioles hitter has suffered more from that oppressive fence than him. Three years ago, he was coming off a 33-homer season and coming into his own as a slugger. His exit velocities actually improved thereafter, consistently ranking him in the top 25 percent, but it made for only warning track power in the Camden crater. During those three years, he hit 53 home runs, but Statcast estimates he would have hit 67 if he had played every game at one of the more neutral venues, Nationals Park in Washington.
With the latest changes to left field at Camden Yards, I'm envisioning Mountcastle returning to being a 25-to-30-homer guy, which is valuable in its own right, but the effect is multiplied by him batting in the heart of an up-and-coming lineup. I'll take him over that tired old Paul Goldschmidt, who's going 90 picks earlier.
TJ Friedl, OF, Reds
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 272.2
Once again, we have an instance of a player being judged unfairly for a season where he wasn't all right. In what ways was Friedl not all right? Well, there was the fractured wrist in April, the fractured thumb in May, and the messed-up hamstring for most of June and July. All told he took part in just 85 games, and virtually all of them, he was either playing through or recovering from something. That's not a recipe for success, and as you can see from the numbers, success eluded Friedl in 2024.
But if you think back to the knock on him last draft prep season -- when he was coming off a .279 batting average, 18 homers, 27 steals, and .819 OPS for a point-per-game average on par with Bryan Reynolds -- it was that he could never repeat that home run total with his bottom-of-the-barrel exit velocity readings. Well, home runs weren't the problem for him in 2024. He hit one every 26 plate appearances compared to one every 31 in 2023. The problem was everything else. His swing suffered because of the broken bones, and his speed suffered because of the bad hammy.
Are those better now? One can only assume, and if they are, well, he's answered the home run question twice over now. His exit velocities may be bottom-of-the-barrel (6th percentile last season), but his high fly-ball and pull rates in the league's most homer-friendly venue are enough to make them stand up. My biggest fear for Friedl is that the Reds will no longer give him free rein in center, but if they do, a 20-homer, 30-steal season isn't so far-fetched.
Clay Holmes, SP/RP, Mets
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 282.8
After spending the past three years breaking hearts as the Yankees' on-again, off-again closer -- and ending on the sourest possible note, forfeiting the job to Luke Weaver just in time for the playoffs -- Holmes gets to try his hand at starting again, a role he hasn't filled since his debut season with the Pirates in 2018. And I have to tell you, I think it'll work out for him.
Nobody wants to hear it on account of all the heart-breaking, but when we take a 30,000-foot view of his time in the Yankees bullpen, he had a 2.69 ERA -- very solid, even by closer standards. His problem was that he came about it by suppressing hard contact, with a ground-ball rate to rival Framber Valdez's, rather than missing bats. When clinging to a narrow lead in the game's most pivotal moments, any amount of contact spells danger. A ground ball, even if not especially likely to result in a hit, is infinitely more likely than a strikeout is, which is why teams generally install dynamic bat-missers as closers and why Holmes' closing stints were relatively high-stress. But over extended stretches, with the game not yet at its highest pressure point, we can step back and appreciate what a 65 percent ground-ball rate does for a pitcher. It yields something like a 2.69 ERA.
I don't think Holmes' ERA will be exactly 2.69 as a starter, but somewhere around 3.25 seems fair. That's what we're used to seeing from Valdez, who comes the closest of any full-time starter to matching Holmes' ground-ball rate. That's not to say that I think Holmes will be as valuable in Fantasy as Valdez, who is the workhorse Holmes almost certainly won't be as he transitions to this new role. But a low-threes ERA and a strikeout per inning from a 150-inning guy would be far more useful than Holmes' ADP suggests.
Michael Conforto, OF, Dodgers
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 323.2
Conforto used to be a Fantasy mainstay, but the last time was the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. Since then, he's hit .236 with a .736 OPS across three seasons, missing all of 2022 due to shoulder surgery. With those numbers, you'd think he'd struggle to find a job of any sort, and yet the Dodgers, with their seemingly limitless resources, saw fit to turn over one of their three outfield spots to him on a $17 million deal this offseason. Now, why is that?
Conforto actually delivered some of the best exit velocities of his career last season, with an average of 90.2 mph and a max of 113.6 mph. If you look at his Baseball Savant page, pretty much all of the offensive readings are some shade of red, with the darkest being his 89th percentile xSLG -- better than Bryce Harper, Lawrence Butler, and Pete Alonso, to name a few. It didn't show up in his top-line numbers because he was playing in San Francisco, which remains one of the most stifling offensive environments. Of his 20 homers last season, only three of them came at home. He hit .253 with an .852 OPS on the road, including .293 with a .988 OPS over the final two months.
The Dodgers aren't dumb -- may be the furthest from dumb of any organization in history, in fact -- and must have found those numbers compelling. The past couple offseasons have shown they can basically have whomever they want, and well, they wanted Conforto. Beyond just escaping San Francisco, imagine the impact to his run and RBI production by batting in that lineup. He may be the one following the murderer's row of Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Teoscar Hernandez, and he's essentially free on Draft Day.
Cody Bradford, SP, Rangers
| ||||||||||||
FantasyPros ADP: 350.0
Of all the players on this list, Bradford comes the closest to meeting the traditional interpretation of "sleeper." He wasn't a prospect of great renown and hasn't made a name for himself in Fantasy yet, so most people don't even think about him when drafting. But he was good enough down the stretch last year to be the odds-on favorite for the Rangers' fifth starter job.
What stands out most is the 1.01 WHIP, which would have ranked sixth among qualifying pitchers. Bradford fits the profile of a WHIP specialist, too, having immaculate control (1.5 BB/9 last season and 2.1 BB/9 for his minor-league career) and elevated fly-ball tendencies (a 44.1 percent rate, according to FanGraphs). Some of the pitchers who come closest to matching him in those areas include Bryce Miller, Bailey Ober, and Shota Imanaga. No doubt you've heard of them. Their WHIPs last year were 0.98, 1.00 and 1.02, respectively.
Bradford doesn't miss as many bats as they do, but he's not as far off as you might think. Sticking with per-nine stats for familiarity's sake, Ober was at 9.6 K/9 last year, Imanaga at 9.0 K/9, and Miller at 8.5 K/9. Bradford, meanwhile, was at 8.2 K/9, putting him just a little below the average. And of course, he's still new to the majors. Ober had exactly 8.2 K/9 at the same point in his career.
These are some lofty comparisons I'm making, but my point is that, for a complete unknown, Bradford fits a model that works for Fantasy -- a WHIP standout who won't kill you in strikeouts but has some ERA risk because of his vulnerability to home runs. Maybe he ends up performing closer to Nestor Cortes than the illustrious trio of Miller, Ober, and Imanaga, but even in that case, he's a bargain.
