2023 First Base Preview
Rolling on with the position previews. Catchers was covered here:
What I failed to mention last time was my overall catcher strategy, so maybe I can cover that really quickly here. My take on catchers is really dependent on the league type. I have never been a guy to draft the first few catchers in my HOME LEAGUE, where it’s a pretty shallow league and you start one catcher and get to add guys all year long. This year, with the position really being like 10-12 deep in terms of finding catchers that aren’t trainwrecks, I definitely don’t think I’ll be after Realmuto/Smith/Varsho unless everybody seems to be feeling the same way and we get further down the draft board to where it makes sense.
In these NFBC leagues where you have 12 or 15 teams and everybody is starting two catchers, I am doing one of those things
Take Realmuto/Smith/Varsho + Naylor/Bethancourt/Grandal
Take two of the Contreras/Melendez/Murphy/etc tier
I don’t want to start a guy beyond that Naylor/Bethancourt/Grandal cluster - and if I miss an elite guy I don’t want to even start one of those guys. I’m more aggressive on catchers in those types of leagues - and I think that’s the right approach.
Okay, now on to first base. The catcher preview was way more words than I thought it would be, and it took longer, so I have bitten off a lot here. I just can’t really force myself to be brief… but I might try to be more general here moving forward so I’m not spending hours a day on this. Let’s have at it.
Landscape
We see first basemen being pretty clumped together this year. We have five guys that go early in the draft, and then like 40+ picks without a first baseman going. They clump into handfuls from there, but that top tier is something to note.
Tier One
Freddie Freeman
Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
Paul Goldschmidt
Pete Alonso
Matt Olson
These five separate themselves from the pack. You could even say that the first four there are one clump and then Olson is on a mini-island by himself. That probably makes Olson my favorite of the bunch.
Freeman and Goldy are the steals sources, but neither of them is a huge positive there - so I don’t think we need to get bogged down by that (especially since both of them could slow the running down since they’re up there in age).
If we don’t consider that, the projections don’t look all that different among the pack:
What exactly justifies Alonso going more than a round ahead of Olson? I don’t really see it.
I don’t think I’ll draft much or any Vlad given the questions about the homers and the lack of steals, and I lean towards the Bichette types over Freeman to get some more secure steals - so most of my teams are ending up with Olson or none of these guys, but Olson really does seem like the best pick of the bunch and maybe one of the best early round picks you can make given how competitive he is with the top names at the position and the lower cost (he’s gone after pick 50 a few times!).
Tier Two
Jose Abreu
Vinnie Pasquantino
Nathaniel Lowe
Rhys Hoskins
This tier spans something like picks 90 through 125, so they all go pretty rapidly. Since 3B is so brutal after the top handful of names - we probably want a first baseman as our corner infielder, which means I absolutely am going to need at least one guy from these top two tiers, and getting two of them would be great too because they are all quite good hitters.
Projections:
You can see they are all very close by the projections, besides Hoskins who is a bit different with more homers but a lower batting average.
Abreu, Pasquantino, and Lowe all come with some form of question mark.
Abreu: A 48% GB% last year and a wide spray chart led to a really low 15 homer count. Moving to Houston is good for his home run potential, but not if he doesn’t change his approach. He could very well come up shy of 20 homers again.
Pasquantino: Despite how awesome the combo of his contact rate (85%) and barrel rate (9%) was last year, we only saw 300 plate appearances of him. He won’t steal bags, and the Royals don’t provide a good team or ballpark context.
Lowe: He had long struggled with the ground ball and inability to pull the ball, which has led to lower home run outputs. In the second half, he fixed those problems - but that could have just been a random blip.
The upside, I suppose, would have to be Pasquantino as he is the young guy with just ridiculous skills - but I think Abreu & Lowe are probably a bit safer investments for 2023.
Hoskins is the undervalued one, and he is the one that can really fall in some drafts.
I’d love to take Olson at like pick 40 and then Hoskins 100 picks later, that would make for a pretty sweet 1B/CIF duo.
Tier Three
C.J. Cron
Christian Walker
Anthony Rizzo
Ryan Mountcastle
Rowdy Tellez
This is the last tier of first basemen that are truly reliable, in my view. These guys are all established starters (although you do see Rowdy sit against lefties, he largely makes up for it with what he does against righties).
Some individual thoughts:
Cron
It seems like we’re playing with fire by drafting Cron again this year. His K% came up to 26% last year and he didn’t post anything amazing with the barrel stuff (7.19% Brl/PA). We saw what Coors Field can do for him in 2021, but 2022 was a step backward and now he’s a year older and still has these health questions and might be traded and so on and so forth - I think I’ll just sit it out on Cron (he hit .214/.276/.340 on the road).
Walker
He hit 36 bombs last year, and did you know his batting average finished at .242?
There’s probably a trade-off here. If he hits .260 this year he will probably lose a lot of homers, and if he hits 35 homers again he’ll probably hit .230 or something. I don’t think he’s THAT good to do both (35 homers, .260 batting average) - but it was a good sign to see that he doesn’t necessarily have to be a massive downer to your team’s batting average. I like Walker on teams where I didn’t get one of those stud power hitters early on (Yordan/Riley/Alonso/Olson/etc).
My favorite of the bunch, and possibly my favorite at the position relative to ADP is Rizzo. The projections I showed above are average projections of all the systems, but I like MINE BETTER, and MINE gives him a .252 batting average and 29 homers. Yankees Stadium is perfect for the guy, so I feel really good about 25+ homers and a little bit of help everywhere else. He tends to fall really far in drafts too which is the main reason he’s my favorite, of course.
Mountcastle also tends to fall to around where Rizzo does - so I’m usually drafting one of these two as my second first basemen. Camden really murdered his output last year:
So that’s a downer, but what some people may not know is that he is probably a top-ten power hitter in the league by the quality of contact and barrel rates. He could benefit by pulling some of those barrels more (way more since you really want to avoid left-center field in Camden now), but he’s just so good that I think he can more or less overcome the park and beat his draft price.
Good group of first basemen there - again, I probably want two of these guys by the time we get here.
Tier Four
Andrew Vaughn
Jose Miranda
Ty France
Josh Naylor
Josh Bell
Joey Meneses
Seth Brown
Miguel Vargas
Luis Arraez
I don’t feel super great about starting any of these guys, but in a deeper league they are probably all starters - and nearly all of them have some upside. By the ADP, they are not all in the same tier:
You could say that Vaughn, Miranda, France, and Bell separate themselves from the others. I think Vaughn is running ahead of the rest in ADP because of the youth and the fact that he can also play OF (which is a pretty big advantage in a 5-OF league).
You can see that the HR projections are pretty similar up and down the list, besides Arraez who you are drafting for runs and average (or if you’re like me, you’re just not drafting him).
I don’t really want to draft anybody here, but really Arraez is the only one I’m completely not interested in. France isn’t really the type for me with the 15-20 homer projection, but that is actually the most common projection - and that was the most common output league-wide last year, so it’s hard to say he really hurts you in power with that - but it does hurt that he doesn’t have 30+ homer upside while not stealing any bases.
Price-considered here, I like Brown (I think he’ll hit 25 homers and steal 15 bases this year while being pretty garbage in everything else), Naylor (sneaky contact+power combo, but he might not play against lefties), and Vargas (huge upside, as I’ve talked about elsewhere).
Tier Five
Wil Myers
Triston Casas
DJ LeMahieu
Brandon Drury
Spencer Torkelson
Matt Mervis
Jake Cronenworth
Isaac Paredes
Trey Mancini
Jared Walsh
In a shallow or standard league, I’m not sure any of these guys really need to be drafted. I’m not a Cronenworth guy - he just doesn’t do anything that well.
Drury hit just .238/.290/.435 last year after leaving Cincinnati, so he seems to just be a homers-only guy (maxing out around 25, probably) with questionable playing time (although the position eligibility is amazing, so that might lead me to take him in a deep league).
The Wil Myers thing is interesting now as he signed with the Reds. We know what that ballpark can do for you, and he’s a guy who can still swipe some bags. The 17-6-.244 projection is a pretty reasonable floor, I think - so I can buy into Myers after pick 250 for sure.
Casas is the most interesting name of the bunch as a bunch of people really like him. He saw 95 PAs in the Majors last year with a 4.2% Brl/PA, a 7.5% Brl%, but a strong 24% K% and a 74% Contact%. He hit too many balls on the ground (57%), and didn’t hit a TON of homers in AAA (11 in 317 PA) - so I don’t see the upside that other people talk about really, but it wouldn’t take much to beat this draft cost and he doesn’t have the huge strikeout problem most of the young guys do.
Mervis is in the same boat as Casas as a top prospect coming up, but it does not look likely that he’ll make the team out of camp after they signed Eric Hosmer. He hit 36 homers between A+, AA, and AAA last year (583 PAs) while slashing .310/.381/.605 with an 18% K% (and the K% was just 15% at the AAA level) - so that’s all pretty convincing. I don’t think Hosmer really is going to keep him out of the Majors for long, but you never know, and you certainly have no idea if he’ll be able to make the jump to the Majors. At this point though, the upside certainly feels worth the risk.
The rest of those guys are fine for what they are. Paredes plays all over the field, maybe Walsh will settle in between what he did in 2021 and 2022 and be roster-worthy, and then yeah you see the rest of the names I don’t know what else to say!
And here are the final ranks:
Freeman (T1)
Guerrero Jr. (T1)
Goldschmidt (T1)
Alonso (T1)
Olson (T1)
Abreu (T2)
Pasquantino (T2)
Lowe (T2)
Hoskins (T2)
Walker (T3)
Rizzo (T3)
Mountcastle (T3)
Tellez (T3)
Cron (T3)
France (T4)
Bell (T4)
Vaughn (T4)
Vargas (T4)
Naylor (T4)
Miranda (T4)
Brown (T4)
Meneses (T4)
Arraez (T4)
Myers (T5)
Drury (T5)
Casas (T5)
Mervis (T5)
LeMahieu (T5)
Torkelson (T5)
Cronenworth (T5)
Paredes (T5)
Mancini (T5)
Walsh (T5)