2024 Fantasy Baseball First Base Preview
Previewing the first base position ahead of 2024 fantasy baseball draft season. I give you tiers, projections, analysis, and strategy for how to handle the first base position in any league type.
Other Positions
Podcast Episode
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Let’s start by pasting the auction value overview from last time. Check out the catcher preview for an explanation of what this.
But as long as you’re familiar with this, you’ll see that first base is a deeper position compared to the others. That doesn’t mean there are studs all over the place, it just means that if you’re one of the last players in your league to pick a first baseman, you’re not losing as much at that spot compared to what you’re potentially losing elsewhere.
That’s not a recommendation to wait. We might end up making that recommendation after we examine the whole landscape, I just want to make it clear that what you see above is not enough information to make a call on.
Most leagues have a first base slot as well as a corner infield spot. That means we want to go at minimum 18 first basemen deep here since that’s the average of how many will be started every week in a 12-man league (12 teams start a first baseman in the first base slot, and half of them start a first baseman in the corner infield slot). But we’ll go much further than 18 to cover all the points.
The Top 20
The screenshot is ugly, but if you’re a paid sub you have access to this Google sheet, so load that up if you want to see the numbers and filter and search and whatnot (it’s called @JonPGH 2024 Position Previews, so to find it go to sheets.google.com and search for that).
Tier 1
Matt Olson
Freddie Freeman
These two separate from the pack by the projections, and both gave you first-round production last year.
The projections:
So they get there in different ways. Olson went for 54 homers, 127 runs, and 134 RBI. Freeman came in a lot lower on the homers (29) but scored 131 runs and drove in 101 while adding 23 steals.
Neither guy is a spring chicken. Freeman is 34 and Olson will be 30 for this season, but I wouldn’t say there’s any risk of significant decline for either guy.
On both fronts, there is likely regression coming. The Braves scored 5.8 runs per game, and even though their lineup hasn’t changed, that’s so high that it’s unlikely to happen again. It seems that everybody on that team put out a career year at the same time.
For Freeman, you can see the projected steals are in the teens rather than in the twenties, and that seems right to me.
Both are great picks and are well worth the top-20 value. My preference for the draft this year is to get Acuna (duh), and if that doesn’t happen then I would still prefer one of the early first-round studs that can steal me 30+ bags, but if I’m drafting in the 10-12 range I’m fine with grabbing Freeman with my first pick or Olson with the second (not both, obviously).
Tier 2
Bryce Harper
Pete Alonso
Harper gets drafted right by Olson on average, and he’s Bryce Harper, so it feels weird to put him in the second tier. My projection came in pretty low on him with just 27 homers. I believe that comes from some lower output last year while he was recovering from injury. But to my surprise, my projection is not much different than The Bat X and it’s only a little bit behind ATC and Steamer.
That’s the main reason I decided to drop him to tier two. If you look at the Google sheet, we see that he’s on average a $14.88 player, well behind Freeman’s $16.99. So even if we boost up the projection a little bit, he’s still not to that tier-one level. And when you look at what he’s done since 2019, he’s maxed out at 35 homers and 15 steals (both of those numbers came in 2019), so he hasn’t put together top-tier production for a full season. He’s 31 now, so a bit older than Olson and the injury stuff is still at least a little bit of a factor, so I feel better about tier-two here.
Pete Alonso, meanwhile, has hit at least 37 homers in each of his four full seasons with 100+ RBI in three of them (max of 131 RBI in 2022, 118 last year).
The steals aren’t there, and the batting average is shaky at best, but there’s no more secure source of HR+RBI. One point on that batting average, it was .217 last year on a crazy-low BABIP. All of the projection systems agree that he’ll bounce back to his career mark of .250.
Tier 3
Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
Christian Walker
Paul Goldschmidt
I don’t like to make the tiers this small, but that’s the way the numbers and my own opinions are shaking out. Let’s zoom in on the auction values:
The top two there are around $17, and then there’s $15-$16 for three players there, and now we’re down around $12-$13. The projections like Vlad as more of a tier-two bat, but that’s because Steamer has gone a little wild on him with a 36-homer projection. He’s hit just 32 and 26 in these last two seasons, so to me my projection and ATCs make the most sense.
If any of these guys will steal 15 bags, it will be Goldschmidt, who has done that in the past and has reached double-digits in two of the last three years.
The ADP shows Walker/Goldy being pretty much a coin flip. That seems right to me.
The reason Vlad goes well above these two and makes a case to be in tier two would be safety. He’ll be just 25 this year and has that monstrous 2021 season on his resume, so he feels way less likely to let you down this year than those other two older guys.
This is not a tier I’m interested in generally. I see a few names below this that I expect very similar production from.
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