2024 Fantasy Baseball Third Base Preview
Previewing the third base position ahead of 2024 fantasy baseball draft season. I give you tiers, projections, analysis, and strategy for how to handle 3B in any league type.
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Podcast Episode
Other Positions
Third base is deep this year. Check out the catcher preview to understand what this table tells you:
So by this table, there’s a big cost in waiting for the replacement third baseman. However, as we’ll see, there are so many options at the position. It’s to the point where you can get a fine option for your starting 3B even after you’ve already rostered 8-10 players.
Let’s get right into the players so we can understand this.
Top 20
There’s the landscape. We have $8 players the whole way into the mid-200s, as you see there.
We have a handful of studs at the top, plenty of solid but boring veterans in the middle, and then a good number of fine fallback options if you wait a really long time or are going for a backup.
Tier 1
Jose Ramirez
Austin Riley
Rafael Devers
It is a little bit less exciting at the top this year. In many drafts, no third baseman is taken in the first round. Jose Ramirez will go late in the first or early in the second, and Riley and Devers tend to go at the end of the second or early third.
Given that Riley and Devers don’t steal many bases and there are plenty of good power bats much later in the draft, I am not prioritizing either guy where they go in the draft.
Drafting Jose Ramirez in the second round is a pretty exciting proposition, so I like that pick a lot. I like Riley late in the second to catch up in homers if I start my team with Corbin Carroll, but other than that I’m not really that into the Riley/Devers pick here given what we can get later on.
Tier 2
Gunnar Henderson
Another one-man tier for me. I can’t put him with the big boys quite yet, but I also can’t group him with the names we’ll see after this.
The projections are cool on him, as is often the case with these very young players with limited data samples. He was very good last year, but we would have to say his line at the end of the year was well shy of elite roto production.
The reasoning for having him at #4 here is that the floor seems just as good as the guys in tier three, but the ceiling is much higher. He could be a guy that steals 20 bags while hitting 30+ homers. As for ADP (30), I think the price is fine. I don’t view him as a value there, but it’s a perfectly good pick in the third round. While he’s healthy, his floor should be something like round-five production, and the ceiling is easily first-round value.
Tier 3
Elly De La Cruz
Royce Lewis
Manny Machado
Elly’s ADP is between 20 and 25, which we’ve talked about before. That means I won’t draft him at all. I view him very similarly to these two who go between picks 50 and 70.
Lewis’s ADP spread is wide. That’s because he’s a very good hitter, but has limited reps in the Majors and has a long history of injuries already. He’s still just 24 years old though, and looked like a stud hitter last year (including in the playoffs). So the upside is huge there, but the downside is a bit scary as well.
As for Machado, he’s falling further than ever before, and yet still projecting for 3 0-homer, 90-RBI season with a handful of steals and a decent batting average. I like taking the discount on him.
Machado is probably the first third baseman on the list I would specifically target in drafts. It’s not that I’m leaving all my drafts with him or anything, but getting him in the 5th or 6th round is pretty interesting to me. He brings you the safe floor, and there’s still some ceiling in him as well. We’ve seen him have spike seasons in steals, and the guy is still just 31 years old.
So Machado is my favorite 3B all things considered so far.
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