If you have been drafting throughout this year, you have noticed these. However, I assume that most of you only do like 1-3 drafts and they probably haven’t happened yet. So I wanted to give my take on some of the rising players in the ranks.
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This can be beneficial if you’re in a non-NFBC league where these ADP changes really aren’t reflected. Take, for example, the poster boy - Jordan Walker. If you’re drafting the ESPN draft room, you will have to go awful far down the list to find Walker. This gives you a good chance to get your hands on him after pick 200, which would be a “steal” right now relative to his newfound ADP. We can certainly get ahead of the pack here if we’re using the “sharp” ADP and the rest of the league is using the lame ESPN stuff.
I tailoring this post to smaller leagues, focusing on players with ADP’s in the top 350. Here are the biggest ADP risers in that range when we compare January 1st - February 14th with February 16th - present.
Elvis Andrus
The reason for the ADP climb here is that he recently signed with the White Sox and was unofficially announced as their starting second baseman.
We saw him have all kinds of fantasy success with the White Sox last year (191 PA, .271/.309/.464 9 HR 11 SB). That might make some people think (falsely, I think) that the White Sox will get more out of him than we would expect otherwise. I don’t think that. The key point to me is that he will probably be a starter.
My projection system hasn’t updated him, so that’s why there’s a split here but here go the projections:
The projections seem to match the price. Andrus derives most of his fantasy value from steals, and I don’t think steals are going to be hard to find this year - so I’m leaning toward scratching him off the list (if I had a list). With an ADP over 300, he’s not someone who needs to be drafted in a standard league - but indeed he is in better shape than a few weeks ago, and he’s a fine buy after pick 320 if you need a middle infielder.
Hunter Brown
The climb here was about the Lance McCullers injury. It would seem that Brown will be the Astros’ #5 starter. Anybody entering the Astros rotation is deserving of a big ADP jump, and Brown is quite good.
In the minors last year (and this is in the PCL, the toughest league to pitch in):
106 IP, 2.55 ERA, 1.08 WHIP, 31.5% K%, 10.6% BB%
In the Majors:
20.1 IP, 0.89 ERA, 1.08 WHIP, 27.5% K%, 8.8% BB%
The stuff looks elite, here are some Major League numbers on that:
His recent ADP is around 200. I think that’s a fine price but it’s getting pretty close to the point where I wouldn’t take him. He is still the #5 pitcher, and I don’t think it would take much for him to lose that job. When (if) McCullers comes back, someone is going to have to go, and it would make sense for the Astros to want to be careful with him. However, Brown has already debuted in the Majors and he’s 24 years old, so those are points in his favor. The upside is that he makes 25 starts for them and is dominant, so in most league types he’s a guy I’m going to be looking at - and if he’s falling to the point where I can grab him an SP4 or SP5, I’m jumping on it.
Adam Duvall
Duvall is still very cheap. Nobody is going to stretch to get him since he’s 34 years old and has never been a fantasy stud even at his best.
The ADP still makes him free in your league, and he’s a 20+ homer guy almost surely.
Boston was a good landing spot for him in that he should be a starter. Fenway doesn’t show up very well in the expected home run readings for right-handed hitters since the Green Monster takes away a ton of those line drive homers.
However, Duvall had the fourth-highest average launch angle in the league last year - so that should help in that regard.
He will hit quite a few homers over that wall, I think. He could absolutely smash 30+ homers this season and that’s not something you can often find in the last few rounds of your draft. Sign me up.
Miguel Vargas
Good news and bad news on this front.
The good news is that Gavin Lux is out for the year (okay, this isn’t good news, but give me a pass here), which seriously elevated Vargas playing time prospects.
The bad news is that Vargas isn’t allowed to swing the bat yet. There’s a really great piece on FanGraphs about this here.
It sounds like Vargas is swinging the bat now, so that’s good news. With three weeks left in spring, he should be good to go for Opening Day, and that makes for a very interesting pick.
He’s eligible at all kinds of positions, and come on - everybody likes having some Dodgers on their fantasy team. He was awesome in the minors and is one of the top prospects in baseball, so you can understand the appeal of the pick.
I’m really not one to buy in on prospects at elevated costs, so I don’t think I’m buying Vargas in the top 200 or anything like that - but if he’s available after pick 250 (which is likely to happen in some ESPN/Yahoo rooms), I’ll jump at it. He showed really great contact and power skills in the minors, which is the stuff I want to see, so that pushes me closer.
Garrett Mitchell
Three dingers and a .353/.353/.941 slash line this spring has pushed Mitchell up draft boards. It might not be the performance as much as the fact that the good spring seems to make it more likely that he’ll be a starter for the Brewers come April.
If we look at all of his stats posted everywhere since 2021:
657 PA, .289/.383/.452, 27.5% K%, 12.2% BB%, 19 HR, 44 SB
That’s a discouraging profile. You don’t like to see a guy with a 26% K% in the minors, because that’s very likely to bloat above 30% in the Majors, at least over the short term. You can take that risk if it’s a guy with legit power, but Mitchell hasn’t shown that either. He’s 24 now, so we aren’t exactly talking about a kid still developing physically.
If he’s a starter, he’s a good steals guy - but I think the strikeout rate and lack of raw power going to keep me away completely, even at an ADP above 300 (which is unlikely to be the case moving forward)
Andrew Painter
This will be a short one. Painter has elbow problems and might need surgery. That would immediately put the kibosh on his season, but for now, even without full clarity - he’s an easy guy to just not draft at all.
Pete Fairbanks
Fairbanks is really, really good.
But the Rays have had really, really good relievers before and not used them in a way that generates enough saves for us. A very good rule is to not go to the Rays for saves, so that’s basically how I’m addressing Fairbanks.
If you’re in some league where relievers can actually have a meaningful impact on your ratios (I’m not sure this kind of league even exists), then you can draft Fairbanks confidently since the ratios are reliable given his stuff - but no I wouldn’t think you can bank on 20+ saves from Fairbanks - I’ll pass.
Jordan Walker
The ADP is simply out of control.
I will not draft Walker in the top 200, I just won’t do it. By now, his name is known enough to where he’ll probably be going in the top 150 even in those soft ESPN drafts. I am certain I will not have Walker on any team. There’s certainly a 20%+ chance I have to eat a bag of shit on that, but the odds just scream that buying high on him right now is a bad idea.
His minor-league numbers are good, but they aren’t exactly banging down the door. The 27 PA/HR is only a little bit of above average, and the strikeout rate isn’t fantastic.
Note that most of those numbers were posted when the guy was 19 years old or younger, so there’s a very high probability that a lot will change for the better in a hurry. But no, I’m not drafting Jordan Walker and I’m going to continue to be annoying about saying that.
Jarred Kelenic
The Kelenic situation is just hilarious. He was the Jordan Walker of 2021 (although he didn’t get drafted nearly as high as Walker is now), and he’s been just miserable in two seasons in the Majors. His contact rate got way worse last year and he struck out 34% of the time. He can hit the ball very hard when he does it, but I can’t imagine drafting a dude in a standard league that has shown so little ability to put the ball in play.
His spring has been glorious, as you might know.
The funny thing is that I’ve seen “person A” be like "yeah we know that Kelenic can crush minor league pitching, and then you’ll have “person B” be like DUDE HE HOMERED OFF OF REYNALDO LOPEZ (or whoever it is was, I can’t look it up right now).
Any time you’re taking 10 spring training games with seriousness, you’re doing something wrong. Anything can happen in life, it’s not impossible for a player to add ten points to his contact rate over an offseason, but it’s like a 15% chance or something like that so just don’t do it.
MacKenzie Gore
He was great in the first half last year, but it was pretty easy to see through that the whole time as he just didn’t have the command. He ended up crashing and burning pretty hard, but now he’s back and ready to start the year in the Nationals rotation.
His stuff last year wasn’t very good by the numbers:
Those are discouraging SwStr% on pretty much all four pitches (none of them are bad for the pitch they’re with, but they aren’t great either).
The Stuff+ marks are quite good:
A lot of this, I think, has to do with the left-handed delivery. You can see that his locations are pretty bad, and he throws an absolute ton of fastballs - and his fastball isn’t a good one.
This spring, he’s still throwing a ton of fastballs:
Not enough data there to learn anything from, but he doesn’t seem to have overhauled his arsenal. I will pass on Gore, but I guess he’s someone I would at least watch closely when the season starts if he’s on the wire.
So yeah, unsurprisingly, I’m out on the players that are getting that “helium” due to spring training success. I would buy Brown and Duvall if the price is cheaper than what we see in the recent ADP, but for the rest of these names, I’m not going out of my way to draft them.
My theory on Fairbanks is that he represents the best chance for a Rays reliever to get saves in several years. Because they signed him to a ln extension and locked in his cost, they don't have to worry about saves inflating his value in arbitration. It doesn't mean he's exclusively a closer, but the contract negates their cost concerns.
Also, reliever ratios are useful in mono leagues with roto categories. They're so deep that some teams won't have more than one established closer. So really good relievers help ratios and Ks.