Late Round Player Duo Targets
Looking at late-round players whose stats combine to make for strong roto value
There are many ways to win a category league, but the optimal strategy is clearly to build a balanced team. Get into the top half of your league in every category and then adjust as needed throughout the year.
That’s my approach, so I’m here to help us pull that off in drafts.
What we’re trying to do is replicate a hitter who goes inside the top 150. There are 88 hitters in that top 150 (judging by NFBC ADP). The average 5x5 projection of that group:
80 R, 24 HR, 78 RBI, 14 SB, .258 AVG
That’s a good player. You are not going to find any player who is likely to put up that kind of production after the first 150 picks in your draft. What we might be able to do is find two players whose projections combine for something close to that.
There are 123 hitters between ADP 150 and ADP 400. If you take every possible combination of those 123 hitters, you get 7,503 possible combinations. That’s a few too many to evaluate one at a time. But Python can do it in 14 seconds.
So I sat patiently through that 14 seconds, and now I have a bunch of duo targets to give you. Here’s what it looks like:
That’s the first ten of the 7,503 rows. We can then filter to find player combos that give us a nice 5x5 roto return.
Let’s start by looking at all five categories.
Unsurprisingly, there are zero combinations that make for at least as good of a line as the average hitter in the top 150 ADP.
As I loosen things up, we start getting some results. At 90% of the average, we find two combinations:
Adolis Garcia is in both, paired with Dansby Swanson and George Springer. That is a low batting average, though. It turns out that 90% of .258 is .232.
Let’s loosen this up to 80% and then sort by highest batting average.
The top result is Dansby Swanson and Heliot Ramos. Those two are draft targets of mine, so it makes sense to me. Swanson will get you a good number of counting stats with some steals, and Ramos projects to be a strong power bat in San Francisco. The average ADP of that duo is 192, and you’ll have to get both around the 175-225 range if you’re targeting that pair.
We’re seeing a lot of these boring veterans here. That’s typically going to be the case. Solid players fall down in ADP because of their age and lack of perceived upside. Leaning into a handful of these player types is a profitable thing to do. I have a lot of Swanson, Vaughn, Ward, Bogearts, and the like this year.
I will share the full data at the end of this so you can explore it yourself, but for now, let’s narrow things down a bit. Let’s drop it down to just home runs and steals. These are the main categories I’m targeting in drafts because they are the most predictable. Those two categories are the most under the player’s control, so the projections will tend to be more accurate in those categories.
There are two combinations of players who get to 24 homers and 14 steals:
Varsho (shoulder) and Garcia (oblique) both have some injury stuff going on, but that Mullins + Soler duo is beautiful. Homers and RBI from Soler, runs and steals from Mullins. Just cross your fingers for a .240 batting average.
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