The 2025 All Buy Low Team
A fantasy roster full of my favorite buy-lows while examining 2024 & 2025 ADP data.
Intro
I am used to being really into social psychology. I read Thinking Fast & Slow, Blink, Outliers, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and all the other big ones. Those books focus on recognizing the biases and quirks of human behavior and reacting properly to them. I’m not as interested in such things now. I care a lot less about networking and figuring people out in a way that makes them like me than I used to. My focus is now on giving my wife the life she deserves and making sure my three kids turn out right.
But it is still advantageous to know the pitfalls that our minds are at risk of falling into. Two big ones we have to deal with are recency bias and a failure to account for regression to the mean.
A baseball player’s career is never a straight line.
The orange line does not exist in the real world. A player who averages a 100 wRC+ will look a lot more like the green line. Some years above, some years below.
That’s the regression principle. The other one is recency bias. We find recency bias when observing that ADP will trail behind performance. Players coming off a (relatively) bad season will get cheaper. Sharp fantasy players are decent at smoothing that out appropriately. Not all down years are created equal. Some come mostly from randomness; others come because of losses in physical ability (which happens with aging). The better fantasy players are good at distinguishing between the two. But there is still an advantage to be had in going to the “buy low, sell high” method.
So, we’re looking for buy lows. These are players who are much cheaper this year than last year, who I think can bounce back.
The Team
Catcher: J.T. Realmuto
ADP 2024: 77
ADP 2025: 138
We start with an old catcher. Catchers age more quickly than others. Have you ever tried to squat down in that crouch position for more than like 17 seconds?
Realmuto has long been on or near the top of the catcher ADP board. This year, he’s down to #10.
2025 Catcher ADP Ranks
William Contreras
Yainer Diaz
Adley Rutschman
Salvador Perez
Cal Raleigh
Willson Contreras
Will Smith
Logan O’Hoppe
Shea Langeliers
J.T. Realmuto
And why is that? The fact that he’s 33 years old is a part of it, but mostly, it’s because of the fact that he hit just 14 homers and stole two bases last year.
J.T. Realmuto Steals by Year
2021: 13
2022: 21
2023: 16
2024: 2
There were knee issues all over the place for Realmuto last year. It’s a very real concern, and knee issues are to be expected with guys who have played this much catcher in their careers. It first popped up in mid-May when he went to day-to-day with a knee injury. Eventually, surgery was required, and he missed more than a month (he was on the IL from June 11th to July 20th).
Before the knee issues popped up, he was running pretty close to normal with a stolen base attempt rate of 15% (he was at 16% in the 2023 season). After the knee stuff began, it went to 0% real quick.
Is it right to think he’ll have a clean bill of health and no more issues in 2025? Absolutely not. But there’s surely a chance that he remains pretty healthy this year. He still got out of the box well last year, so it’s reasonable to think he’ll be one of the faster catchers in the league again in 2025.
Even if the steals don’t come back, there’s good news on his quality of contact metrics.
Realmuto xBA & xwOBA by Year
2021: .245 xBA, .313 xwOBA
2022: .267 xBA, .338 xwOBA
2023: .248 xBA, .324 xwOBA
2024: .264 xBA, .343 xwOBA
He hit the ball even better in 2024 than in 2023 while keeping the strikeout rate (24.7%) and contact rate (74%) right in line with where he’d been for years.
The upside on Realmuto is another 20-homer, 15-steal season. More likely, perhaps, is that he sits more often this year and takes it easy on the bases. But I still think he’s a guy who will slug .450 or so with 15+ homers and a good number of RBI.
I’m perfectly happy to wait a bit at catcher and take Realmuto as my starter.
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