If you were here last week for Your Favorite Rookie Sleeper’s Favorite Rookie Sleepers Volume 1, you might remember we were scheduled to discuss Tyrone Taylor today. A huge part of my fascination with Taylor came down to Lorenzo Cain being old and injured. I’ll be surprised at this point if Cain ever returns to his previous life as an everyday centerfielder. With Milwaukee’s signing of Jackie Bradley Jr., Cain became an extra piece. I know the Brewers front office initially said he’d remain the centerfielder with JBJ sliding over to right, but that was before Cain attempted to resume playing baseball, which did not go well. He’s laid up with leg troubles, probably needs a cane to walk, so there’s still glimmer enough for Taylor to break camp with the big club. Still, he’s less appealing to me today than he was last week. Jackie Bradley Jr. is a very good big leaguer in a great place to have his career year thanks to a very kind park for left handed hitters and less-than-exceptional slate of pitchers in the NL Central.
I still like Tyrone Taylor as a player and think he could break through in a big way next season when Cain and Avisail Garcia aren’t around, for what it’s worth. In hindsight, I should not have declared my next three sleepers that far out anyway. A week in Spring Training during the heart of Draft Season is worth at least a month of the off-season calendar, and I’d never pick three players I’ll be talking about a month from now, I think. I’m often a mystery to myself, truth be told, so let’s push forward and find out who’ll get the feature-piece treatment this week.
On Friday night, I’ll be juggling three drafts and two auctions simultaneously. Definitely a first for me. Luckily, one auction is slow, one is in-person with my home league, and the three drafts are merely crawling forward like a tortoise with two broken toes.
One of those leagues is a 30-team, 50-man-roster, five-year best ball hosted by the good people at Prospects Live. The Dynasty Baseball Championship is a unique set-up. I drafted a team for Donkey Teeth last year while he was off the grid seeking enlightenment. We went heavy pitching and wound up in first place, so that’s the play so far. Ten rounds in, I have one bat: Luke Voit. Just him, the chosen one. Luuuuuke. I am his father now. In this league, I will be scraping the bottom of the barrel for bats. Today’s featured players will be among them.
In fact, my impending pick (assuming he remains on the board today through about a dozen drafters) will be the subject of today’s first rundown:
2B Brendan Rodgers | 24 | Colorado Rockies | Fantrax ADP 407.53 | NFBC ADP 445.03
I landed Rodgers at pick 314 In the The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational. Felt like a steal even 131 picks in front of ADP. I just use the aggregate number in NFBC because that’s the one we see in the draft room. If you’re in a high-stakes setting, I recommend shrinking the sample size especially for cases like this one. The market pricing stretches all the way back to October 1. The vast majority of the sample making up Rodgers’ ADP occurred before Nolan Arenado was shipped off to St. Louis. Even before Ian Desmond hung up his cleats. Whatever traffic blocked Rodgers the way Colorado lives, laughs and loves to do has cleared.
If we take just the samples from February 2 onward (the day after Arenado was dealt), Rodgers climbs to 394.76 in all 15-team drafts. If we take only the drafts in March, his ADP is 358. The market is moving quickly on Rodgers but just doesn’t have time to catch up to those 4+ months of out-dated information.
For his part, Brendan Rodgers is far and away the most talented player of the first seven names in this series. When he was drafted 3rd overall out of high school in 2015, the Rockies received praise from every corner of the game. In Rodgers, they had their next Tulo, went the narrative. LOL Rockies was not yet a thing in any real way. We all expected big things from this kid, and for the most part, he delivered early and often. Sure, he swung a bit much and wasn’t yet making pro-level swing decisions, but he was young-for-level and climbing quickly. Only has two real blips on his resume: an 18-game sample at AAA in 2018 after graduating AA Hartford, a pitching-centric northeast setting where most Rockies prospects fall on their face after cozy hitting environments the whole way up. There, Rodgers produced a 129 wRC+ in 95 games to earn the promotion, slashing .275/.342/.493 along with 17 HR and 12 SB. I only mention that whole statline because I think that’s pretty near my expectations for this season on a per-game basis. Would be a loud rookie season indeed, and something well within range for the supremely gifted rookie in Coors. In the Razzball group chat, I suggested Rodgers should be on par with Lux heading into 2021, which would put him around 242.93 across the whole draft season. You don’t have to pay anything close to that, but I do think it’s wise to bump him up the queue if you want Rodgers this year.
Update: I was able to get him in that 30-teamer at pick 323. Huzzah!
SS Ramón Urías | 26 | Baltimore Orioles | Fantrax ADP 859.32 | NFBC ADP 738.88
Older brother of Milwaukee’s Luis Urias, Ramon possesses similarly high-end bat-to-ball skills but has traveled a much less glamorous road to his 2021 opportunity. After a brief stint in rookie ball with Texas, the Rangers sold Ramon’s rights to Diablos Rojos, where Urias became teammates with Kenny Powers in the Mexian League for half a decade. Jon Daniels has apparently forgotten the Alamo. Bad joke, sorry. Couldn’t bring myself to cut it. Just totally clueless as to why an org would sell a promising rookie ball bat for what couldn’t have been much money.
Tough as I’m sure it was at times, Urias just kept hitting and built himself into a monster at that level, slashing .340/.433/.577 across his final 106 games there in 2017. St. Louis had seen enough at that point and added Urias to their AA club prior to 2018. He was the same guy there (.333/.406/.589) and went to AAA after 44 games. Water met its level at that point (.261/.291/.430 in 46 games), and the Cards didn’t seem to care when Urias boosted that OBP to .369 in 96 games the following year. Despite having Urias under team control for a while yet thanks to the winding road he’d walked, St. Louis sent him packing during a roster squeeze, and he wound up in Baltimore, land of orange and opportunity.
In Maryland, Urias mashed. We’re not impressed with his .360/.407/.560 slash line, even though it looks a fair bit like his track record when he’s been right. That was just 27 plate appearances across ten games. But one of the real values of exit velocity is what it can tell us in small samples, and the 90.9 average exit velo and 106.7 max both tell us Urias has more power than the league seemed to realize. If MLB teams had known Urias brought above-average in-game power, I think he’d have been more sought after through the years, given his plus hit tool, plus plate skills and natural barreling skills.
He’s still not much of a defensive player, but shifts have helped lower the baseline on that front. Baltimore doesn’t have much this year. Pat Valaika. Rio Ruiz. Freddy Galvis. These are fine players.
Yolmer Sanchez is listed as the starter at 2B according to roster resource. Maybe that happens. But Urias is cheap and under team control for a few years. Smart rebuilding teams try to turn little profits all around the diamond by leveraging their opportunity to uncover hidden gems. That’s Ramon Urias. I think he’ll play a lot in 2021. Don’t wait too long on him like I did once this winter. He’s not a secret. I got sniped in the reserve rounds of the CBS AL-Only auction.
2B Josh Rojas | 26 | Arizona Diamondbacks | Fantrax ADP 732.05 | NFBC ADP 627.48
If you’ve seen Ted Lasso, you know what’s in my head whenever I hear of Rojas’ many spring splashes showing just how far beyond the Covid woes that waylaid his 2020. Danny Rojas! Football is life! And from the look of reality and the sound of the reports, Josh Rojas committed himself to a Baseball-is-Life kind of off-season and showed up ready to roll this year.
You might remember Rojas as a key piece in the trade that sent Zack Greinke to Houston. At the time, Rojas was enjoying a breakout season that ended in 23 HR and 33 SB across 105 games at AA and AAA. He slashed .332/.416/.606 across those stops. Wowza. I had nicknamed him the Night King at the time because he was menacingly lurking off screen and was kind of ancient in prospect years. Also Game of Thrones was all the rage. I was all in on both, and both kind of let me down, to be honest. “The Long Night” was perhaps the most thrilling episode of TV I’ve ever seen, but after those walkers ripped through the people of Westeros, they just collapsed when Arya stabbed the King. Likewise, when covid stabbed Rojas in 2020, his performance collapsed. Yikes, that was a jog.
Breaking News: Rojas was just selected at pick 356 in my TGFBI league. He’s looking healthy and strong this spring, and Arizona has every reason to let him win an everyday gig. They’ve got partial or complete openings at 2B, 3B, LF, CF, and RF by my count, if they’re honest with themselves about the Escobars and Assdribbles of the world. If you’re believing in Rojas’ early spring fire, you’ll have to jump way above whatever ADP your draft room is showing.
Thanks for reading!
I’m @theprospectitch on Twitter.
