It’s baseball season, long-lost Razzball friends! Okay, fantasy baseball season. Okay, fantasy baseball drafting season. Okay, fantasy baseball drafting season for fantasy baseball writers and mildly disturbed folk who couldn’t make it through the first day of 2018 without entering into a fantasy baseball draft (proud to count myself a member of both of those elite groups, thank you very much).
Drafting the first week of January feels downright crazy. Well, is downright crazy. Projecting stats takes on a new layer of complication right now with such a ridiculous number of draftable players unsigned, and it’s trickier than ever trying to guess how fellow owners might be valuing players. I recently completed my first official fantasy baseball draft of the year, and found my instinct taking over regularly, leading me to impulsively click on a name which was far below other, higher-ranked names on my tidy little spreadsheet, simply because I had a gut feeling. Sure, we could call it women’s intuition, if we wanted to sound like we were writing this article in 1978. (As it turns out, there are studies that support some version of women’s intuition being a biological reality, due to the fact that females are exposed to less testosterone in the womb, which leads to an extra “sense.” Google if bored).
“What’s the point, lady??!” you ask…
The point is that, while things are going to be changing drastically and often, it’s finally time to talk fantasy baseball again! Also, though I appreciate your concern over how to address me given the current sensitive nature of male/female relationships, you really don’t need to call me anything as formal as “lady.” I’m beyond excited to be back, so get ready for some of my super-early girl thoughts on how 2018 NL-only, AL-only, and other deep-league fantasy baseball is very slowly beginning to shape up.
First up: a few of those super-early thoughts on a random handful of deep-league starting pitchers, specifically guys that went outside of the top 40 starters in my draft (it’s a good old fashioned 15-team, 5×5 redraft mixed league: 29 rounds of pure fun, in the form of 23 active roster spots plus a 6-man bench). I’ll list the players by the number each was drafted among all starting pitchers, mentioning two or three names at a time who were drafted close to each other. To give you an idea what was happening just before we got to starting pitcher #41, here’s #36- 40: Chase Anderson, Sonny Gray, David Price, Lance McCullers, and Michael Fulmer. I would’ve taken Anderson just a bit later if he’d fallen, and I already regret not jumping on Gray, as I had him targeted about a round earlier and probably should have pulled the trigger.
Round 12: Jon Gray (starting pitcher #43) and Kenta Maeda (#47). I have no idea how I didn’t end up with either of these guys on my team, since I was theoretically targeting both of them this late in the draft. Maeda actually went a little earlier than I thought he would, but for Gray, I guess I just had a last-minute moment of Coors Field panic/2017 burn. I think he could be a deal here, and will probably own him in multiple leagues this year. (Two that I thought would go a couple rounds earlier but went in this tier and I still was not interested in: Johnny Cueto and Gio Gonzalez. Too much baggage for this gal.)
Round 14/15: Blake Snell (#50), Charlie Morton (#51), Lucas Giolito (#55). I don’t really want invest much in Morton this year for fear that all he will do is disappoint me and hope that in my upcoming drafts someone will pounce on him earlier than this – but if they don’t, he’s pretty tempting here. Snell, meanwhile, is a guy who I decided I really, really wanted, but only after he was on someone else’s team. If he continues to go this low in my upcoming drafts, I suspect I’ll own him a lot. I also kind of regretted passing on Giolito this late, realizing I’d much rather have his upside than the other guys being drafted at about the same point (Tajuan Walker, Mike Clevinger, Lance Lynn).
Round 17: Dinelson Lamet (#63), Jake Faria (#65), Miles Mikolas (#66). I am intrigued by the Cardinals’ signing of Mikolas after his success in Japan, but wasn’t close to considering him yet and was surprised to see him drafted so early. Faria is yet another name I thought would end up on my team, and would happily take him at this point in my next draft. Lamet I’ve become a bit obsessed with, and will probably overdraft all preseason. I just can’t say no to a guy with strikeout potential who pitches half his games in San Diego (sigh, hopefully this will work out better than my attempted fling with Luis Perdomo last year).
As we drop a couple rounds down, we come to the last group of pitchers that I can actually imagine purposely adding to my team for now: Jordan Montgomery (#79), Patrick Corbin (#80), and Luis Gohara (#84). Who knows what to expect from Montgomery after the billion or so innings he pitched last year, and I wouldn’t exactly call him a high-ceiling guy, but I also feel like his floor isn’t terrible in a deep league. You’ve probably already read Grey’s fantasy about Corbin (https://razzball.com/patrick-corbin-2018-fantasy-baseball-sleeper/), and while Gohara is more of a dart-throw, I find his potential upside intriguing in the deep-league, and particularly NL-only world. He may not open the season in the rotation and a bad spring could quickly make him droppable, but a great one could raise his price substantially.
Perhaps it’s from being burned so badly by a few of my deep-league, late-round starter “secret weapons” last year (talkin’ to you, Mike Foltynewicz and Jharel Cotton), but there was basically no starting pitcher that I wanted to take a flier on in the last rounds of this draft. Here are some of the gentlemen, many of who I’ve shared a moment or two of fantasy glory with in the past and all of whom were ultimately drafted, who inspired me to just swipe left (that’s the “ick” direction, correct?): Jerad Eickoff, Mike Leake, Marco Estrada, Ian Kennedy, Vince Velasquez, CC Sabathia, German Marquez, Matt Moore, Steven Matz, Jason Vargas, Jhoulys Chacin, Zach Wheeler, Josh Tomlin, and Tyler Anderson.
With one draft under my belt, here’s my overall thought about deep-league starters in 2018: when you get to the later rounds, it’s likely to be an absolute cesspool. I’ve had seasons in the past where I’ve been successful taking one top-10 pitcher in an AL or NL-only league, then thinking offense, offense, and more offense for the bulk of the draft, and closing it out by grabbing a bunch of late-round pitching flyers. I’m already getting the idea that’s not gonna work this season, and I feel like I passed on way too many starters in this draft. We’ll see how much things evolve before April and what potential hidden gems may emerge, but for now I’m thinking that in 2018 I’m going to need to grit my teeth and grab several starters that I like in the early-ish and middle rounds of all but the shallowest leagues. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to talking lots of deep-league fantasy baseball. Happy new year and I hope the long, transaction-deprived offseason has been treating you well!
