I told you once, I told you a million times that there’s no one way to skin a fantasy baseball sleeper. They’re not all “draft after the top 400 and return top 200 value.” A lot of them are not, tee bee aitch. I was looking through Steamer projections again, and, besides stumbling on seeing Trevor Story had a projected 600+ plate appearances, and cackling for 45 minutes straight, I sorted by homers for third baseman in 2025 and would you look at that, Mark Vientos, was at the top. What a glorious thing that was to behold. Then I looked at his Mark Vientos’s ADP, saw around 100 overall and my eyes went crossed. NowIamstrugglingtotype amIusingthespacebar oramI hittingthetopofmydesk whereIthinkthespacebaris? By the way, I don’t want to spread misinformation so I need to point out, Steamer does not give Trevor Story 600+ plate appearances. Fangraphs did. We have our own Steamer projections, they have their own, and others might have theirs. Steamer gives rates and people add their own playing time. For unstints, Steamer might say Trevor Story will have .0035 HR per plate appearance, then Rudy adds 550 plate appearances or 125 plate appearances or 600+. So, when people say, “Steamer gave Trevor Story 600 plate appearances? That’s nuts!” They didn’t. Whatever site you’re at gave him 600 plate appearances. It’s semantics, but I don’t think most people realize that. So, what can we expect from Mark Vientos for 2025 fantasy baseball and what makes him a sleeper?
PSYCHE! My 2025 fantasy baseball rankings are all on Patreon. Don’t wait for the rankings to come out next month. Anyway II, the Mark Vientos sleeper:
When I said Mark Vientos had the most projected homers, did he? Yes and no. He did according to FanGraphs’ Steamer projections, which is what I was perusing. When I wrote this, we didn’t have our Steamer projections published yet. That does mean Steamer projects Vientos for the most homers if him, Rafael Devers, Austin Riley, Machado, Jo-Ram and Burger all had the same number of ABs. That’s not, nothing. Mark Vientos received very little fanfare for his previous season, from what I saw. Maybe if he were a rookie (he wasn’t), he might’ve got more pub for people putting him in the same convo as other ROY guys, but he had a random 218 ABs in 2023, where he hit .211. The thing about that random 218 ABs, he also had a 114.9 MPH MaxEV. That was top 20 in all of baseball. It’s not everything. You can get into one ball and not be great, but it is incredibly rare. If you get into a ball at 115 MPH, then 99 out of 100 times, there’s something else there. Vientos wasn’t the rare exception. He’s something.
Mark Vientos’s 29.7 K% is concerning, but since he hits the ball so hard, as previously mentioned, he had a .324 BABIP, and that doesn’t feel terribly high, even if his fly balls are. Speaking of which, his 11.4 Launch Angle is a tad lower than I’d like to see, and he hits a few too many ground balls. Talking swing profile, and it’s flatter than you want, but not Yandy Diaz. His HR/FB% was 26.5, which is high. If he can nudge his fly balls to 40%, not far off his 36%, and his HR/FB stays around 20, then he’ll be okay. At 24 years of age, he just hit 27 HRs and .266 in 413 ABs. That doesn’t happen accidentally. As someone who watches a lot of Mets games, Vientos has easy power. The ball zips off his bat. Anecdotal? I don’t know, doesn’t seem it when you see his exit velocity and the good balls he bats up (totally an expression):
Went back and looked at 2021 thru 2023 to see if you could fake this sorta thing. I see no indication of that. Top guys for barrels are top guys. You do not sting the ball that much on average by accident. The weirdest examples I found were an outlier of Sean Murphy in 2023. At least I think it was an outlier, but he was hurt last year, so maybe he bounces back. And Rowdy Tellez had an incredible year in 2022 that looks like an outlier, but he can eat. Any hoo! I’m confident in saying whatever Mark Vientos’s final ADP is, it’s not high enough. If you tell me, he’s going at 100, I’m drafting him at 85. If you tell me 85, I’m going 75. If you tell me 65, I’m going 55. If you tell me 55, I’m going–Okay, he has no speed, so easy there, double nickel. For 2025, I’ll give Mark Vientos projections of 82/34/95/.251/1 in 580 ABs with a chance for more.
