There is something about buying used.  Whether it is that pleather couch or your 90’s hatchback, you cannot go wrong.  In our fantasy baseball world, this simply means passing up the young shiny objects and buying those old rusty veterans.  Sure, we sometimes are fighting Father Time, but at least we know our lineup can drive stick shift.  This week we dig into those draft day values that might sneak through the cracks and be waiting around for the savy owner.  Let us dig into this week’s 2023 fantasy baseball hitter profiles!

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See all of today’s starting lineups

# MLB Starting Lineups For Mon 8/4
ARI | ATL | BAL | BOS | CHC | CIN | CLE | COL | DET | HOU | KC | LAA | LAD | MIA | MIL | MIN | NYM | NYY | PHI | PIT | SD | SF | STL | TB | TEX | TOR | ATH | CHW | OAK | SEA | WSH

Few teams are as adept at navigating the social media markets of our modern age. Invisible threads connect everything in the baseball world, and while it’s possible the Mariners would be able to trade Noelvi Marte and Edwin Arroyo for a big prize without the power of their brand, it certainly helps that nobody’s better at hyping their own than Seattle. The Yankees are great, too, and some of the fan bases do a lot of lifting for their organizations, but whenever Seattle isn’t posting a workout video or highlight reel, they’re handing their social media feeds over to their prospects to flash their personalities and connect to the fans. For years, the Yankees were able to spin their internal prospect praise to public-facing outlets and then flip almost all of these youngsters for big league pieces. 

When Seattle traded for Luis Castillo last year, the narrative was focused on how big a haul the Reds received. Some of that is just the moneyball-ization of the modern baseball fan, but a large portion is down to the power of marketing. No offense to Marte, a power hitter who slugged .462 in High-A, or Arroyo, a shortstop who hit .227 with a 28.4 percent strikeout in Low A, but the idea that these two plus reliever Andrew Moore and pitcher Levi Stoudt represent a huge haul in exchange for an ace-level starter is absurd to me. Castillo posted a 2.99 ERA and 1.08 WHIP across 150.1 innings last year and then signed a team-comfortable contract at $108 million through 2027 with a 180-inning vesting option for 2028. This will cover his age 31, 32, 33, 34, and age 35 seasons. If he’s healthy and good enough to throw 180 innings at 35, he’ll be a bargain at $20 million as a 36-year-old. Or he’ll be off the payoff before the tough seasons start. I guess it’s not fair to compare the under-contract Castillo to the trade return he brought as a soon-to-be free agent, but I have to think everyone who said the Reds did great in this trade would feel a little differently if he’d been traded with five-plus seasons of affordable team control. Feels to me like a master-class from Jerry Dipoto, sending far-away prospects to pull a great pitcher out of a numbers-inflating environment and then signing him to a long-term contract before his statistics better reflected his pitching-friendly new home. 

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Well, we have made it through the first 100 players in this year’s 2023 Dynasty Rankings. Now, just another 100 more players to go.

This week rankings feature players ranked numbers 100 to 76 – or my Tier 4 players. This group of 25 players features only eight pitchers, seven of which are starters. The group also skews to the under-30 crowd as only 10 of the players in this tier are 30 or over.

Season Slowing Inching Closer

Next week the start of Spring Training is here, which means the real season is just around the corner. But until then, the next month will be about you creating a new team (or teams) in dynasty baseball leagues are continuing to tweak your current team(s).

No matter what you are looking forward to – Spring Training, the regular season, drafts or everything – it is a great time of the year. And since we can’t get enough rankings, let’s get to this edition of the 2023 Dynasty Rankings: 100-76.

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Happy Saturday, Razzballers! Pitchers and catchers report on Monday. Just in time to take your early season hopes and dreams on a romantic dinner for Valentine’s Day. What better time is there than to continue where I left off in last week’s edition of Ambulance Chasers about aging baseball players. A few weeks ago, our […]

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Due to being in the middle of the 2023 fantasy baseball rankings, I got super backlogged on player updates, so this is going to be a huge How’s Your Father. First up, and perhaps the biggest news I missed, Pablo Lopez was shipped to the Twins. Or I should say given away. What’s his downside? Well, he kinda sucked last year. That’s a big one. Here’s the thing: That was last year, not this year. Crazy, right? If you followed my lead, you were out on Pab-Lo last year. And now we’re going back in. Last year, he threw 180 IP, 8.7 K/9, 2.7 BB/9, 3.56 xFIP. Was a bit unlucky on men left on base and his command was a little wonky, but he upped his SwStr% and lowered his inside and outside zone contact. His 2nd half really hurt him (4.97 ERA) but that was based on a very high BABIP and he actually had better command. He had the 15th lowest Hard Contact% for the season, and 16th lowest in the 2nd half. That is disconnected from his 2nd half ERA. In fact (Grey’s got more!), he had the 8th highest difference in his 2nd half ERA and FIP. He was one of the unluckiest pitchers last year, and, if he hadn’t been, he would’ve ended the year with something like a 3.10 ERA instead of a 3.75 ERA and would be ranked at least ten starters higher, and drafted about 30 to 50 spots higher in ADP. He’s ranked and projected in the top 60 starters. Anyway, here’s what else I saw this offseason in 2023 fantasy baseball:

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You’ll have to forgive me, I’m a little out of breath. I’m still in the middle of running the victory lap of telling everyone, everywhere last season to draft Cristian Javier at all costs. Can I see the future, you might ask? No, my friend, I am no fortune teller. At least I don’t think […]

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Four score and seventeen-hundred rankings posts ago, my Fordfathers said, “Stop calling us Fordfathers, you idiot, it’s forefathers.” In order to form a more perfect fantasy baseball ranking system, we stopped ranking for fantasy baseball and simply said, “Eff it, let’s just let Grey rank 500 or so Mr. So-and-So’s.” Or, more succinctly, the top 500 for 2023 fantasy baseball. A few years ago, the top 500 was only a top 300 for fantasy baseball. Before that, it was 16 AD and I was drafting in one-person leagues because no one knew fantasy baseball or baseball. In a few years from now, this is going to be a top 10,000 and I’m going to be ranking Ronald Acuña Jr. Jr. Jr. Today, in this year, Twenty-Three after Twenty, comes the top 500 for 2023 fantasy baseball. Or as I like to call it, “Did he really rank Mr. So-and-So before Mr. So-and-So Jr.?” If Mr. So-and-So Jr. would stop chasing pitches in the dirt, I might’ve ranked him in front of Mr. So-and-So. This post isn’t meant to send shockwaves through your system. The pipe cleaner that the doctor uses to get the clogged wax from your ears is meant for that. This is simply to give you an idea of where guys are ranked in relation to other positions, i.e., you know I like Vaughn Grissom better than Brandon Lowe, according to the top 20 2nd basemen, but do I like Grissom better than Josh Jung? Okay, it’s not that simple. You should read the blurbs for all players, but this top 500 should give you an idea. You’ll notice after the top 200, positions start to get clumped together. I might be the only fantasy baseball ‘pert to tell you this, but it doesn’t matter where, say, Justin Turner is ranked vs. Alexis Diaz. If you need saves, Turner isn’t going to help you. He can be ranked 50 spots in front of Diaz and it doesn’t matter. That’s why I have the 2023 fantasy baseball rankings broken down by positions. If you need a 1st baseman, then Jose Miranda vs. Ty France matters, but where Miranda is ranked vs. Kodai Senga really doesn’t matter. Also, there’s no comments about players in this top 500, which you really should know prior to drafting. In other words, Shane Bieber might be in the 60s overall, but am I drafting him? Well, you’d know if you read my top 20 starters for 2023 fantasy baseball.  There’s also a top 100 for 2023 fantasy baseball to help you. Also, there’s our online War Room, which is downloadable, and it comes free with Razzball Subscriptions.

Also, where I had omitted the free agent projections previously, here I filled them in because, well, it was getting confusing for me with open spaces. All free agents’ projections are based on neutral parks or best guesstimates where they will end up. Anyway, here’s the top 500 for 2023 fantasy baseball:

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Here’s a link to the Top 15

Around this point in the draft, you should probably be checking the free agent pool. You never know who can slide through the cracks created by transaction freezes, roster limitations, football season and the general malaise that sometimes accompanies late-summer rotisserie baseball.

16. Mariners SS Cole Young | 19 | A | 2025

Cole Young looks like the early win of last summer’s draft. He wasn’t especially late at 21st overall, but he might go inside the top ten if the draft happened tomorrow. A 6’0” 180 lb left-handed hitter, Young features plus bat-to-ball skills and an all-fields approach that plays beyond his years. He graduated the complex league in seven games and got even better in Low A, slashing .385/.422/.538 with two home runs and a stolen base in ten games. In the cold light of dawn between publications, this ranking feels a little low.

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Hello, all you brave, courageous, adventure-seekers, you’ve found the wrong website. This is fantasy baseball, not fantasy role playing, unless it’s fantasy roll-playing and this is Stratomatic, but that’s still not right. Still, fantasy baseball. Good, now that we got rid of all those people wearing fedoras and shopping from the Indiana Jones collection at Eddie Bauer, we can get down to the bidness. The Auction value bidness? Not quite, but you can find all auction values in Rudy’s rankings — one example, 12-team mixed league auction values. This is a top 100 for 2023 fantasy baseball. Let’s do this!

One word about this top 100 for 2023 fantasy baseball, before I give you another 5,000 words. I’m going to avoid repeating myself from the position rankings in the 2023 fantasy baseball rankings. If you want to know my in-depth feelings about a player, then you need to go to his positional page, i.e., the top 20 1st basemen for 2023 fantasy baseball, the top 20 outfielders for 2023 fantasy baseball, the top 20 Patterns In Queso That Look Like Messages From Another Planet for 2023– Okay, but I almost got you. This post is meant to give you an idea where guys from different positions are in relation to each other. Since this post is only the top 100, there’s more players where this came from. 448 more, to be very exact. Next up, there will be a top 500 that will go past 500, then, after that, there will be a top 7,500 that will go to 8,602, then a top 25,000 that will go to 28,765, then a top 600,000 that will go to 892,121, until we end up with a top kajillion in April that will go to a kajillion and one. Or maybe I’ll stop at the top 500. Yeah, that makes sense. Not to get all biblical on you, but this is the gospel. Print it out and take it to Mt. Sinai and it will say, “Win your 2023 fantasy baseball league, young prematurely balding man.” Projections were done by me and a crack team of 100 monkeys fighting amongst themselves because there were only 99 typewriters. Somebody please buy Ling-Ling his own typewriter!

Razzball Subscriptions are also now open, which include the Fantasy Baseball War Room. I don’t draft without it, neither should you. Anyway, here’s the top 100 for 2023 fantasy baseball:

Please, blog, may I have some more?