Rolling In The Deep: The Price Of Youth

Warmest of winter greetings, friends! It hasn’t been the easiest of offseasons for all kinds of reasons for many, particularly here in Los Angeles, so I wish you and yours the best and will also take a moment to appreciate the refuge that both real life and fantasy baseball can be. As I am wont to do, I started drafting for 2025 back in October, so I’ve already seen some significant ADP movement thanks to offseason injury news, trades, and free agent signings. As always, I try not to let ADP affect my own personal rankings or opinions too much (also as always, WAY easier said than done). I do, however, like to use it as a tool to figure out which of my targets I need to pull the trigger on early, and who I might be able to wait in the weeds for and snag later on in a draft. Finding the balance between ensuring that you’ve rostered as many of your must-have players as possible while simultaneously adjusting your plans so that you can take advantage of what a draft or auction gives you isn’t easy, no matter how well-prepared you feel going in. But as I see it, there’s no reason not to be familiar with public ADP so that it can help guide you on occasion, as a tie-breaker on which player to take now and which to cross your fingers and wait a round on, if nothing else.

As we slowly but surely turn the calendar pages towards spring (we’re a mere few weeks from pitchers and catchers reporting, and less than two months out from a couple MLB games in another country that may or may not count in your fantasy league!),  we’ll start by looking at some general trends in the 2025 draft landscape. As rosters continue to fall into place and we suddenly have a barrage of best-shape-of-his-life type news bullets to navigate, we’ll make our way towards more specific thoughts on positions, players, roster construction, and deep league strategies.

For now, I thought I’d start with one of the first things that stood out to me when I started drafting: the surprisingly high cost of last year’s young breakout players. There are a handful of guys I thought I’d have multiple shares of by now whom I haven’t drafted on a single team, mainly because I was taken aback at just how highly they were also being valued by my fellow early drafters. The flip side of this, it turns out, is that I have already drafted Alex Bregman, who I’m honestly not sure I’ve ever rostered before in my life. Seeing him manning the hot corner on one of my teams at all, let alone before I even know where he’ll land in 2025, is making me mildly queasy. But should it? Have the younger unproven players’ values gotten so inflated that it actually makes sense to draft a possibly washed-up veteran with zero upside? If my first few drafts were largely experimental, then those are questions we’ll need to answer before I dive back in for more, so let’s take a look at just how big a mark-up has been placed on the price of some of those young guns.

(For our numbers, we’ll be using current NFBC ADP, which covers a whopping 388 completed drafts already.)

I was originally planning to limit this list to hitters, but since Paul Skenes sort of epitomizes the title of this post, let’s throw that plan out the window and go ahead and start with him. Grey ranked Skenes #18 overall in his Top 20 post, and to quote Mr. Albright: “you know I’d never draft a starter in the top 20. So, yes, I’ve chosen to only rank one starter in the top 20 this year, and this is more to point out how I would not draft him.” I feel the same way about Skenes; sure, I’d love it if someone magically dropped him on to a few of my rosters, but there is no way he’ll ever end up there on purpose given his current astronomical price tag.  He is being drafted #12 overall, and has been drafted as high as third overall. Third! No further comment.

As long as we’re talking pitching, let’s discuss Mason Miller for a hot second. I was pretty giddy about him when I was drafting eleven months ago or so, and you know how that turned out: he was basically the MVP of at least one of my 2024 draft and hold teams where I grabbed him late. I still love the talent, and I’m honestly not worried about the number of save opportunities, but to misquote Blondie, the price is high. Miller is being drafted as the fifth closer off the board on average, with a ADP of 53, and a minimum pick of #27. Now while the Razzball/SAGNOF philosophy aligns with my own more often than not, there may be a rare time, in a specific situation, in the right league, where I draft a top closer. And if I were to draft a top closer, I might choose Miller; in fact, if I had to choose right this second in a vacuum, I think I might take him over one or two of the four closers being drafted ahead of him. Just know that if you’ve been coveting him, you’ll likely have some serious competition for his services.

Moving on to hitters, let’s discuss the one “young” guy that I knew I’d have to pay up for (and have already done so in at least one draft): Brent Rooker. Over the final months of last season, I realized that I probably wasn’t the only one noticing that Rooker had become an absolute team-carrier when it came to fantasy, and I knew the price would be escalated this year. I went into my first NFBC draft with a “have to have him” mentality when it came to Rooker, and while I’m happy to see him on my roster, I’m already wondering if it was a mistake to put such a high level of importance on drafting him. There were clearly others who were just as eager to grab him, though, as his ADP sits at 72 with a latest pick of 138 and an earliest of… wait for it… 21. Let’s not forget, among other things, that Rooker qualifies only at Utility in most leagues, including the NFBC leagues those numbers are based on. Also, he’s 30. He just locked up a big contract; will he still be motivated? Is he really going to steal bases in the double-digits again? Oh, and he had offseason forearm surgery. And is there any way a guy with a 29% K rate is gonna hit .293 again? Or… can we turn this whole narrative around and look and wonder if his current cost will actually end up being a bargain? I mean, he was good at everything in terms of fantasy stats last year. Plus, perhaps the A’s 2025 home in Sacramento will be a bandbox? And if he was that good with a sore forearm, maybe he’ll be even better this year if he’s fully healthy?

Okay, so while I wasn’t surprised at Rooker’s cost, I was taken a bit aback by that of his Athletics teammate Lawrence Butler. Butler’s ADP falls just after Rooker’s at #73, and he’s been drafted as high as #36. Butler had one of the hottest two-month streaks in baseball last summer, including not one but two 3-homer games, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that he’s so prominently on the fantasy radar now. He also is a left handed hitter who has handled left-handed pitching brilliantly, plus he didn’t just steal 18 bases last year, he did it without being caught a single time. And then there’s that triple A stadium mentioned in the above blurb. (I’ve heard it described as “intimate,” and I’ve also read that some folks think it won’t play as a hitters’ park to the extent we might be assuming it will. I wasn’t really thinking about the stadium when evaluating Miller, but perhaps that needs to be factored into the equation, not that it will make a huge difference if he basically strikes everyone out like he did last year. And while we’re on the subject, I honestly didn’t realize when I sat down to write this that I’d be talking about no fewer than three A’s… ah, how I long for the olden days when targeting players on not-great West Coast teams was an untapped fantasy goldmine that others barely knew about!) Back to Butler… while his lack of walks is a red flag for me, I’ve been a fan for a while and was both happy and not entirely surprised to see him break out to the extent that he did. While I won’t have as many shares as I thought I would when I figured I could get him a few rounds later than his current price, I still consider him a target in the right league at the right time.

Now, on to the player who was one of my true sleeper darlings last year but who I now realize I will not be rostering as often as I thought I would in 2025: Jordan Westburg. I will start by saying that his 2B/3B dual-position eligibility is a very nice perk, and I do love his skill set. I just wasn’t expecting it to be quite so expensive, as his ADP sits at #94 and he has been drafted as high as 49th. IF he’s healthy after last year’s hand surgery and plays a full season, he could easily go 25/10 this year based on last year’s numbers, so that would be worth paying for. But I’m a little wary given that he has just 175 total MLB games under his belt, and that even if everything goes as well as we can hope for him, he’s unlikely to do anything more than not hurt you when it comes to average or OBP. Like I said, I understand the attraction here; I just want to remember there are a lot of other fish in the sea later in the draft and that it may or may not make sense to roster Westburg based on the league, my roster construction, and his cost.

Let’s continue with Mark Vientos, another player I headed into draft season thinking I could get for a relatively bargain price and quickly learned that I was sorely mistaken. His ADP has actually inched just ahead of Westburg’s, at #92, and he’s been taken as high as #52. Third base (and corner infield) is most definitely not what it used to be when it comes to fantasy goodness, but this one still really surprised me. Then again, looking at just how good Vientos was last year, and remembering that this is a guy who is still only 25 and who we all thought a few years ago was likely to be great at Major League Baseball, I’m realizing that the price makes sense. Sure, he could drop off significantly, but so could anyone, and if he doesn’t, he could launch himself into the first tier of third basemen pretty quickly. Also, he may end up playing and qualifying at first base sooner rather than later, which is not nothing given how surprisingly weak the 1B field is this year. It’ll be difficult for me to pull the trigger this much sooner than I was hoping to, but Vientos feels like a player that I’ll regret missing out on if I fade him entirely.

While we’re talking about young third baseman, I’ll take a moment to throw Matt Shaw‘s name out there, even though he doesn’t qualify as a 2024 breakout player seeing as he’s never had a single major league at bat. The general consensus seems to be that a starting job in Chicago is his for the taking this spring, but if you want him on your fantasy team, good luck trying to figure out when to draft him or how much you’ll need to pay for him in the meantime. His current ADP is 306, but that comes with an outrageous minimum/maximum pick differential: he’s gone as late as #431, and as early as #57.

Let me know in the comments who the youngster you’re willing to reach for is, and who you’re passing on at anywhere near the current cost. Or, feel free to drop a note about anything else; I’m just excited to be back and to have the opportunity to connect with all of you good folks out there who speak the beautiful language of fantasy baseball!