LOGIN

Please see our player page for Austin Charles to see projections for today, the next 7 days and rest of season as well as stats and gamelogs designed with the fantasy baseball player in mind.

With two first-year-player drafts behind me and two underway as I type, fantasy baseball is officially back in the Itch household. Today I plan to share my early takeaways with you, dear reader, starting with the guys I actually selected.

I’ll start with the Razz 30: a 30-team league filled with skilled players. We can keep as few as seven minor leaguers and as many as 18 major leaguers, so the draft is 13 rounds across a couple weeks, adding up to 320 total picks this season. 2B Cesar Prieto of the Cardinals was Mr. Irrelevant, a solid selection in a league where playing time is king and low-minors lottery tickets tend to end up back in the draft pool. I like this about the league. The free agent pool gets a full scouring in comparison to the new guys coming in from the draft, and the two pools get well shuffled up and mixed together. Phillies RHP Moises Chace, for example, went 1.19. I was disappointed because I wanted him at 1.30. He went undrafted in the 15-team FYPD I completed this week, which made sense. Pitching is a lot easier to find in that league, and proximity is almost a punishment because each team has 30 MLB roster spots, and players are exceeding their minor league eligibility all the time. 

Please, blog, may I have some more?

1. 1B Jac Caglianone | 22 | A+ | 2026

Announced as a two-way player, Caglianone was deployed first in the pros as a full-time hitter after slashing .419/.544/.875 with 35 home runs in 66 games for Florida. The well-developed, left-handed college bat made a nice fit at sixth overall for a Royals team on the rise. With Vinnie P at the slow corner, Caglianone could perhaps fake left field until he figured it out if necessary. The arm would even play in right once he’s accustomed to the angles, but at 6’5” 250 lbs, he may not have the mobility to learn on the fly out there. He didn’t blow the doors off the leagues he’s played as a pro but did pop five homers in 21 games in the Arizona Fall League.

Please, blog, may I have some more?

For this list, I used the players’ ages as of July 9, 2023.

The cut-off lines for eligibility were 130 at bats for hitters and 50 innings for pitchers.

Here’s a link to the Top 25.

Here’s a link to the Top 50

51. Rays RHP Shane Baz | 24 | MLB | 2021

With 40.1 innings, Baz remains eligible by the laws of this list. His value is pretty dependent upon your play style and/or league setting, I think. He’s a good bet to gain value between now and spring training 2024. 

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Dynasty baseball is always complicated. The winners tend to allocate their roster spots most effectively, and this time of year especially, each spot is gold. With short-season leagues underway in Florida and Arizona, new names are popping into the newsfeed all the time. These two remaining short-season “leagues” have inherited the levels left behind by the recent minor league purge, so one could argue they matter more than they ever have. On the other hand, the pitching and defense is perhaps too haphazard to help us sort the hitters. Same goes double for the Dominican Summer Leagues. Also, it’s only been a week, and everyone is telling everyone else to hold their horses while filling their own FAAB runs with DSL hitters like Atlanta OF Luis Guanipa and Guardians SS Welbyn Francisca. And that’s where we’ll close this post: circling some names making waves in the dynasty-verse. 

Let’s take it from the top first though. Big news of the night has to be Giants OF Luis Matos, who homered in his first at bat and got pulled from the game after his second. He’s hitting .398 with seven home runs and six steals in 24 games at Triple-A Sacramento. This might be a drill but does not feel like a drill. San Francisco is 35-and-32: good enough to make the playoffs if they started today. Hard to make a strong case against promoting Matos. I added him in two leagues yesterday: a ten-teamer and a twelve. Both redraft leagues. Chasing that lightning.

Please, blog, may I have some more?