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Please see our player page for Ryan Cusick 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?

Dynasty drafts come in several shapes and sizes. Some leagues break the player groups into veterans and prospects. Some leagues let you draft 34-year-old relievers right alongside 16-year-old little brothers. I don’t really have a favorite way to cut it up. I just love the game. Though I will say the Razz 30 has something special going on with a prospects-only draft and a vets-only auction that becomes, at its core, a bums-only auction. It’s about two weeks of slow-bidding Steven Brault up to $21, and it’s a treat like few others in the fantasy realm. Jose Martinez once sold for $96. Michael Pineda went for $62. Zach Davies for $36. Two of those are purchases of mine! The fun never ends! Well, except when you ask MLB owners if they’d rather make money or take all the different balls and go home.

Anywho, I’ve broken this year’s First-Year-Player Draft rankings down into tiers and included some snippets about where my head would be during those spots on the draft board.

You can find most of these guys in the 2022 Fantasy Baseball Prospects, Minor League Preview Index

If not, feel free to drop a question in the comments so we can talk some baseball, pass the time.

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Atlanta is finishing a painful but impressive season, bottoming out at one point after losing Mike Soroka and Ronald Acuña Jr. for the year on top of missing Ian Anderson–not to mention the Marcel Ozuna saga. 

They could’ve done the cool kid thing and stopped trying. Instead, they traded for a whole new outfield of misfit toys–Jorge Soler, Joc Pederson, and Adam Duval–that selling teams no longer wanted on the payroll, sacrificing next to nothing from their farm in the process and putting together another potentially division-winning club, their fourth in a row if they can hold off the Phillies, who are just one game back as I type this on Saturday night. 

If Atlanta can power through, they’ll have benefited from being in baseball’s wonkiest division, but a win is a win, and who knows, perhaps this team that figures to win about 85 games will outperform much better regular season squads in the postseason, and even if they fall short, their minor league system looks better to me than it has since Acuña graduated. 

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Omaha! Omaha! Either Peyton Manning just put together a quick game of pick-up flag football in my backyard, or the College World Series is officially underway in Nebraska. *editor buzzes into my earpiece* Manning is in fact in Canton learning how to properly construct a Super Bowl trophy out of a Wheaties box for the next incredibly average Peyton’s Places segment, so it must be the latter — which is good for him, because my backyard is currently infested with slime mold and being treated for turf diseases, so that simply wouldn’t be advised for the local neighborhood youths. But alas, the CWS is here, and we have the luxury of scouting an excess of 2021 MLB Draft talent from June 19-30. Six players in my top 30 were able to advance to college baseball’s ultimate event, but countless others such as Arizona’s Ryan Holgate, Vanderbilt’s Isaiah Thomas and NC State’s Luca Tresh made the Omaha cut as well. This not only means that these rankings are fluid and will undoubtedly change prior to the July 11-13 draft, but also that I recommend taking the below intel and doing some of your own personal scouting over the course of the next week-plus. So, who has made the cut as we inch closer to the release of the complete college top 100? Check it out below, as there are a handful of new names previously excluded from the preseason list that utilized excellent 2021 campaigns to springboard their stock — such as Washington State’s Kyle Manzardo and Florida State’s Matheu Nelson. Where they’ll ultimately fall in the draft, nobody knows! For that reason, I like to refer to such players as this year’s “unsupervised children flying off trampolines at the annual Memorial Day reunion.” There’s always bound to be one or two.

Please, blog, may I have some more?

If you’re a fan of college baseball, then you know the 2021 NCAA season is right around the corner. Exciting! *unexpectedly, clapping begins* Right around the corner: that’s precisely what I said. Now, for some fans, that corner is well within sight. *clapping slows down, still unsure of where it’s coming from* If you’re a fan of a major Power Five team, then the 2021 campaign likely begins in just over two weeks, during the weekend of Feb. 19-21. That is, unless you’re a die-hard Big Ten supporter, in which case you still don’t even have a 2021 schedule. *clapping stops* That’s right — there is going to be a lot of variance entrenched in 2021 college baseball schedules. Some teams are starting on time and playing a full non-conference slate, while others will experience a delayed start while partaking in conference-only competition. This year, we will be comparing apples to bananas (not a big fan of oranges, plus they’re far too close in appearance) more than we ever have. But even with that, we need to move forward, and it all begins with my Preseason Top 50 Draft-Eligible College Players to Target in Dynasty Formats. Onward! *looks back to see no one following* I said, onward!

Please, blog, may I have some more?