Skip to main content

Fantasy Baseball: Thoughts going into the 2024 season

January is a month of new beginnings.  Clean slates.  Resolutions.  The end of one year, the beginning of another.  For us, it also marks the end of the fantasy football season and, officially, the beginning of the march to fantasy baseball season.

For some, the grind never stopped, which is why we're here, in January, talking prospects.  Going into any new season, my personal opinion is that the veterans have largely solidified their status - in one direction or another.  It is the prospects -- the post-hype and the new-hype that disorient and disturb the board more than any other category of players.  That's our inquiry for the moment.

Post-hype prospects

I have three post-hype prospects that I am targeting, in particular.  They are Michael Busch (Cubs), Kyle Manzardo (Guardians), and Curtis Mead (Rays).  Busch is a pretty easy pick, but I suspect his price is going to get too expensive relative to his ADP neighbors.  Busch was shipped from the Dodgers to the Cubs, which is only going to boost not just his value, but his price, as well.  The team underdogs, ultimately, are Kyle Manzardo and Curtis Mead.  Manzardo, the former Ray, and Mead, the current Ray, were "no doubt" stars coming out of the 2022 minor league season.  For both players, they struggled in 2023, though for entirely different reasons.  Manzardo was confronted with fairly significant personal issues (his mother, in particular, dealing with serious health issues).  Mead, meanwhile, just could not stay healthy.  Injury after injury, and it's clear he could never quite get right.

If you're looking for a dark horse, I would also consider two Dodgers: Miguel Vargas and Gavin Lux.  To be clear, I would not chase either of these players or pay too steep of a price.  They both come with significant, and I mean significant, flaws.  With Vargas, he was a minor league stat sheet-stuffer, but couldn't come close to fulfilling that promise in his major league debut.  I think it's entirely possible that the injury he suffered in spring training zapped his ability to hit for power... in other words, I am not entirely ready to ignore him altogether.  Gavin Lux, meanwhile, is a steady, though not prolific player.  It's not clear how he will look and perform coming off knee surgery, but he could be one of the benefactors of a better Dodgers lineup.

New-hype prospects

There are so many prospects to choose from, it's almost too difficult to target one over the other. Wyatt Langford, Jackson Holliday, Dylan Crews, Jackson Chourio.  Who to pursue?  If you ask me, outside of the dynasty context: none of them.  I am generally reluctant to chase the prospects unless the price is just right.  When looking at ADP values, the price for a top prospect can sometimes come at the expense of a solid and steady veteran.  That said, some of these prospects have the chance to hit and hit big.  If I am guessing, I would be willing to take a chance on Wyatt Langford.  In the interest of transparency, I was never a Langford-believer.  I thought his ascension was a tad too quick and sudden.  I preferred Dylan Crews and his masterful career -- an incredible portfolio of statistics across a glorious 3-year career at LSU.  What Langford has done since being drafted, however, significantly surpasses Crews and, in my opinion, Holliday and Chourio.  I don't doubt that the latter two will be perennial all stars, but I also think they're just not quite yet ready for solid-to-spectacular fantasy baseball production.  The verdict, overall?  You may just want to go with the veterans.

Popular posts from this blog

When you create something bigger, your failures are given context

The first chunk of my life was dictated for me.  I went to school and I was told what to do in school.  I got a job and I was told what to do at that job.  I went to college and I was told what to do in college.  I found a better job and I was told to do in that job.   My success in those different contexts was some milestone, goal, or achievement that was given to me by those different contexts.  I didn't have to think about what the goal was - it was merely given to me.  In some sense, that's great - I appreciate that someone was training me. But the problem is that no one told me that I was merely being trained.  Without necessary communication and context, I kept drifting through the days thinking another goal or milestone would magically appear. Well, it didn't.  And it took me a few years to figure this out - more than I'd like.   What did I learn in the process? That you must set those goals for yourself - even if those ...
Read more

The More Good Days than Bad Days Principle

There are seven days in a week, about 30 days in a month, and 365 days in a year.   Not all of those can be good days.  No one has 7 perfectly good days.  Likewise, I've never gone through an entire year without a single bad day.   I have two reactions to that: The first reaction is the whole "control what you can control" thing.  You can control your effort and your attitude.  And that's absolutely true.  But sometimes a day is so bad that no amount of effort or attitude will fix it. The second reaction is that, in any given week, if you have 4 good days and 3 bad days, you're still winning.  Even if you have a few "meh" days, but the good ones are still outnumbering the rough ones, I think we're in a good place. The same goes for our practices with our little leaguers.  We've had some truly rough and awful practices.  The coach's didn't show up with patience, the kids didn't show up with their attention spans, a...
Read more

Fantasy Baseball: A few weeks in, how do we adjust and adapt?

We are several weeks into the season and, at this point, we can all agree that everything we knew going into the season was thrown out the window as soon as the games started.  That said, there is still a lot of baseball yet to play and for us, as fantasy nerds, a lot of in-season management to navigate.  As we move forward into summer, here are a few things I either have done or am thinking about doing. Use your FAAB to get the young pitchers and sell them, almost immediately, for impact bats. Put this one in the category of "shiny new toy."  Sure, I have preyed on our inattentiveness, but in re-draft settings, I see no issue with snagging these higher-end rookie pitchers and then flipping them.  In two different settings, I was able to flip Bibee for Miguel Vargas and then, separately, Mason Miller for Jordan Walker. Will these trades work out for me?  Probably not, but I have a lot more faith in Vargas and Walker, particularly, than I do in Bibee and Miller....
Read more