Baseball season is quickly approaching, and that means many fans are suddenly tasked with the unenviable challenge of preparing for lengthy fantasy drafts. For many, drafting a fantasy team can become an exercise in picking the most recognizable names available. A problem with that approach, however, is that while some players have great name recognition from past success, they simply don’t have the same skills today.
To help fantasy players avoid overreaching for those duds, we were interested in finding the big-name stars that you should likely overlook in drafts. That’s not to say you don’t want these guys on your team team at all, just that you aren’t getting good value if you take them where they’re currently being drafted.
And in that regard the worst move you can make is picking Yu Darvish. Like, at all. The Texas Rangers ace has an average draft position of 59.6, or the end of the fifth round for a 12-team league, but Darvish recently underwent Tommy John surgery and will be out for the entire 2015 season. Unless you’re in a particularly deep keeper league and are planning to stash him for next next season, Darvish obviously shouldn’t even be on your radar this year.
Another major offender is Cincinnati’s Joey Votto. The 2010 NL MVP used to be one of fantasy baseball’s top options at first base. Despite his performance since declining and an injury-plagued 2014, he’s still being drafted in the late sixth round in 12-team leagues. Our projections put him at No. 125 overall, or an eleventh-round pick.
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To compile our list we first started by pulling our pool of All-Stars. In this case we defined the term as a player who has been elected to or chosen for an All-Star roster in at least two of the last three seasons. That gives us a pool of 47 active players plus Derek Jeter, who we didn’t include for obvious reasons.
We then ranked the 47 big-name players on their average draft position (ADP) as of Monday, March 23. For this we used FantasyPros.com’s overall ADP, which is itself an average of each player’s ADP on five different fantasy sites, including CBS, Yahoo and ESPN. The players in our pool ranged from Mike Trout, the consensus No. 1 pick with an ADP of 1.3, down to Carlos Beltran, who on average is being drafted around the No. 271 pick.
Next we needed to determine what those players are actually expected to do this season. To that end I pulled preseason projections from three of the most widely respected systems – Steamer, ZiPS and CAIRO – as well as the rankings from the experts at FanGraphs to add a more human element. I averaged those four to get a composite projection ranking for each All-Star. And from there it was simply a matter of comparing average draft position to average projected ranking and singling out the worst offenders.
Twenty-seven of those 47 players are considered overrated in our system, but some aren’t worth noting. Giancarlo Stanton, for instance, has an average draft position of 3.7 and an average projected rank of 4.4, a difference that is hardly significant enough to warrant mentioning. But 18 of those overrated players are being drafted at least one full round ahead of their projected rank, and those are the ones we’ve highlighted in the slideshow above.
Full List: The MLB All-Stars To Keep Off Your Fantasy Team
To reiterate, there’s nothing necessarily bad about having these stars on your team. The real problem, rather, is drafting them where they’re typically being taken. Robinson Cano is one of the two or three best second basemen in the game and should be an asset to any fantasy team. But he’s getting drafted around No. 16 overall while in our projection system he barely cracks the top 30 players. Cano is a great player, but our numbers say he’s overrated as a second-round pick. Similar story with Troy Tulowtizki and Yadier Molina. If either player falls far enough in your draft, then go for it. But odds are that Tulo will go in the second round and Yadi in the eleventh, both of which are prices that you should be wary of paying.
Other All-Stars to avoid include Adam Wainwright and Justin Verlander. Both starters have had remarkable success in their careers, but they are on the wrong side of 30 and should be drafted at least two rounds after where they’re going now (fourth and 12th rounds, respectively). Our approach also seems to suggest that fantasy players tend to overrate relief pitchers; one-third of the list is comprised of closers, including the likes of Aroldis Chapman, Craig Kimbrel, Greg Holland and Fernando Rodney.
The biggest differences between ADP and projected performance belong to Matt Wieters and Joe Nathan. They are going in the 14th and 17th rounds, respectively, but our numbers suggest neither should be drafted in the first 20 rounds.
There are fewer All-Stars on the other end of the spectrum - that is, players being taken well after when they should be - but our approach still highlights a few names that could offer pretty good value from where they’re currently being drafted.
The All-Star who offers the most value is Alex Gordon. The Kansas City outfielder is being drafted at No. 108 on average, but the projections rank him around No. 64 overall. In other words, you should be able to draft him as late as the ninth or tenth round, but he’s projected to give you sixth-round output. That doesn’t mean you should pick him in the sixth round – after all, odds are you can get him two or three rounds later - but his is a name you ought to keep an eye on.
Other solid value picks are David Ortiz (going late sixth, should be late fifth), Matt Carpenter (going late 10th, should be early 10th), Glen Perkins (going 13th, should be 12th) and even Bryce Harper, who is getting taken in the late third but should go at the start of that round instead.
All-Stars who are getting drafted right in line with their projections include Felix Hernandez (late first), Max Scherzer (early second), Buster Posey (early third), Carlos Gonzalez (early fifth) and Starlin Castro (mid tenth).
Full Coverage: The Business of Baseball