Baseball Draft Kit: Finding Value in the Scrapheap

This piece is one of my favorites to write each season. Last year, this particular article mentioned names like Rick Porcello, Brandon Guyer, Leonys Martin and Michael Saunders as names to consider grabbing at a discount to help your roster. Each had more success in 2016 than they did in 2015, and Porcello went as far as to steal a Cy Young Award from Justin Verlander!

Winning a fantasy baseball league is more difficult than winning a fantasy football league. A primary contributor to this is the fact that unlike fantasy football, there are few casual fantasy baseball players. Everyone plays fantasy football and thinks they can wake up and roll into a draft with their mad skills to pick a daily or season-long winner. That is not the case with baseball. There is luck in baseball, but luck is minimized over a 26-week season and a 162-game schedule. Those that play it are immersed in it. They are looking at the RotoWire news updates multiple times a day, tracking information as it breaks on Twitter, and listening to radio shows and podcasts trying to catch tips before their competition does.

When you are that invested in the players on your teams, it is only natural to get frustrated with them when they do not perform. We get angry with players when they do not perform at the level of their preseason projections for a few weeks, or in some cases, an entire season. Yes, Lorenzo Cain, I am looking at you. When someone like Cain has that kind of season, fantasy players tend to shift from a pragmatic approach toward that player to a dogmatic one. DTM = "Dead to me," is the popular acronym for such an approach within the industry.

While that approach may offer some momentary relief from the frustration of previous relationships with a player, it absolutely holds you back as a fantasy owner. You may end up missing out on players that come back with successful seasons following disastrous ones because you assumed that the player would just continue to underperform. Many analysts refer to "last year's trash as this year's treasure" across their various platforms.

If you had filled out your 2016 roster with the 2015 "trash" or the disappointing "flukes," you could have constructed a 23-man roster such as this in a 15-team mixed league with standard scoring ($=2016 Tout Wars Mixed Auction Cost).

It would have cost $59 to roster that particular group that delivered $399 of fantasy value and $340 of surplus value. This is not to suggest that you should walk away from your auction leaving a bunch of money on the table as you spend the entire auction hunting for the best value possible as there is value everywhere.

If you value Kevin Kiermaier at $11 and the room stops at $7, you say $8 and win the bid, you have saved $3. Bargains like that add up over the course of the auction.

The purpose of this recurring article in our draft kit is to remind everyone that there is value in what has most recently scorched fantasy hopes because recency bias is present in any auction.

There are a variety of reasons that these players are available at little or no cost in your auction. Some are recovering from injuries, some are coming off perceived fluke years or realistically awful years, others have landed in an unfortunate playing time situation. In some cases, these players are just trying to hang on and prolong their playing career. Some players are reinventing themselves after recognizing their previous approach was not working. Using those filters, let's seek out potential values for 2017 that should be cheap options to fill out your roster with the hope of earning a significant return on your investment.

Rebound From Injuries

The obvious ones here are the pitchers returning from major surgery. Names like Carter Capps, Zack Wheeler and Lance Lynn stand out from that group, but banking on pitchers coming back from major injury is typically a frustrating investment.

Devin Mesoraco has missed the better part of the past two seasons with major surgeries to his hip and non-throwing shoulder. He may not be ready to begin the season, but that is not necessarily a bad thing for a catcher who does not need to play 135 games to have value. When he was last healthy, he was crushing homers with regularity. Two seasons of injuries plus the uncertainty of being ready for April should make him a dirt cheap power source.

Greg Bird returns after missing all of 2016 due to a shoulder injury. When we last saw him, he looked like Kevin Maas 2.0, nearly matching his 2015 minor league home run total in half the playing time with the Yankees. He should hit fifth or sixth in the lineup and still be able to produce in two categories if he can pick up where he left off.

Andre Ethier missed nearly the entire season with a leg injury and his 2017 future is uncertain as the outfield depth chart has become crowded. He is due $18M in 2017 and it costs another $2.5M to buy out his 2018 option which makes him very tough to trade. However, Ethier has been very good throughout his career as long as he rides the pine against lefties. If the Dodgers eat some of that salary and move him to a club where he can strong side platoon, Ethier can offer dirt cheap production in the endgame.

Hanging On

Players do funny things late in their careers to stay in the game. We've seen guys sell out contact for more power, start running more out of nowhere, change batting stances and add new pitches. Whatever it takes for a few more days in the sun on a major league field.

Matt Holliday comes to New York on the heels of arguably his worst season as a pro. He will be 37, but is expected to hit in the middle of the Yankee lineup where he is well-protected on both sides. He will also get to enjoy an unbalanced road schedule of parks that are friendly to right-handed hitters. Additionally, Holliday can now focus on hitting as the primary DH, so his lower half should stay fresher than it did in St. Louis.

Charlie Morton was signed by the Astros after pitching just 17 innings in 2016. He was hurt running out a bunt, so we barely got a glimpse of what he did, but what we saw was intriguing. He was throwing harder than he ever had in his career, which would help him do better against lefties – something he has had issues with throughout his career. Houston will have a stacked offense in 2017, so Morton could win double-digit games as a fifth starter and look good doing it if the new velocity is sustainable.

Other Names to Watch

Just mentioning Ivan Nova's name in an auction elicits numerous eye rolls from Yankee fans or anyone who has rostered him. As it turns out, he is pretty good away from the Yankees as he pitched well in 11 starts for Pittsburgh and the homer issues that plagued him in the American League went away. He gets strikeouts and is stingy with the walks, but the list of owners burned by him is long and distinguished. After re-signing with the Pirates, Nova has an excellent chance to build upon his impressive finish to 2016.

Brandon Finnegan struck out 145 batters in 172 innings while winning 10 games, but his 3.98 ERA and 1.36 WHIP cut into his value making him a $2 pitcher in 15-team mixed leagues. However, if we drill in on his second half, we see a 2.93 ERA, a 25 percent strikeout rate and a 1.29 WHIP. The big fly is still a problem for him, but the pieces are there for him to take a step up in value in 2017.

Eric Thames is coming back to the big leagues after a few years destroying baseballs in the Korean League. The year after many were burned by Byung Ho Park should be a good time to get Thames on a discount because they had similar power and average numbers in the KBO, but Thames has a better skill set and is going to be given every chance to succeed in Milwaukee without being yo-yoed in and out of the lineup as Park was (even while playing hurt) by Minnesota.

This article appears in the 2017 RotoWire Fantasy Baseball Guide. You can order a copy here.