Fantasy Freestyle: Stop Looking for Sleepers, Start Looking for Value

If it’s January, it must be time for fantasy analysts to come out of the woodwork and start identifying “sleepers.” This term is almost as old as fantasy baseball itself. While it is possible it was a useful exercise at one point, like a lot of other overused buzzwords the term sleeper has become completely arbitrary and therefore virtually worthless. So far this winter, I have seen the following players identified as sleepers:

• Mike Fiers
• Carlos Carrasco
• A.J. Pollock
• Jean Segura
• Kolten Wong

While it’s entirely possible that these players will be somewhat undervalued at auction or in drafts, it’s difficult to call anyone who finished in the top 168 hitters or top 108 pitchers the year before a legitimate sleeper. Someone is going to land one of these players in a mixed league; the question is what does this player cost you.

If you are in a competitive league, you are going to need to dig deeper than Carlos Carrasco or Kolten Wong in order to win in 2015. The biggest sleepers from 2014 were the players who no one identified as draft-worthy in 2014 and wound up making significant impacts on the fantasy landscape. When I devise my values and look for bargains, I attempt to ascertain why these guys fell through the cracks and how (or if) I can remedy this the following season.

Table 1: Top 10 Free Agent Hitters, 12 and 15-Team Mixed Leagues, 2014

Table 1 looks at the 10 best free agent hitters in both 12-team leagues (drafted 169th or higher among hitters on average in NFBC leagues) and 15-team leagues (211th or higher). Obviously every league is different, but Dee Gordon was on the average 15-team mixed league roster but not on the average 12-team mixed league roster at the beginning of the season. Lucas Duda was not on the average mixed-league roster in any format. The NFBC rankings do go past 291, but the only information available online about 2014 is at fantasypros.com, which only goes 500 players or 291 hitters deep.

There are a few obvious takeaways that jump off of this table, but the most obvious takeaway is that speculating on rookies does not seem to pay off. The only rookie who appears here is Santana, and even in the savviest of expert leagues Santana was ignored even in the reserve rounds. A common piece of advice from most experts is to try and swing for the fences on a rookie with a late draft pick or a reserve round pick. Below are the rookies who were taken in the reserve round in Tout Wars mixed auctions and drafts last year.

Kris Bryant, Billy Burns, Byron Buxton, Matt Davidson, Maikel Franco, Joc Pederson, Gregory Polanco, Addison Russell, Jonathan Singleton, Oscar Taveras.

With the exception of Polanco, none of these players made a significant impact in mixed leagues last year. The idea that there is upside in these picks flies in the face of logic. The other side of this coin is that boring, vanilla veterans cannot or should not be able to produce top shelf mixed league value. Yet this is exactly what a number of the “boring” veterans manage to do here. Span and Cabrera are gimmies even for a 12-team mixed league, but a number of the players on Table 1 either had assured playing time or at least a path to playing time that was impeded only by a weak starting option. I understand the urge to avoid using a 17^th round pick in a 12-team mixed league on Duda, but why would you have taken Singleton over Duda in the reserve round? Neither player was a sure thing in 2014, but rolling the dice on someone who had some time in the majors in 2014 was the better play. If you are in a league that chases rookies at the end of the draft, this is where you should wisely speculate instead of rolling the dice on the longshot that is unlikely to come to fruition (this advice doesn’t apply to keeper leagues, of course). Loney and McGehee are boring, but they are boring and they produced. Production—not bragging about snagging the hot rookie in March who is unlikely to produce—is the name of the game.

Table 2: Top 10 Free Agent Pitchers, 12 and 15-Team Mixed Leagues, 2014

With the majority of undrafted pitchers, the precept of “your guess is as good as mine” applies here. Carrasco isn’t a sleeper this year because everyone will be targeting him; he most certainly was a sleeper last year. The variability on this list of pitchers makes me believe that conventional wisdom is dead wrong and that it would be far more logical to avoid pitchers in the reserve round and simply try to scoop them up later via free agency and/or the waiver wire.

The other lesson is not to forget middle relievers. Betances and Davis would have been worthy early pickups. They didn’t usurp the closer role, but given the ungodly numbers they put up it didn’t matter very much. Both pitchers provided plenty of value in all formats, and relievers with those kind of qualitative numbers either ensure ERA/WHIP victories or allow you to speculate liberally on starting pitchers thanks to the ERA/WHIP cushion they are creating.

It is worth noting that in the expert leagues the speculation on rookie arms is not nearly as prevalent among pitchers. Jameson Taillon and James Paxton were taken in both Tout Wars mixed leagues, but that was pretty much it when it came to rookie speculation. The experts seem to understand from experience that rookie pitchers are unlikely to crack this list, or at the very least that rookie pedigree does not guarantee success.

In deeper leagues, you would expect the landscape to be different.

Table 3: Top 10 AL Free Agent Hitters, 2014

You could argue that I am cheating including Gillaspie, since someone in Tout Wars purchased him for $1. However, the “free agents” are the players who were not among the Top 168 A.L. hitters purchased. It doesn’t really matter all that much, because this is a group of hitters that comes completely out of nowhere.

Gillaspie is the only one you can perhaps make an argument for paying a little more for based on last year’s earnings; everyone else is purely a $1 play, at best. Martinez’ $6 earnings are more than offset by the fact that he was buried in Houston at the beginning of the season and it didn’t look like he’d have a spot in the majors.

Unlike in mixed, the AL looked like a good play to speculate on rookies. However, the rookies were players like Santana, Jones, and Kiermaier who came from out of nowhere. Even Odor, who certainly had a healthy prospect sheen, wasn’t expected to be an impact player in 2014; it isn’t surprising no one took a stab at him in March.

Table 4: Top 10 NL Free Agent Hitters, 2014

It is more or less the same story in the National League. There is a nice mixture of veterans who come from out of nowhere and rookies who were low profile who come out of nowhere. The difference is that only six NL free agents cracked double digits in fantasy earnings. This is one of the most significant differences between mono and mixed formats. It’s always hard to find a worthy replacement in mono leagues, but some years it is virtually impossible.

Half of the players on the list are either Padres or Diamondbacks. If you are idly trolling for replacements in a thin year, looking for players on teams with weak or oft-injured regulars isn’t a bad play.

Table 5: Top 10 AL Free Agent Pitchers, 2014

If you needed further proof that all we’re doing is playing a guessing game with pitchers, this table confirms it. Half of the pitchers on the mixed league top 10 reappear here, and not a single one of the top five gets so much as a $1 bid in any of the three expert leagues. CBS gets the most “credit” for buying two of these 10 pitchers, with LABR purchasing Keuchel. Despite convening the latest of the three expert leagues, Tout Wars doesn’t purchase one of these 10 guys.

Another significant difference between mono and mixed is that six of the 10 best freebies are relievers. If you don’t want to forget about relievers in mixed, you must absolutely remember that they are essential in mono formats. You could have remedied a significant number of sins simply by picking up two or three of the guys on Table 5. Even if you “only” had Smith, Miller, and Boxberger, you still would have owned three of the top 46 pitchers in AL-only.

Table 6: Top 10 NL Free Agent Pitchers, 2014

Finally, the National League pitchers include some players who actually earned something the year before and were overlooked. They are mostly relievers, but Watson, Simon, and Casilla are all pitchers who probably should have been carried for a buck in all of the expert leagues. Collmenter is another nice, all around utility arm who deserved more play than he received during the auctions.

This is still a group that pretty much comes from out of nowhere. If you know that deGrom was going to put up even 75 percent of the season that he put up, I’d like to spend a weekend in Vegas at the roulette tables with you. Maybe we need to start giving more credence to the Ray Searage phenomenon and start paying for anyone on the Pirates, but given Volquez’s past performance, it is understandable why people took a pass.

There are always surprises on the free agent landscape, but the biggest takeaway—in both mixed and mono formats—is that highly hyped rookies aren’t the way to go in redraft leagues. In mono leagues, they cost money and won’t be bargains, but even in mixed leagues there are a significant number of better bets among the boring vanilla veterans. To bring this all the way back to the beginning of the article, if you are looking for “sleepers”, it is better to look at players who have major league experience but have been forgotten. Players who have already experienced some success aren’t sleepers… they’re just players who we are trying to make a decision on. If you’re looking for a “sleeper,” look for a player with a low profile who won’t cost much or anything at all.