Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue (and northwest green).
As a reminder, all the players highlighted in this column are rostered in fewer than 40% of the 52 Main Event Qualifier leagues on the National Fantasy Baseball Championship website. The leagues are 15-team, weekly-FAAB contests, and given the stakes—the winner gains entry to a 2025 Main Event league—they’re both highly competitive and should provide useful insight into the player movement at the deep end of the player pool.
Mitch Spence, Oakland Athletics (17% rostered)
There are a couple of things Spence has going for him.
The on-field things are a good three-pitch repertoire that features a slider he throws primarily to righties, a curveball he throws mostly to lefties and a cutter he uses against both. The mix—with the slider being his best pitch—hasn’t yielded big strikeout totals but has allowed him to keep the ball on the ground and generally inside the park when it is hit in the air. Playing your home games at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum doesn’t hurt, either.
Off the field, the fact that he’s a Rule 5 pick from the Yankees helps as well. Being a Rule 5 selection, the A’s must keep Spence on their major-league roster all season or offer him back to the Yankees for next to nothing. Assuming they like what Spence is giving them—and if the Oakland Athletics aren’t happy with what a pitcher is doing, fantasy players will be long gone anyway—the A’s will certainly keep using Spence for the foreseeable future.
Does that guarantee us fantasy players anything besides volume? Of course not. He’s shown fairly well so far, though, and the under-the-hood metrics don’t scream for a regression. Wins will be hard to come by and strikeouts shouldn’t be assumed, either, but decent ratios as a matchups-based starter? You could do worse.
Andre Pallante, St. Louis Cardinals (17% rostered)
It’s tempting to refer readers to the above writeup when discussing Pallante, but that would be lazy.
(Not really an apt comparison, either. But mostly lazy.)
No, I won’t do that. But I will be lazy in a different way.
Two Baseball Prospectus writers who are much smarter than me—a low bar, but one both clear—have written about Pallante in recent memory in a way that means much more than whatever I could say here. First, in September 2022, Brian Menéndez wrote about how Pallante is a “unicorn” for his pair of distinct fastballs. Then, this past March, Matthew Trueblood suggested, with a straight face, that the Cardinals should go to a five-man infield when Pallante is on the mound because of how often he gets groundballs.
Both of those pieces were written before real games started in 2024. So, when you see his Baseball Savant page and he’s in the 90th percentile in both Barrel percentage and ground ball percentage, it reinforces that Pallante’s One Weird Trick is not just something he was able to capture for a few appearances in 2022 or whatever. Pallante remains elite at getting ground balls with his unique fastballs, and since moving to the starting rotation he’s turned in two starts with zero earned runs allowed.
He is like Spence in the fact that he won’t get you many strikeouts, but the 25-year-old does have a Wins upside that Spence lacks. Read those smart pieces and you, too, will begin to buy in on Pallante.
Daniel Schneemann, Cleveland Guardians (12% rostered)
You might look at Schneemann’s usage in his first week in the majors and be underwhelmed, but you’d be wrong (for two reasons).
It’s true that the 27-year-old has only started five of the team’s seven games—and perhaps five of eight after Wednesday, if he’s not in the lineup against Reds southpaw Nick Lodolo—but Schneemann is a left-handed hitter on a team that’s faced lefty starters in four of their last five contests, so his absences have been largely excused. He even drew a start against one of those lefties over the weekend.
You’re also wrong because his defensive versatility is one of the reasons his usage will actually be a strength, not a weakness. Schneemann is, after all, the first player since 1906 to appear at six defensive positions in his first six career MLB games. That kind of flexibility will allow him to get into the lineup more often, providing more fantasy goodness for us.
That goodness should be coming, too, with the Guardians in line to face righties for the foreseeable future after that abnormal string of lefties. With a little bit of speed and a little bit of pop, Schneemann is a great player to have at the end of your bench or in a MI spot to fill in as needed.
Rowdy Tellez, Pittsburgh Pirates (10% rostered)
Tellez took so long to get it going—like, almost a year and a half—that it was a legitimate question whether he’d ever get it going again or if he was simply cooked.
After a good finish to the 2021 season and a 35-homer campaign with the Brewers in 2022, Tellez struggled mightily in 2023 and didn’t do much to inspire hope in the early weeks of his Pirates career, either. Over the past four weeks, though, the 29-year-old is hitting .310/.341/.452, a sign that he’s still got some of that ability that made us like him so much ahead of the 2023 campaign.
He’ll still sit against most lefties and get the occasional day off, but that might be a good thing for fantasy players anyway. Having found his groove at the plate, though, Tellez should be in there against almost every righty moving forward. What he’s done at the plate thus far doesn’t count against your stats, so if you have a need, don’t look past the hefty first baseman.
Hurston Waldrep, Atlanta Braves (8% rostered)
Waldrep won’t be lightly rostered for long, and lead prospect writer Jeffrey Paternostro and fantasy ace Carlos Marcano did a better job assessing his fantasy value than I could. Just go read their piece on the Braves top prospect instead.
Drew Thorpe, Chicago White Sox (2% rostered)
Thorpe won’t be lightly rostered for long, and lead prospect writer Jeffrey Paternostro and fantasy ace Tim Jackson did a better job assessing his fantasy value than I could. Just go read their piece on the White Sox top prospect instead.
Dominic Canzone, Seattle Mariners (2% rostered)
I wrote about Canzone in late March, and much of that reasoning still applies.
He’s still making relatively good swing decisions, grading out around guys like J.D. Martinez, Corbin Carroll and Ozzie Albies in Robert Orr’s SEAGER metric. He’s still playing a lot, when healthy, against righties, starting every game against them since coming off the injured list on May 15. And he’s still doing this:
Dominic Canzone – Seattle Mariners (6)
pic.twitter.com/vnKrwYABGE— MLB HR Videos (@MLBHRVideos) June 11, 2024
Enough said.
David Dahl, Philadelphia Phillies (2% rostered)
Dahl is from the Daniel Schneemann School of I Promise This String of Lefties Won’t Last Forever, as his playing time has been hurt in the same way Schneemann’s has by the Phillies facing five straight lefties last week. Dahl actually did start the first two games of the week before taking a seat for the final three, including both games in London.
The Phillies called him up to take Brandon Marsh’s spot in their outfield, though, and he seems intent on doing just that. In the 10 at-bats he has found since being promoted, the 30-year-old has a pair of homers among his four hits. That’s a continuation of what he’s done in the minors thus far this year, batting a video game-like .340/.416/.660 with 12 homers and two steals in 43 games at Triple-A.
As noted, the slew of southpaws ended Sunday, and stretched out ahead of Dahl and the Phillies is a right-handed road that continues through next week’s series against the Padres. That’s a lot of potential playing time for Dahl and given how well he’s hit and the Phillies’ run of injuries, there’s no reason to think he won’t get as many at-bats as he can handle. If you’re in the market for volume and favorable matchups, there are few better and more widely available options than Dahl.
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