I’m sorry if this isn’t the sleeper list you wanted.
You probably came here expecting to read about a bunch of players you’ve scarcely heard of, but what you’re getting instead is a bunch of former All-Stars who’ve fallen on hard times. What gives?
- Sleepers 1.0: Scott | Chris | Frank
- Breakouts 1.0: Scott | Chris | Frank
- Busts 1.0: Scott | Chris | Frank
Perhaps we should revisit what the term “sleeper” actually means. It refers to something that achieves some degree of success despite receiving little attention. In Fantasy Baseball, this translates to a player who’s being underdrafted — or more accurately, drafted in a way that doesn’t account for his potential.
Potential is a word we most often use to describe young players just entering into prominent roles. They’re the ones receiving outsized attention these days, such that no one could possibly “sleep on” their potential. If anything, it’s too widely presumed. Of course, if that type of player is moving up the rankings, then another type has to move down, and I’m finding more and more these days that it’s the established ones with some concern or another, even if that concern is rather vague.
So those are the sleepers now. Don’t shoot the messenger.
NFBC ADP: 116.5
How do I justify calling Bellinger a sleeper only a year after calling him a bust? Location, location, location. If there’s one venue that can salvage a left-handed slugger whose exit velocities have gone down the drain, it’s Yankee Stadium, home to the most famous short porch in baseball. The Yankees themselves must realize this, acquiring Bellinger from the Cubs this offseason, and just like that, I’m seeing his improbable 2023 — when he hit .307 with 26 homers, 20 steals, and an .881 OPS to re-enter the MVP conversation — in an entirely new light.
The prevailing sentiment going into last year was that there was no way he’d repeat it, hence the bust call. His average exit velocity ranked in the bottom quarter of the league, his max exit velocity in the bottom half, and his hard-hit rate in the bottom 10 percent. Home runs are still possible with that profile, but only when the hitter sells out for them, consistently lofting the ball toward the shortest part of the outfield fence. Bellinger has the lofting part down, his fly-ball rate regularly exceeding 40 percent, and pulls those fly balls at a nice rate as well, but Wrigley Field is notoriously deep at the foul poles, placing it among the worst venues for such a hitter. Isaac Paredes found this out last year (more on him in a bit).
Fittingly, Bellinger came back down to earth in 2024 as the same batted-ball profile yielded more mathematically feasible results, but again, that was at Wrigley Field and not Yankee Stadium, where Statcast estimates Bellinger would have hit six more home runs. I suspect it’ll be more once he gets in a groove there, his swing being naturally geared for pull-side power. If he can get back to the 25-30 range and remain reasonably healthy, then the other numbers will improve as well, putting that 2023 stat line back in reach (only at a lower price tag this time).
NFBC ADP: 141.6
Bichette has been more or less a stud since the time he entered the league six years ago, so what’s he doing in a sleepers article? Hey, that’s what I want to know. I actually thought he was overrated back when we were drafting him Rounds 1, 2, and 3 — like, you know, just last year — but to see him go in Round 12 all of a sudden makes me question my sanity.
I did say he’s been more or less a stud from the beginning, and well, last year he was less. But normally, players with his sort of track record get a pass for the rare misstep. He’ll only be 27 this year, for goodness’ sake, and actually has a pretty good explanation in that he tried playing through a calf injury that twice landed him on the IL. The core metrics haven’t changed. His contact quality was down a bit, but to a level where we’ve seen him thrive before (see 2020). He wasn’t missing on pitches inside the zone or chasing pitches outside of it — not any more than usual, anyway. Altogether, it seems like we should just chalk it up as a lost season and not look too much deeper into it.
So that’s how I was approaching it before any ADP data became available, slotting Bichette about 70th in my rankings. Again, I thought he was overrated in Rounds 1-3. His base-stealing days are long behind him, and his emphasis on hitting the ball the other way has rendered him more of a 20-homer guy than a 30-homer. But one thing we could always count on him to deliver was batting average. He had never hit less than .290 prior to last year, and with good health, I expect him to return to that standard. To see him go twice as low as I rank him — behind Anthony Volpe, of all people, who’s an obvious liability for batting average — tells me that people believe Bichette is catastrophically broken. I don’t see the evidence for it.
NFBC ADP: 166.7
Nimmo hit .224 last year, and because of that, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that he’s a batting average liability now. But to that, I say “Uh… no?” We’re talking about a guy who hit no less than .274 in the previous four seasons, who just set a career-high for average exit velocity, and who’s regarded to have some of the best plate discipline of any hitter in baseball. Those plate discipline numbers were a little worse in 2024, but they weren’t an order of magnitude worse, such that you’d expect him to go from a plus to a minus in batting average.
So what happened? Like Bichette, Nimmo was playing through injury, a case of plantar fasciitis that cropped up in May. He also appears to have fallen victim to plain old bad luck, his .267 BABIP being completely incongruous with his other batted-ball data and a huge departure from his career .333 mark to that point.
And yet … he repeated as a 20-homer guy, holding onto his power gains from 2023. Despite the foot injury, he had double-digit steals for the first time, going a perfect 15 for 15 in what seemed to be a concerted effort to take advantage of the new pickoff limits for pitchers. He came within two runs of a 90-run, 90-RBI season as one of the top three hitters in the Mets lineup. He’s rounded out his game so that he’s now a five-category threat if he can only get the batting average back up. And I suspect he will, for the reasons I’ve already outlined.
My first inclination was to rank him in the same range as Seiya Suzuki and Bryan Reynolds. ADP has him going 75 spots lower than that.
NFBC ADP: 212.3
It’s completely obnoxious of me to call Profar a sleeper when he just had far and away the best year of his career, placing as the 11th-best outfielder in 5×5 category leagues and sixth-best in Head-to-Head points after 10 seasons of what would politely be described as mediocrity. Some good this sleeper call does now when everyone’s fully aware of what he’s capable of doing.
Here’s the thing, though: Nobody’s drafting him like that. Nobody’s drafting him much at all. An incomplete list of the 205 players going ahead of him, according to NFBC averages, includes Ben Joyce, Nick Pivetta, Victor Robles, and Yandy Diaz. (Seriously, what does Diaz have on him?)
And the truth is I don’t really want to draft Profar either. Even though the Statcast data fully backs up what he did, with career-best exit velocities and a .282 xBA that’s in line with his actual .280 mark, he seems like an obvious regression candidate just because … well, where was he all this time? I haven’t seen a compelling explanation for this mid-career breakthrough, and whenever a player in his 30s does something he’s never done before, you should take it with an enormous grain of salt.
But just because I’ve seen no compelling explanation doesn’t mean there isn’t one, and since evaluating players isn’t an exact science anyway, there comes a point when betting against your instincts makes sense. I thought I could avoid drafting Profar — again, a top-12 outfielder last year — by dropping him to 34th at the position, but apparently, everyone else has said 50th. OK, well, if a sleeper is a player whose upside is widely overlooked, and if Profar’s upside is what he showed us last year, then he would seem to fit the description, wouldn’t he?
Isaac Paredes, 3B, Astros
NFBC ADP: 239.2
You remember how, when discussing Cody Bellinger, I said that Wrigley Field is notoriously deep at the foul poles? Turns out that was an especially big problem for Paredes, whose spray chart the past three years looks like this:
You wonder how a player with 13th percentile exit velocities can hit 31 home runs? That’s how. Paredes basically just takes aim at the left field foul pole and puts the ball there often enough to be somebody. That is until his trade to the Cubs last July ruined everything. He homered just once every 71 plate appearances during his short stay with them compared to once every 21 plate appearances in his 2 1/2 seasons with the Rays.
Houston, we have an opportunity. With the Cubs looking to graduate third base prospect Matt Shaw to the majors, Astros GM Dana Brown made sure Paredes was included in the Kyle Tucker trade, giving him a ready-made replacement for free agent Alex Bregman, another hitter who overcomes marginal exit velocities by battering left field. For all of Bregman’s success in Houston, there’s a good chance the Astros don’t even miss a beat. Just as Yankee Stadium was the ideal landing spot for a hitter with Bellinger’s profile, Minute Maid Park is for a hitter with Paredes’ profile. Compare it to the other places he’s played:
On the left is Tropicana Field in Tampa, a cozy enough venue down the left field line. In the middle is Wrigley Field, a disaster. On the right is Minute Maid Park, which is as good as it gets for a hitter with Paredes’ profile. In fact, Statcast suggests that if he had played every game there last year, he would have 26 home runs rather than the 19 he actually hit. And how many did Bregman hit in 2024? Why, 26.
Bregman has a slight edge in plate discipline and other areas that make it less than an apples-to-apples comparison, but describing him broadly as a .260-hitting, 25-homer guy, which is what he’s been for the Astros the past three years, I’d expect about the same from Paredes in Houston. And yet his ADP is 100 spots lower, dragged down by his poor showing in Chicago.
NFBC ADP: 243.0
So what, we’re pretending Brandon Lowe isn’t good now? Because that’s a laughable assertion, you must know. He had the fourth-best OPS among full-time second basemen last year and trails only Ketel Marte and Jose Altuve at the position since entering the league in 2018 (minimum 1,000 plate appearances).
I get that he can be frustrating, having played in only 58 percent of his team’s over the past three seasons because of injuries and occasionally taking a seat against lefties. I’d prefer if the Rays had traded him this offseason to a team more committed to playing him every day, especially since his career numbers against left-handers are actually quite good. I can find things to complain about, sure. But at a position that’s light on power hitters, he’s a genuine standout.
Even with an oblique injury costing him six weeks in 2024, his 21 homers were the third-most at the position. His 39 homers in 2021, his last healthy season, were the sixth-most ever for a second baseman. The guy’s good! And there’s a chance he gets even better this season with the Rays forced to play their home games at the Yankees’ spring training complex, a field with the same dimensions as the big one in New York. You may know that left-handed hitters tend to fare well there, and that’s without adding Florida humidity to the equation.
Shoot, I might call Lowe a sleeper if he was going 100 spots earlier. Seems to me like his best-case scenario is something like Pete Alonso, only at second base. As it is, he’s going behind Willi Castro. He’s going behind Trevor Story, whose health history is way more concerning and whose effectiveness is very much in question. He’s going behind Colt Keith, who has yet to give us any reason to believe he’s even usable in Fantasy. At that price, Lowe can be exactly who he was last year and still pay off handsomely.
NFBC ADP: 254.2
Once again, we have an instance of a player being judged unfairly for a season where he wasn’t all right. In what ways was Friedl not all right? Well, there was the fractured wrist in April, the fractured thumb in May, and the messed-up hamstring for most of June and July. All told he took part in just 85 games, and in virtually all of them, he was either playing through or recovering from something. That’s not a recipe for success, and as you can see from the numbers, success eluded Friedl in 2024.
But if you think back to the knock on him last draft prep season — when he was coming off a .279 batting average, 18 homers, 27 steals, and .819 OPS for a point-per-game average on par with Bryan Reynolds — it was that he could never repeat that home run total with his bottom-of-the-barrel exit velocity readings. Well, home runs weren’t the problem for him in 2024. He hit one every 26 plate appearances compared to one every 31 in 2023. The problem was everything else. His swing suffered because of the broken bones, and his speed suffered because of the bad hammy.
Are those better now? One can only assume, and if they are, well, he’s answered the home run question twice over now. His exit velocities may be bottom-of-the-barrel (6th percentile last season), but his high fly-ball and pull rates in the league’s most homer-friendly venue are enough to make them stand up. My biggest fear for Friedl is that the Reds will no longer give him free rein in center, but if they do, a 20-homer, 30-steal season isn’t so far-fetched.
NFBC ADP: 254.5
Y’all just cannot abide injuries, can you? Not even a little bit. It’s true that a bout with plantar fasciitis limited Correa to only 86 games last year. It’s also true that he has a reputation for being injury prone. But I’m here to tell you that the reputation is overblown. How, you ask? Well, in the three years prior to last, he averaged 140 games. That’s not perfect attendance, but it’s not grounds for summer school either. Generally, if a hitter is playing that often, you’re not going to rue the day you drafted him.
Correa was drafted pretty late in NFBC leagues last year, too — 236th, on average — but there were real performance concerns at the time. He had slashed .230/.312/.399 the year prior, and no one really knew why. With his injury history already a stain on his record, the 2024 season represented a crossroads for him in Fantasy, signaling whether he would regain his once favorable standing or fade into the background. And I thought it went pretty well. He slashed .310/.388/.517 for the 86 games he was healthy. His OPS was his highest since 2019, the juiciest year of the juiced ball era. He cut his strikeout rate by six percentage points, was an obvious choice to represent the Twins in the All-Star game, and ultimately averaged more Head-to-Head points per game (3.33) than Corey Seager, C.J. Abrams, and Willy Adames. He doesn’t get any credit for that?
I’m long overdue in pointing out that there is downside to using NFBC ADP. NFBC leagues don’t offer IL spots and tend to be on the deeper side. These particulars make every injury twice as damaging because of the roster crunch it creates and the lack of alternatives it presents. It stands to reason, then, that the people who play in such leagues would be especially injury-conscious. That’s not the typical Fantasy experience, where IL spots are used and waiver wires are plentiful, but NFBC ADP is cited enough that it has influence throughout the Fantasy Baseball world. Maybe you can’t count on Correa lasting to Pick 250 in your league, but I was prepared to rank him 125th before his ADP became known, ahead of other far-from-a-sure-thing shortstops like Ezequiel Tovar, Xavier Edwards and Anthony Volpe. You can get Correa later than that, at least.
NFBC ADP: 255.6
More fun with outfield fences! Why go to a better one, as Cody Bellinger and Isaac Paredes did, when you can fix the one in your own backyard? The Orioles made a gargantuan mistake when they moved the fences back 30 feet for almost the entire length of left field prior to 2022. This made Camden Yards arguably the hardest place for a right-handed hitter to homer, which should have been obvious because 30 feet is insane. They decided to moderate this offseason, moving the left field fence back in 13 feet in some places and 26 feet in others, which doesn’t return Camden Yards back to its old dimensions but does return it to the realm of the reasonable.
And it should be all Mountcastle needs. Perhaps no other Orioles hitter has suffered more from that oppressive fence than him. Three years ago, he was coming off a 33-homer season and coming into his own as a slugger. His exit velocities actually improved thereafter, consistently ranking him in the top 25 percent, but it made for only warning track power in the Camden crater. During those three years, he hit 53 home runs, but Statcast estimates he would have hit 67 if he had played every game at the most neutral venue there is, Nationals Park in Washington.
With the latest changes to left field at Camden Yards, I’m envisioning Mountcastle returning to being a 25-to-30-homer guy, which is valuable in its own right, but the effect is multiplied by him batting in the heart of an up-and-coming lineup. I’ll take him over that tired old Paul Goldschmidt, who’s going 70 picks earlier.
NFBC ADP: 365.1
Conforto used to be a Fantasy mainstay, but the last time was the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. Since then, he’s hit .236 with a .736 OPS across three seasons, missing all of 2022 due to shoulder surgery. With those numbers, you’d think he’d struggle to find a job of any sort, and yet the Dodgers, with their seemingly limitless resources, saw fit to turn over one of their three outfield spots to him on a $17 million deal this offseason. Now, why is that?
Conforto actually delivered some of the best exit velocities of his career last season, with an average of 90.2 mph and a max of 113.6 mph. In fact, if you look at his Baseball Savant page, pretty much all of the offensive readings are some shade of red, with the darkest being his 89th percentile xSLG — better than Bryce Harper, Lawrence Butler, and Pete Alonso, to name a few. It didn’t show up in his top-line numbers because he was playing in San Francisco, which remains one of the most stifling offensive environments. Of his 20 homers last season, only three of them came at home. He hit .253 with an .852 OPS on the road, including .293 with a .988 OPS over the final two months.
The Dodgers aren’t dumb — may be the furthest from dumb of any organization in history, in fact — and must have found those numbers compelling. The past couple offseasons have shown they can basically have whomever they want, and well, they wanted Conforto. Beyond just escaping San Francisco, imagine the impact to his run and RBI production by batting in that lineup. He may be the one following the murderer’s row of Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Teoscar Hernandez, and he’s essentially free on Draft Day.
NFBC ADP: 374.3
After spending the past three years breaking hearts as the Yankees’ on-again, off-again closer — and ending on the sourest possible note, forfeiting the job to Luke Weaver just in time for the playoffs — Holmes gets to try his hand at starting again, a role he hasn’t filled since his debut season with the Pirates in 2018. And I have to tell you, I think it’ll work out for him.
Nobody wants to hear it on account of all the heart-breaking, but when we take a 30,000-foot view of his time in the Yankees bullpen, he had a 2.69 ERA — very solid, even by closer standards. His problem was that he came about it by suppressing hard contact, with a ground-ball rate to rival Framber Valdez’s, rather than missing bats. When clinging to a narrow lead in the game’s most pivotal moments, any amount of contact spells danger. A ground ball, even if not especially likely to result in a hit, is infinitely more likely than a strikeout is, which is why teams generally install dynamic bat-missers as closers and why Holmes’ closing stints were relatively high-stress. But over extended stretches, with the game not yet at its highest pressure point, we can step back and appreciate what a 65 percent ground-ball rate does for a pitcher. It yields something like a 2.69 ERA.
I don’t think Holmes’ ERA will be exactly 2.69 as a starter, but somewhere around 3.25 seems fair. That’s what we’re used to seeing from Valdez, who comes the closest of any full-time starter to matching Holmes’ ground-ball rate. That’s not to say that I think Holmes will be as valuable in Fantasy as Valdez, who is the workhorse Holmes almost certainly won’t be as he transitions to this new role. But a low-threes ERA and a strikeout per inning from a 150-inning guy would be far more useful than Holmes’ ADP suggests.
NFBC ADP: 423.9
Of all the players on this list, Bradford comes the closest to meeting the traditional interpretation of “sleeper.” He wasn’t a prospect of great renown and hasn’t made a name for himself in Fantasy yet, so most people don’t even think about him when drafting. But he was good enough down the stretch last year to be the odds-on favorite for the Rangers’ fifth starter job.
What stands out most is the 1.01 WHIP, which would have ranked sixth among qualifying pitchers. Bradford fits the profile of a WHIP specialist, too, having immaculate control (1.5 BB/9 last season and 2.1 BB/9 for his minor-league career) and elevated fly-ball tendencies (a 44.1 percent rate, according to FanGraphs). Some of the pitchers who come closest to matching him in those areas include Bryce Miller, Bailey Ober, and Shota Imanaga. No doubt you’ve heard of them. Their WHIPs last year were 0.98, 1.00 and 1.02, respectively.
Bradford doesn’t miss as many bats as they do, but he’s not as far off as you might think. Sticking with per-nine stats for familiarity’s sake, Ober was at 9.6 K/9 last year, Imanaga at 9.0 K/9, and Miller at 8.5 K/9. Bradford, meanwhile, was at 8.2 K/9, putting him just a little below the average. And of course, he’s still new to the majors. Ober had exactly 8.2 K/9 at the same point in his career.
These are some lofty comparisons I’m making, but my point is that, for a complete unknown, Bradford fits a model that works for Fantasy — a WHIP standout who has some ERA risk because of his vulnerability to home runs but who won’t kill you in strikeouts. Maybe he ends up performing closer to Nestor Cortes than the illustrious trio of Miller, Ober, and Imanaga, but even in that case, he’s a bargain.
