With a myriad of injury woes rendering the current crop of reliable fantasy starters much thinner than than it was this time last year, the prospect of taking calculated risks at the positional is as viable as ever.
These five starters all have the potential to recoup massive profits on Draft Day cost, and they all have just as great a chance of vexing fantasy owners with inconsistent performance and injury-plagued headaches.
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Perhaps the prototypical risk/reward player, Strasburg’s range of possible outcomes is as wide as the day is long.
There’s no doubting the skills here, because when Strasburg is on, he’s as dominant as anyone in the bigs. The hard-throwing phenom touched 98 MPH with his heater last year, settling in at an average velocity just below 95. All the while, he commanded his secondary stuff with ease, notching a 35.1 percent strikeout-minus-walk rate with his curveball and a remarkable 48.7 percent mark with his 89 MPH change up.
Of course, the question remains, as it always does for the heavily-scrutinized ace, whether Strasburg will be healthy enough to sustain a full starter’s workload. After all, Stras enters the 2017 season only seven months removed from a partial elbow tear that ended his 2016 campaign on a sour, uncertain note.
The injury also calls into question the sustainability of Strasburgh’s high-intensity arsenal. For what it’s worth, there was evidence of some skills depreciation last year, with the big righty surrendering career-worst 10.8 percent walk rates on his fastball and 13.8 mark on his two-seam.
All of this sounds like an ultra-murky proposition for a player who will cost a top-50 pick to secure on Draft Day. Of course, if Strasburg puts it all together for a 200-inning season of 11 strikeout-per-nine ball, that price will seem quite reasonable in retrospect.
No self-respecting fantasy owner would be faulted for snatching up at least one share of Strasburg and his seismic upside. It might be wise, though, to pair him with a number two starter who has a solid floor, like Rick Porcello or Jose Quintana.
Aaron Sanchez (SP – TOR) / Marcus Stroman (SP – TOR)
These two Blue Jays hurlers are available just outside of the overall top 100 players per FantasyPros aggregate ADP data, and each has the potential to be a strong, difference-making number two fantasy starter. But both Aaron Sanchez and Marcus Stroman are young and largely unproven, so their status as stable fantasy assets is hardly as secure as their fairly pricey ADP might suggest.
Granted, Sanchez is the reigning American League ERA king, having finished 2016 with a 3.00 mark right on the dot. Sanchez’s more modest 3.75 xFIP might suggest that some negative regression is on the horizon, though, especially considering he surrendered a subdued .267 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) despite a near-nine-percentage-point spike in hard contact rate.
Still, the young righty made notable gains in fastball effectiveness last year, exceeding 98 on the radar gun while inducing a 10-plus percent swinging strike rate that upped his previous year’s mark by almost 40 percent. If Sanchez can parlay that upper-nineties heat into continued strikeout-per-nine growth while once again approaching 200 innings of work, the young Blue Jay would certainly represent a massive profit on his Draft Day cost.
Then again, last year represented a 100-inning jump in MLB workload for the Jays’ prized young righty, so a full, consistently effective season from Sanchez is by no means set in stone. Sanchez’s fantasy ceiling is sky high, but his floor might be quite a bit lower than one might assume given his reputation as an up-and-coming ace.
And even if his cost is roughly equivalent, Sanchez’s teammate Marcus Stroman is hardly someone you would mistake for an ace pitcher. The diminutive righty with a career 7.34 strikeout-per-nine rate across almost 362 MLB innings, Stroman and his pitch-to-contact approach has thus far disappointed those pining greedily for the hurler who perennially punched out 10-plus per nine in the minors.
Yet Stroman’s ability to induce weak contact while eschewing the added stress of pitching deep into counts makes him much more likely to repeat his 200-plus inning workload from 2016. Such high volume could elevate Stroman as a tremendous rotation stabilizer for fantasy, provided he can maintain the effectiveness that saw him post a sub-3.00 xFIP over the second half of last year.
On the other hand, contact-heavy pitchers like Stroman are often resigned to the vagaries of batted ball luck. For instance, a hair-raising .409 BABIP against left Stroman saddled with a 7.76 ERA (almost four whole runs higher than his expected mark!) across the month of June.
There’s no chance that Stroman’s that bad, of course, but that rough month did go a long way toward the unimpressive season-long ERA of 4.37 that Stroman was left with, despite his strong second-half mark of 3.42. These grueling stretches of under-performance are still very much in play for the promising young righty, so fantasy owners who gamble on his talent should hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
It’s fair to think of Salazar as a mini-Strasburg, which is to say that he’s a tantalizingly hard thrower with gaudy strikeout rate upside who simply hasn’t put together enough of an injury-free resume to reach all out fantasy superstardom.
The Indians’ flamethrower certainly seemed well on his way to a superstar season last year, posting a minuscule 2.22 ERA and a 28.5 percent strikeout rate over the first three months of the season. But a compromising elbow impingement brought Salazar down to earth quite profoundly over the next two months, with the righty getting tagged for 10 homers and a whopping 7.36 ERA over his final 44 innings of work before being shut down in early September.
And as with Strasburg, it’s worth considering whether Salazar’s balky elbow hasn’t contributed to a significant skills depreciation. After all, the Indians’ hurler saw a notable spike in line drive rate, walk rate, and OPS allowed off of his fastball.
Still, Salazar’s famously devastating change up was as wicked as ever last year, boasting a 42.2 percent strikeout-minus-walk rate while grading as a career-best run suppressor per Fangraphs’ weighted runs created plus (wRC+) metric.
Salazar certainly has what it takes to quickly ascend to the status of fantasy ace, but he also has what it takes to torment his fantasy owners. Mini-Strasburg’s upside isn’t quite as high as the real thing, but his Draft Day cost around the 40th pitcher off the board is much more palatable.
He’s a breakout-in-waiting with a strong prospect pedigree, but Gray’s damning quality is his home park, a hitter’s candy land that might render Gray’s plus skills moot, making him a very dicey proposition on Draft Day.
But even so, that risk is clearly baked into Gray’s price. He’s being drafted outside of the top 70 starters per FantasyPros ADP data, with many fantasy owners clearly spooked by the prospect of rostering a young, volatile arm who throws half of his games at Coors Field.
Oddly enough, though, last year Gray’s home/road splits found him thriving in the thin air of the Rocky Mountains, with the young up-and-comer tallying a 3.07 xFIP at Coors compared to a 4.14 mark on the road. Is it possible that Gray already has a mature enough approach so as to adjust his arsenal to his unfriendly home park? If that’s the case, Gray might only be a touch of walk-rate improvement away from being one of the most profitable pitchers in fantasy.
That said, speculation on Gray probably makes the most sense in shallower leagues where replacement level on waivers is high and fantasy owners need not rely on Gray as a fourth or fifth starter. The Coors nightmare still looms, so in the event that Gray is not ready to overcome his home ballpark, fantasy owners should have an exit plan ready, otherwise the untested righty could be a major drain on their ratios.
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Tom Whalen is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Tom, check out his archive or follow him @tomcwhalen.
