When you’re preparing for your fantasy baseball draft, there are plenty of tools that can help you navigate the waters. But two of the most critical are the Expert Consensus Rankings (ECR), which tell you how the fantasy expert community is ranking every player on average, and consensus ADP, which gives you the average draft position among several sites. Using both in combination can help you maximize your draft return on investment by showing where you can take advantage of the arbitrage.
One of the key ways to do this is by taking a look at who the expert community has ranked significantly higher or lower than ADP. Taking a closer look at these players can allow you to realize why you may be undervaluing a player, or why a player likely isn’t worth close to his draft price. So, let’s look at five players who have an ECR significantly different than their ADP.
Hanley Ramirez (BOS – 1B): ECR – 226, ADP – 369
There are obviously some questions concerning Ramirez’s playing time after the Red Sox signed both J.D. Martinez and Mitch Moreland, but all the word out of Boston at this point is that Ramirez will still be a regular. And although fantasy owners appear to be writing him off entirely, that’s a mistake.
Ramirez isn’t close to the player he once was, but he’s just a season removed from putting up a .286/.361/.505 slash line with 30 home runs, 111 RBIs, and nine steals. His numbers were much worse last year (.242/.320/.429 and just 23 home runs), but there are plenty of reasons to give Ramirez a pass.
First, Ramirez battled through multiple shoulder injuries last season. He entered the season with a right shoulder injury that prevented him from throwing, and he suffered a left shoulder injury during the season that required arthroscopic surgery.
Even with the injuries, however, Ramirez looks to have suffered from some old-fashioned, plain bad luck. For example, even though his hard contact rate, launch angle, and exit velocity remained consistent with his 2016 season, his HR/FB rate dropped by nearly five percentage points in 2017. Also, although Ramirez has a .295 career batting average and .897 OPS against lefties, he hit just .179 with a .679 OPS against them in 106 plate appearances last season.
Ramirez’s numbers were terrible last season – there’s no sugarcoating it. But the idea that he’s not even worth a late-round selection is silly. Don’t forget about him near the end of your drafts and, hopefully, you can reap the rewards.
Randal Grichuk (TOR – OF): ECR – 266, ADP – 382
The fact that Grichuk is being undrafted is understandable. After he burst onto the scene in 2015 with a .877 OPS in 103 games, Grichuk put up a pedestrian season in 2016 (.769 OPS) before starting 2017 in a dreadful slump and being optioned to the minors.
Upon his return, Grichuk was the best version of his old self, hitting home runs (24.5% HR/FB rate) and striking out a ton, and wound up with nearly identical numbers to his 2016 season (.758 OPS). Still, if you add all that up, his ADP would be perfectly acceptable if he were still with the Cardinals.
Of course, he was traded to the Blue Jays this offseason, and that’s a game-changer when it comes to Grichuk’s potential value. With a path to playing time and a perfect park, Grichuk’s floor is probably 25 home runs with a .250 – .255 batting average. Although that isn’t anything to get excited about in today’s day and age, what makes Grichuk someone to consider at the end of your draft is his potential.
Grichuk ranked 28th in hard contact rate (40.2%) last season, has finished with isolated-power mark over .200 in every season of his career, and has ranked in the top 10% in wOBA and expected wOBA since he became a regular because he hits the ball so darn hard. Playing on the turf in the Rogers Centre, he legitimately has the potential to hit 40 home runs with a .265 batting average if everything breaks right.
Players like that just should not go undrafted. Simply put, Grichuk is the exact type of high-reward, low-risk player that wins fantasy leagues, and he should not be forgotten in fantasy drafts as his consensus ADP suggests he has.
Adrian Beltre (TEX – 3B): ECR – 92, ADP – 137
Moving to the mainstream a little more, Beltre is exactly the type of player who often has an ECR much higher than his ADP. Fantasy owners almost always prefer the unknown and love potential, opting to forgo the aging star who can still help you win your league. And that’s exactly what you have with Beltre.
The reason fantasy owners are shying away from Beltre is simple – he’s entering his age-39 season, and leg injuries limited him to just 94 games last season. And sure, the ride ends for everyone not named David Ortiz, so avoiding players who are rapidly approaching 40 years old is a strategy that can hardly be criticized. But the fact is that Beltre was just as good as he’s ever been last season, and in some ways, even better.
He set a career high in walk rate (10.0%) and bested his career marks in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and hard contact rate. If you gave Beltre the 151 games he had played on average in his previous four seasons, he would have given you a .312-76-27-114-1 stat line.
In other words, if Beltre were 35, his ADP might be 50 spots higher. Though his age is a concern, of course, in light of the little decline (if any) in his numbers, there’s no reason to let Beltre slip too far.
Gio Gonzalez (WAS – SP): ECR – 166, ADP – 139
If you sat there throughout Gonzalez’s 2017 season just waiting for the good times to end, you weren’t alone. But they just never did, as Gonzalez checked in with his best season since 2012, totaling 15 wins, a 2.96 ERA, and a 1.18 WHIP while reaching the 200-inning mark for just the third time in his career.
Unfortunately, there’s much to suggest that Gonzalez’s season was a mirage. His fastball velocity continued its downward trend, and it is now nearly three miles per hour slower than it was in 2015. His walk rate increased, his groundball rate decreased, and both his FIP (3.93) and xFIP (4.24) were more than a run higher than his ERA. In essence, Gonzalez’s season was based mainly on luck, fueled by a career-best BABIP against (.258) and left on base rate (81.6%).
All of the underlying metrics suggest that Gonzalez is due for a significant regression this season. To be fair, his ADP does not indicate that fantasy owners are drafting him expecting last season’s numbers. But it does not appear to account for a large enough step back that Gonzalez is likely to take in 2018.
Jose Berrios (MIN – SP): ECR – 121, ADP – 96
Berrios made up for his awful 2016 cup of coffee (3-7, 8.02 ERA, 1.87 WHIP) with a solid, if unspectacular, 2017 (14-8, 3.89 ERA, 1.23 WHIP). In light of his improvement and his pedigree, fantasy owners seem ready to trust him as a solid, mid-tier fantasy starter.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the experts are suggesting that more caution is warranted than what fantasy owners appear to be giving. Although Berrios’s season-long numbers were fine, it’s worth noting that the early part of the season largely buoyed them. Take his month-by-month numbers:
- May – 26 2/3 innings, 2.70 ERA, 0.79 WHIP, 9.11 K/9
- June – 33 2/3 innings, 3.21 ERA, 1.13 WHIP, 8.82 K/9
- July – 23 1/3 innings, 5.79 ERA, 1.76 WHIP, 6.94 K/9
- August – 34 2/3 innings, 3.89 ERA, 0.98 WHIP, 9.61 K/9
- Sept/Oct – 27 1/3 innings, 4.28 ERA, 1.65 WHIP, 7.90 K/9
Each month is an incredibly small sample size, but you can see that, for the most part, Berrios greatly slowed down in the second half. Whether that was fatigue or the league catching up to him is a bit unclear, but either way, there is some risk in buying into Berrios’s early-season numbers. In the end, Berrios was about an average pitcher last year, with an ERA backed up by his FIP (3.84) and xFIP (4.51), an 8.59 K/9 and a walk rate of nearly three batters per inning.
There’s plenty of room for optimism. But based on his numbers last year, his ECR (35th-ranked starting pitcher) is a much safer place to value him than his current ADP (25th starting pitcher being drafted).
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Dan Harris is a featured writer for FantasyPros. For more from Dan, check out his archive or follow him on Twitter at @danharris80.
