Winning a fantasy baseball league usually comes down to value. When all else is equal, did your players outperform your opponents’? Were you able to identify those who were about to reach their potential?
Put another way, did you find the right players who achieved positive regression or successfully bounced back from a bad 2022 campaign?
This column is about sleepers, but not in the sense that other fantasy managers may draft them too late or bid too little to acquire them. These are the players who have the numbers or narratives — ideally both — to support a better output than they had last year. Maybe they aren’t the league’s best-kept secrets, but they are the targets who are poised to rebound from 2022.
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Fantasy Baseball Sleepers
Austin Meadows (OF – DET)
While this article eventually filtered out any hitter with fewer than 300 plate appearances last year, one player jumped off the screen despite a small sample size — 147 plate appearances. Austin Meadows played just 36 games with the Tigers following a trade just days before the start of the season — and technically after the originally intended season opener that was delayed until the new collective bargaining agreement was settled.
If we only look for players who fit the mold of a possible “bounce-back” candidate because of missed time, then Meadows would make this list anyway. It’s the addition of the “positive regression” that makes him a no-brainer. Among all hitters with at least 100 plate appearances, Meadows had the largest positive gap between expected and actual slugging percentage. He also ranked third in that group for the distance between expected and actual batting average. In fact, his expected batting average of .308 was the fourth best.
Meadows hit 27 home runs and drove in 106 runs two years ago with the Rays, but last year was completely lost for him. We shouldn’t forget about the potential he holds.
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