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
Tyler O’Neill (OF – STL)
Tyler O’Neill is all about perspective. If we compare his outstanding 2021 campaign to the rest of his career, we could argue that it was an outlier. It was the only year in which he played 100 games — granted, he played in 50 of his team’s 60 games in the atypical 2020 — and his 34 home runs were just one fewer than the rest of his other seasons combined.
Conversely, if we look at 2021 as the culmination of a young player growing into a regular role, then 2022, in which O’Neill again missed time due to injury, is the aberration.
It’s obviously subjective to pick one of these years as the anchor and subsequently discount the other, and that’s why we have to look at the numbers that drive the final output. O’Neill actually cut his strikeout rate to a career low, but he suffered from a below-average BABIP — and one that was far below his own career mark. His expected slugging percentage and expected wOBA were both high — and higher than his actual numbers — but his ground-ball-to-fly-ball ratio reached its peak. If he can simply stay on the field and move back toward his 40% fly-ball rate — it had dipped to 37.8% last year — then he can approach a repeat of his ’21 season. The other positive is that, even in 96 games, O’Neill swiped 14 bags.
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