With countless lists available leading up to each fantasy season, resources exist to guide team management. The majority of leagues allow add/drops to take fliers on guys breaking out or having a career year. By the time everyone is warmed, up most managers in competitive leagues have a solid understanding of player value. There are also websites tracking stats and writing articles as the season unfolds. As such, it’s difficult to gain a large advantage over competition with so much news and analysis readily available. The work needs to be put in to stay competitive but I believe there are other areas where there is more room to separate from the competition.
The appeal of being able to dig through thousands of relatively unknown players holds a special place in my heart. There is an opportunity within the prospect realm to completely change the fortune of your dynasty franchise that I personally cannot see available at the Major League level. I believe this mostly comes down to a lack of in-depth coverage on prospects, although there are other factors as well. While there are plenty of high-level leagues out there with very serious players, the majority of leagues are re-draft leagues. There is very little incentive for the casual player to pay attention to prospects, besides the players who could be promoted in-season and theoretically help immediately.
Resources are available that focus specifically on prospects but not nearly enough to incapsulate all the possibilities. It is difficult to surprise your competition if you are all picking from the same group of players after reading the same descriptions and discussions. That thought led me to investigating the players outside the industry lists. If you were able to identify players who are on the verge of cracking lists before the managers you play against that could give you a huge advantage! Imagine having a relatively cheap shot at next season’s biggest breakout before anyone else has a chance to salivate over him. Months before all the articles and videos start flooding the internet and the hype starts inflating their prices. It seemed like an intriguing thought and I had to try it out.
The first year putting this strategy into play I drafted an unknown player in rookie ball with my final pick of a prospect draft. I discovered his name in some obscure article tucked away in far corners of the internet. Even after making the pick I am sure it was widely dismissed as a throw-away pick. Less than two years later he nearly led me to a championship as a 19-year old! His name is Juan Soto. Had I not selected him at that moment he would have been the top pick in the next season’s prospect draft. That was the only chance I had to land him cheaply. It had to be before anyone else knew about him.
Some of you reading this might be saying to yourself, so what? Anyone can get lucky and pluck a random player out of thin air one time, and I will give you that. But what if I told you that the following season, I made the exact same play on a widely unknown player deep in the prospect draft? And it worked again. The name of that young, unproven player is Wander Franco. Again, it was my last opportunity to get him in that league. He was going to the be the top pick the following season, the rest of the world just did not know that yet. At the very least I wanted to see what he looked like a year later and was willing to pass on more well-known names to take that gamble.
By now maybe you are thinking Soto and Franco is a couple of really nice picks, what is next? I am glad you asked. I used the same approach the following season to land a young man named Marco Luciano. Completely unknown to the average fantasy player at the time and nowhere near a top prospect list that I could find. Available at the last pick of my draft. The very last pick. As was the case the previous two years this ended up being my last opportunity to land Luciano in that league without trading away major assets.
With all of that as a background…
It is important that you take chances in fantasy baseball and I think that lesson applies even more so with prospects. You need to take unconventional approaches if you want unconventional results. Well-timed, aggressive moves and calculated gambles will serve you well. Nearly all of the players selected in prospect drafts are not going to impact fantasy teams immediately. That fact helps explain why I will rarely select a player in a prospect draft solely based on his proximity to the major leagues. A solid player who is almost in the major leagues is not a good enough reason to pass on the chance at someone special.
As I suggested in a previous article, if you are viewing prospect picks like lottery tickets, you are not going to be worried about the five tickets that lost if the sixth ticket turned you into a multi-millionaire. Once you embrace this concept it opens up several other options going forward. If you see a young kid out there with special tools, don’t hesitate to take him over more well-known players who are closer to the majors that do not carry the same upside. Don’t be afraid to be aggressive!
That being said there are going to be some epic failures along the line. For every Juan Soto there will be plenty of guys like Delvin Perez, Lucius Fox and Jhailyn Ortiz to keep you humble. The examples I used are some of my biggest success stories in recent years. Even the most accomplished drafters fail more than they succeed if the bar is set high enough. You have to learn to embrace that aspect of the game. You can only make picks with the best information available to you at the time. Just be aware that the information is a starting point and should not be viewed as factual or finalized. You are merely trying to get closer to the truth faster than your opponents.
Going into every prospect draft it is essentially common knowledge who the top prospects available are. Perception and reality are often not the same, but we generally know who is going to be taken early. Those players are going to be taken off the board and sometimes in a surprising order. While it is vitality important that you develop the ability to differentiate between elite prospects, it is once those obvious names are gone that you can separate yourself over time. The key is learning when that moment has happened in the draft and what type of players to target instead of taking the traditional approach. If you take my advice, more often than not you will be targeting a relatively unknown teenage hitter who just might become a cornerstone of your franchise one day.
Embrace Calculated Risks
