In fantasy baseball, value is the name of the game — especially during draft season. After all, everybody can identify a five-category stud. What’s far more important toward winning your league is finding production where no one expects it, the late-round gems that supplement your early-round stars on the way to fantasy glory. That’s where this column comes in. We’ve identified six brand names (i.e., players being taken in the early- to mid-rounds) who we think will have their production just about matched — or even exceeded — by players at the same position who are being taken several rounds later. So you can free up that all-important draft capital to spend elsewhere.
2024 fantasy baseball: Cheaper versions of big-name stars
Brand name: Xander Bogaerts; alternative: Ezequiel Tovar
Bogaerts is currently going off the board just inside the top 100, after a season in which he went 19/19 with a .285 average. That’s solid, balanced production, to be sure. But Tovar is going some 100 picks later, and just went 15/11/.253 as a 21-year-old rookie. He’s locked into playing time, he’s got the speed, and if you’re worried about the difference in batting average, he gets to play half his games at Coors Field — a gift from the BABIP gods. If Tovar takes even a slight step forward in year two, he could give you the power/speed combo at a middle infield spot that you’re looking for.
Brand name: Adolis Garcia; alternative: Teoscar Hernandez
I’m not even particularly down on Garcia, who’s still a good player in both real life and fantasy. But his declining speed — he stole just nine bases last year, after 25 in 2022 — make him more of a pure power profile, and that’s far easier to replicate several rounds later than his current ADP of 44. Take, for instance, Hernandez, who just went 26/7/.267 last year — not too far off from Garcia’s totals, with fewer homers and a better average — and found the ideal landing spot in a loaded Dodgers lineup this winter. L.A. offers him a better home park to hit in than Seattle’s T-Mobile Park, and he hits the ball as hard as anyone. His projections for 2024, around 30 homers with a handful of steals and a batting average in the .260s, look a lot like Garcia’s, just 80 picks later.
Brand name: Lane Thomas; alternative: Daulton Varsho
Okay, so Thomas might not be brand name like the two above, but he’s still going inside the first 10 rounds of 12-team leagues after going 28/20/.268 last season. There are reasons to think that some regression is coming, and if you’re looking for a power/speed combo in one of your outfield slots, you could instead wait some 100 picks and snag Varsho. Even in a down year, the Jays left fielder hit 20 homers with 16 steals, and he’s some batting average luck away from putting together a season that looks a lot like what a reasonable projection would be for Thomas.
Brand name: Ha-Seong Kim; alternative: Thairo Estrada
I’m fading Kim pretty hard this spring; his gains as a hitter weren’t supported by his batted-ball data, and his spike in value was almost solely predicated on a huge spike in speed — he went from 12 steals in 2022 to 38 last year, aggressive even given the rule changes. Estrada has hit for a better average than Kim in each of the last two seasons, he’s a better bet to hit the 15-homer mark (14 in just 120 games last year) and he’s stolen 21 and 23 bases over the last two years. If I’m looking for stolen-base upside with enough power and average to not drag me down, I trust Estrada to deliver that profile far more than Kim — the track record is longer, and the underlying skills are more reliable.
Brand name: Cedric Mullins; alternative: Jarren Duran
Similarly, if you find yourself in need of a stolen-base boost in the outfield, consider Duran rather than Mullins. The Orioles stalwart has really struggled at the plate in 2022 and 2023, and last year got so bad that it started costing him a bit of playing time down the stretch — especially against lefties. Duran, meanwhile, stole 24 bases in just 102 games before his season was cut short due to injury, and Alex Cora wants him leading off to start the year. Mullins would seem to have the power edge, but his homer spike in 2023 also made him a batting average liability, and it would seem that you’ll only get one or the other this season. Duran, meanwhile, should be able to hit at least .250, and he’s got more power upside than his eight homers last year would suggest — his 90th-percentile flyball EV is actually in the 78th percentile.
Brand name: Josh Jung; alternative: Jake Burger
The league started to figure Jung out after his scorching start to last season; he posted a .718 OPS in June and a .740 mark in July, then fractured his thumb in August and had a hard time recovering. Jung will always hit for power, but said power comes with no speed — and risk of a batting average far worse than last year’s .266 mark, given his 30% strikeout rate. If you’re looking for a 30-homer bat that will hopefully be able to at least not be a drain on your batting average, I much prefer Burger, who’s significantly cheaper and has a stronger contact profile than Jung does. Both players swing and miss too much to ever reliably hit more than, say, .250, and both are line-drive machines. One of them is 50 picks pricier, though, and Texas’ strong lineup isn’t valuable enough to account for that difference.
