Early ADP Tiers: Third Base
A quick look at the 3B position using early ADP data and projections
Other positions covered so far:
Tier One
Jose Ramirez
This has to be the longest tier one streak in modern fantasy baseball history. J-Ram just keeps going! 30 more homers and 41 more steals to his resume. I guess I’m not sure if J-Ram gets to the Hall of Fame someday, but he would certainly make the fantasy baseball HOF if such a thing existed.
The dude is a five-category stud year in and year out, and he doesn’t get hurt. What more can you ask for?
Well, I guess there is more you could ask for! He’s 33 now, and we saw some reductions in his quality of contact. He’s never been a huge barrel rate guy, but the 7% mark we saw last year was his worst work, and his hard hit rate also dropped to a six-year low at 36.4%. Those are very slight worries. He still posted an elite .289 xBA and a .351 xwOBA. The batted ball profile all looks similar enough to his past five years for us to be confident we can once again get first-round value out of J-Ram. But that confidence reduces with every passing year.
Tier Two
Junior Caminero
Jazz Chisholm Jr.
There are two more 3B options going in the top two rounds, and then there are only three more in the top 100. It’s a top-heavy position.
Junior Caminero looks like a 60-homer threat. He pairs league-topping bat speed and exit velo’s with a very nice strikeout rate. There aren’t many guys out there that can hit 40+ bombs without striking out a bunch and therefore giving up batting average points, but Junior is one of those guys. The park shift back to Tropicana is bad for him, but I don’t have too many reservations. The skills are just too good for him to fail.
As for Jazz Chisholm, he’s one of the best HR+SB guys in the league. The guy has 42 bombs and 49 steals in 176 games as a Yankee. He’s a roto stud. But there is some serious batting average downside. His K% reached 28% last year, and that’s a bit of a worry. He could definitely be a guy who ends up hitting .240 and hurts you there. But the HR+SB plus good team context for R+RBI makes him a comfortable enough second-rounder.
Tier Three
Manny Machado
We have small tiers early on. Machado is on an ADP island at 38. The next guy is around 30 picks later, so I have to leave Machado in his own tier.
Manny hasn’t had a first-round type of fantasy season since getting into a Padres uniform. But he’s also never had a bad season. He’s in there hitting around 30 homers and steals some bags with a good batting average every year. And he holds up really well, having played at least 138 games in each of the last five years, going for 150+ in the other four.
He’s safe. Maybe you worry that the steals will dry up soon. His 13th-percentile sprint speed is way down there these days, and that makes you wonder if he just won’t shut it down. But double-digit steals in each of the last two, and that’s not a massive part of his fantasy game anyways. He gets the value done with batting average, homers, and counting stats.