The Sharp & The Fish: Round 13
A series where we pick out the best and worst picks in each round
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This has been a fun series. I’ve been slugging a lot of these outs in fits of writing. The ADP has been shifting slightly as I’ve gone through it, so you might see some repeat names in the screenshots.
We’re rounding out the top 200 players in this post and the next one. Here’s what we’ve got:
SHARP: SPENCER TORKELSON
This isn’t me saying I love Tork or think he’s going to have a massive breakout season. I just think that first base is a good one to chill at this year. So many of these guys are very similar.
You can take a dude like Matt Olson at ADP 50, and you’ll be getting this projection:
91 R, 30 HR, 93 RBI, 1 SB, .248 AVG
Or you could chill, wait 150 picks, and grab this Torkelson projection:
73 R, 26 HR, 77 RBI, 2 SB, .230 AVG
Significantly less R+RBI, but a similar profile. At this position, you’re getting middling average and a few steals. You’re taking a guy to help your fantasy team in HR and RBI, and Torkelson can do both of those things just fine.
For this to really pop off, Torkelson will have to take a step forward and hit for a higher batting average. But he’s just now entering the prime years as a 26-year-old; his best years are ahead of him, and you can’t say that with most of the rest of this position in 2026.
FISH: SHANE BIEBER
2020 was a long time ago. That was the year that Bieber won the cheapest Cy Young Award ever handed out. Since then, we’ve seen him a bunch of velo, lose a bunch of points on the strikeout rate, have Tommy John surgery, and then have forearm fatigue while being handled very carefully in his return from that surgery.
And there wasn’t much confidence shown from his camp. He opted into a one-year deal to return to the Blue Jays.
My wife would probably explain that by saying that he must just really like his teammates and the city and stuff. And $16 million! That’s way more than enough money, it probably wasn’t even a consideration!
But the more skeptical among us suspect that Bieber didn’t think he was worth very much on the open market, so he took the paycheck he could get.
We’ll see, this could end up looking pretty dumb, but we have that two-headed risk (health being one thing, and performance questions being another) with Bieber that I’m always trying to avoid.