2023 Fantasy Baseball Draft Prep: 19 players underrated by ADP include Carlos Correa, Rowdy Tellez

These players are being underappreciated in drafts

I have my sleepers, and I have my breakouts, and I have my tidy definitions to distinguish them from one another. But the idea behind this article is simple: I like these players more than you do.

Or more than the consensus, anyway. There may be some crossover with those sleeper and breakout lists, but in most cases, I couldn't get away with calling these players either. I just think they're being underappreciated, and it's an inefficiency that I've been known to exploit in drafts.

Let's see if I can convince you to do the same.

Note that ADP values come from FantasyPros, which brings together data from several different sites. Its default format is standard 5x5 Rotisserie, so I've provided my own Rotisserie rankings as a comparison.

The Four Horsemen

I've been referring to this foursome as the Mount Rushmore on the Fantasy Baseball Today podcast, but since the full meaning of that nickname is too arcane to foist upon the print audience, I'm rebranding them here as the Four Horsemen, their arrival signaling the end times for the juiced ball era. What Merrill Kelly, Miles Mikolas, Tyler Anderson and Martin Perez have in common is that they were excellent last year, genuinely must-start in every format. Respectively, they ranked 32nd, 30th, 23rd and 37th among starting pitchers in 5x5 scoring and 20th, 22nd, 17th and 23rd in points scoring. Yet they're all being drafted outside the top 200 overall. Perez is barely drafted inside the top 300.

The skepticism is understandable. None excelled in ways that we would have deemed sustainable during the juiced ball era. We've graduated to a more forgiving era, though, where pitchers can find success pitching to contact again. The way these four excelled was by inducing weak contact and avoiding barreled balls -- not in equal measure, mind you, but the ones who fell a little short made up for it with either premium control (Mikolas) or a strikeout rate closer to league average (Kelly).

Bottom line is that there are many ways to succeed as a starting pitcher, and coming out of a period when that was less true, we may be slow to embrace it. As late as these four are going, there's no risk in betting on them sustaining their 2022 production -- or something close to it. I usually wind up drafting at least two, prioritizing them in the order I've listed them here.