The Steamer-ZiPS All-Undervalued Team 2015

Avid readers will know I dove into the Big Board last week to bring you a list of the most astonishingly undervalued players. I had so much fun that I’m back to do it again, this time filling in every spot on the diamond. The same caveats apply here – these player values are calculated using the default Big Board with ESPN default settings and 5×5 scoring. This time I’ll be opting for the ever-popular 50-50 mix of Steamer and ZiPS projections. Player rankings are compared against ADPs for ESPN, Yahoo, and CBS to find the players being most undervalued in drafts compared to their projections.

To do this on your own (and customize it for your specific league), get your own version of the Big Board!

	Infield		Outfield		Pitchers
C	Brian McCann	OF1	Charlie Blackmon	SP1	Drew Smyly
1B	Steve Pearce	OF2	J.D. Martinez	SP2	Phil Hughes
2B	Rougned Odor	OF3	Jorge Soler	SP3	Matt Shoemaker
SS	Javier Baez	OF4	Brandon Moss	SP4	Brandon McCarthy
3B	Chase Headley	OF5	Joc Pederson	RP	Addison Reed

What players are undervalued in your league?

In 2014, teams that drafted Anthony Rendon towards the end of their drafts set themselves on the fast track to the playoffs. Every year we fantasy baseballers do a ton of research leading up to draft season in which we try to identify ‘sleepers’ like Anthony Rendon. But I hate the term sleepers. A more clickbaity site might even call this a sleeper article. But what we’re endeavoring to do today is look for the players most undervalued by your site’s default rankings. Though we’d like to believe we’re all above the influence of our respective host site’s default rankings, it’s really the only idea of ‘market price’ we have on draft day, and therefore typically ends up being pretty close to where players are actually drafted! I usually don’t recommend ‘targeting’ specific players coming into the draft, but when it comes to guys as undervalued as these, it can be worth trying to nab them a round or two before their ADP. So follow along with your own Big Boards at home, and mark these guys on your watch list, and you’ll be winning your draft in no time.

First Mock Draft of the Season

The Super Bowl is over and that means one very important thing – baseball is almost here! I may have spent all offseason playing around with the Big Board, but it’s been quite some time since I last busted out the spreadsheets and got down to drafting. I wasn’t sure what to expect out of Howard Bender’s (@rotobuzzguy) Mock Draft Army but I have to say I was pretty happy with my team after going up against a draft room of experts. What follows is a breakdown* of my team from the Mock Draft Army #3 last Tuesday. I had the first pick. First thing’s first – full draft results available here.

*One thing to note is I’ll be referencing ‘surplus value’ throughout the post, which I’m defining as the difference between the $ value of any given pick (e.g. pick 24 is worth $27) and the projected $ value for each player as determined by my ‘Big Board’ (e.g. Felix Hernandez is worth $36)