This week, the Touts were asked
Who are your biggest draft regrets? Why didn’t you draft them and why have they changed your mind?
Patrick Davitt (BaseballHQ, @patrickdavitt): I ran myself out of fundage before I could get Tesocar Hernandez as a late-gamer. I haven’t changed my mind about Hernandez. I still wish I’d got him.
Larry Schechter (Winning Fantasy Baseball, @LarrySchechter): I got too much power, at the expense of OBP and SB. I wish I’d bid $22 on Whit Merrifield for more SB, and I could have done without Chris Davis or Albert Pujols. I got them at good prices, but didn’t need the power; and Pujols has a poor OBP projection.
Doug Dennis (BaseballHQ, @dougdennis41): Why did I draft Marcus Stroman? Could have done a lot better for that $12. I really thought I’d sneak Yonny Chirinos onto my reserve roster, so I sure wish I had grabbed him for $1 instead of, say, Trevor Hildenberger. Finally, Blake Parker and Alex Claudio didn’t work at all as prop bets. I wish I’d have gone 50% on those bets, or combined that money for a surer thing, but c’est la vie.
Mike Gianella (Baseball Prospectus, @MikeGianella): My approach is valuation rather than player-centric, so I seldom if ever regret missing out on a specific player. However, in one of my drafts I passed on Dee Gordon and Charlie Morton and have been kicking myself for the past month. I passed on Gordon in the 2nd round of this 15-team draft because it seemed “too early” to draft speed, even though my valuations had his high speed/batting average combination as the correct pick in that slot. My offense in this league is fine but my batting average could be better, and Gordon would have helped. I had a mid-round decision between Sonny Gray and Charlie Morton in this same draft. While I had Gray ranked slightly higher my instincts said to go with Morton, a pitcher I liked better and whose higher ceiling would have been a better fit for my team at that point in the draft. My biggest weakness in drafts is often being too doctrinaire about rankings in the mid-to-late rounds and while I have improved in that area the last couple of years, I didn’t adjust with the Gray/Morton decision and it has cost me dearly.
Al Melchior (FNTSY Radio, @almelchiorbb): Not nominating Jose Martinez as a $1 player. If I had done it early enough, I could have gone a few extra dollars on him if necessary, and it still would have been a great value. Then I wouldn’t have needed to trade Scott Kingery to get Yuli Gurriel.
Glenn Colton (Fantasy Alarm, @glenncolton1): Staying with the idea Chris Archer is an ace. Yes, the K’s are nice but two straight years of an ERA over 4 should have caused us to value him as an RP2 – even in an AL only. Yes, the 6.61 ERA will go down but will it go below the 4.49 FIP? I sure hope so. After all, it was not supposed to be Porcello and Gausman carrying Archer on our LABR team.
Todd Zola (Mastersball, @toddzola): I was on Gerrit Cole all off-season. There was a latent park upgrade with a loud team upgrade. I had faith the Astros brass would recognize throwing more curves would be a good thing. Yet, too many times, I passed on Cole, confident I could get…wait for it… Luis Castillo a few rounds later. Oy vey. I’m still confident Castillo will right the ship, but what’s done is done. Don’t get me started on Sonny Gray…
Scott Pianowski (Yahoo! Fantasy Sports, @Scott_Pianowski): One of my leagues auctions shortly after the season starts, and I told a non-competing friend that I would get Gerrit Cole “no matter what” (very much against my owner profile; I’m a value guy). Ha ha, I didn’t get him. Joke’s on me: he’s got a different repertoire, a better team around him, the park helps. All those double-digit strikeout games carry signature significance to me. I have one Cole share, but that’s a very light bag given how many leagues I play in. I also regret buying a reduced-price Matt Carpenter, as I generally tread carefully around guys with his physical concerns. I figured last year was his floor. Now I’m concerned maybe it gets worse, maybe his body simply isn’t right.
Scott Swanay (FantasyBaseballSherpa, @fantasy_sherpa): Johnny Cueto, J.A. Happ, and Charlie Morton all went for less in the Tout Mixed Auction than I had them valued for. However, because I insisted on spending over $40 for Clayton Kershaw, I was too busy filling out my pitching staff with the likes of Garrett Richards, Matt Shoemaker, and Drew Pomeranz to pay up for some of these better (at least to-date) options.
Michael Beller (Sports Illustrated, @MBeller): Gerrit Cole immediately came to mind after I read this question. I was on him all winter. I’ve got the receipts over at SI.com. But he has already been mentioned a few times, so I’ll go with Kyle Schwarber, another guy who I loved all winter and then couldn’t find a way to get onto any of my teams. I get a pass in my home league, which is a 14-team keeper where he was already on a roster, but I had three drafts/auctions from scratch, and Schwarber is on nary a one of those teams. Yes, I am a born-and-bred Cubs fan, so I’ll admit that had a little something to do with my love for him, but his draft-day cost was silly. It was almost as though people forgot that he had played all of 1.5 seasons in the majors before this year, and that he spent the entire offseason rehabbing a gruesome knee injury before his lone full campaign. It’s generally a bad idea to write off high draft picks who become elite prospects and key members of World Series teams less than 1,000 plate appearances into their careers. There isnt a specific reason why I missed out on him. Just one of those things. At least I am a Cubs fan, though. I can still enjoy what he is doing instead of kicking myself every time he leaves the yard.
Ray Flowers (Fantasy Guru Elite, @BaseballGuys): Hard to change to dramatically after just a month. I guess it would be mot owning more shares of Patrick Corbin and Sean Manaea. I wrote glowing Player Profile reports on both, so my followers certainly have them both. Should have taken more of my own advice I guess.
Peter Kreutzer (Ask Rotoman, Fantasy Baseball Guide, @kroyte): My Tout Wars team has been horrible. Part of that have been injuries to Elvis Andrus and Josh Donaldson, and another part has been the slow start of Paul Goldschmidt. I’m partly kidding about this, but Goldschmidt is a guy I’ve never been as high on as other people. His modest minor league record made me a little doubtful, and how can you trust sluggers to keep running as they get older? Etc etc etc. But as sometimes happens, I found myself in position to get an admittedly great OBP guy, as Goldschmidt is, at a fair price. So I bit, and then I fretted, because players like this almost always jinx me. I doubt them, they’re great for other fantasy owners, and when I finally go for them, they have their only down season. For example, if you look at Justin Verlander’s career, the one year I bought him was 2008. So, I have regrets, and Goldschmidt is one. The other? I thought Didi Gregorious was generally underappreciated by the fantasy intelligentsia in the preseason. He went for only $4 in this league! I already had Dozier, Andrus and Whitfield at that point in the auction, but I’m sure UT was open. Yuck.