2018 Fantasy Baseball Draft Rankings from Mr. Cheatsheet To You

I have been running this fantasy baseball site for over nine years now. In my early years, I vowed that I’d never do fantasy baseball rankings. I can’t really remember why I felt so strongly about it but I did. Youth is wasted on the young. But, anyway, I eventually cracked and decided to publish my first rankings back in 2014. Lo and behold, I ended up being ranked by FantasyPros as one of the top 10 most accurate draft experts that year. This fueled an egotistical maniacal side of me and turned me into a draft rankings monster who is chasing that Top 10 ranking every year now and ultimately that #1 ranking at FantasyPros. That hasn’t happened yet but I’ve ranked in the Top 10 three of the four years I’ve submitted rankings to their site (let’s not talk about 2015). My 2018 rankings are here and they hope to keep that streak of success going.

When I create these rankings, I use a little bit of advanced stats, a tiny bit of x-Stats, a fair bit of my weird sleeper benchmarks and then a whole lot of black magic. The result is usually a pretty decent list of players in an order that I would prefer to draft them in.

These are built with a 5×5 roto draft in mind. My strategy in these drafts is to get power hitters early because that is something you can only really find in the early rounds (typically). I also don’t overpay for closers as I prefer to hunt the waiver wire for saves during the season. I have a few other quirks in my draft strategy but those are two things to keep in mind when you see how I ranked certain players here.

Outliers In My Rankings

When comparing my rankings to the other experts at FantasyPros, there are a few notes:

• Hitters that I like more than the rest of the field include Eugenio Suarez, Randal Grichuk, Ketel Marte and Nicky Delmonico. All of these guys are being drafted in the later rounds of your draft but, to me, have a bit more upside than the players around them. I really like the value for Suarez in drafts as he’ll be hitting behind Votto in the cleanup spot and seems to be improving a bit each year. He’s a nice breakout candidate. Grichuk is a cheap potential source of power later in drafts. He’s a post-hype sleeper and may finally deliver. Marte is just ranked weirdly low for my tastes. He’s got lots of talent and opportunity and is worth a gamble.
• With pitchers, the guys I like more than most are Jon Gray, Jeff Samardzija, Charlie Morton, Michael Wacha and Joe Musgrove (among others). Most of these names can be found in my Undervalued Pitchers post so it’s no surprise that I’m targeting them. Samardzija’s injury is dropping his stock a bit further than I think is warranted. I feel these are all decent guys to fill your staff with after the top names are off the board as they all have high upside potential.

My 2018 Fantasy Baseball Top 300