Baseball Draft Kit: Joe Sheehan's Picks and Pans

The league-wide trends toward waiting out free agents, toward taking entire seasons off from competing, toward looking internally for solutions, have a real impact on fantasy baseball. As I write this in late December, six top-10 free agents remain unsigned, including Bryce Harper and Manny Machado.

We know they will be top-15 picks wherever they land, but what we don't know are the domino effects created by their choices. Keep that in mind as you read these picks and pans for 2019, which even without Harper and Machado, have been driven in no small part by what teams have done early in the Hot Stove League.

2019 PICKS

CORBIN BURNES SP • BREWERS
Outside of a brief stint in the PCL last year, Burnes has a 1.89 ERA in 220 innings, including a 2.61 mark pitching out of the bullpen for last year's Brewers. As much fun as "bullpenning" was last season, Craig Counsell will go back to a more conventional approach this year, with Burnes a big part of that. He'll be innings-light, but the rates will be exceptional and he'll bring 150 strikeouts to the table.

TYLER CHATWOOD SP • CUBS
Chatwood walked nearly one of every five batters he faced last year, the seventh-highest walk rate on record, and the highest since 1987 (min. 100 IP). He also lost more than a tick of velocity off his four-seam fastball and pitched just once in the season's final six weeks. The good news? As bad as Chatwood was, the Cubs went 11-9 in his starts, and they still need him. Yu Darvish is coming back from his own lost season, Jon Lester is in decline, and as we saw last year, the internal replacements are bad. Chatwood still had a 54% groundball rate, which will be the key to cheap wins for your team.

RAFAEL DEVERS 3B • RED SOX
Let's put Devers' "disappointing" 2018 into perspective: He's younger than five of the six players who got votes in AL Rookie of the Year balloting last year. At 21, he had a strikeout rate just barely higher than the league average. His percentage of hard-hit balls was in the top quartile of major leaguers, right there with Edwin Encarnacion. Devers is positioned for a breakout season at 22, in a lineup that will blow up his RBI totals when he hits.

DEXTER FOWLER OF • CARDINALS
Let's call this a managerial reset. Fowler's relationship with Mike Matheny was terrible. It's hard to calculate how much of it leaked into Fowler's awful 2018 season, but we do know that when Mike Shildt took over, he penciled Fowler into the lineup every day until Fowler's broken ankle ended his season. At 30 and 31, Fowler hit .271/.378/.467 (123 OPS+), and whether in St. Louis or somewhere else after a trade, the bet here is he'll get back close to those numbers at 33.

JON GRAY SP • ROCKIES
A popular breakout pick heading into 2018, Gray pitched nearly as well last year as he did the year before, with a 3.45 xFIP in '17 and a 3.47 mark in '18. Unfortunately for him, his rate of homers allowed on flyballs jumped from 11.1% to 18.1%, yanking his ERA up more more than a run. He developed an enormous runners-on/bases-empty split that turned every one-out single into an adventure, and eventually led to a demotion. Kyle Freeland showed what kind of fantasy value is possible for a starting pitcher in Coors Field. Look for Gray to have that kind of season in 2018.

RYAN McMAHON 2B • ROCKIES
With DJ LeMahieu leaving in free agency and the Rockies well aware of their need to add offense, the team signed Daniel Murphy to play first base with an eye toward letting McMahon and rookie Garrett Hampson take over at second. In 2019, McMahon may get the chance to be the big part of a platoon at a thinned-out position in fantasy, playing half his games at Coors Field. Take the power and don't sweat the .240 batting average.

ROMAN QUINN CF • PHILLIES
The signing of Andrew McCutchen -- see below -- complicates Quinn's 2019 outlook, but keep in mind that even after adding McCutchen, Quinn is the only true center fielder they have. This is a team whose defense almost single-handedly ruined its playoff chances a year ago. If Quinn stays healthy, which is always the question with him, he's a source of very cheap speed (15 MLB steals in 65 games) who could score 100 runs.

ALEX REYES SP/RP • CARDINALS
More myth than man at this point, Reyes goes into 2019 having thrown four total MLB innings in the last two seasons. He's had success both as a starter and as a reliever, but the bet here is that the Cardinals' greater need for bullpen help, even with Andrew Miller, pushes Reyes into the save-collection role, where he will be dominant. Jordan Hicks doesn't strike out enough batters to block Reyes from a 25-save campaign.

ALEX VERDUGO OF • DODGERS
The Dodgers dumped nearly a thousand plate appearances when they traded Yasiel Puig and Matt Kemp to the Reds. Enrique Hernandez seems likely to get his playing time at second base. The Dodgers could go into the free-agent market for an outfielder, but they've been open about their plans to keep payroll down. Enter Verdugo, a top-50 prospect with some of the best bat-to-ball skills (12% career strikeout rate) in the game. He's a better leadoff option than Chris Taylor or Joc Pederson, a lock for a .280 average and 100 runs scored if he plays.

2019 PANS

PATRICK CORBIN SP • NATIONALS
There are warning signs on top of warning signs here, starting with a mysterious midseason velocity drop that was never fully explained. Corbin also threw 41% sliders last year; the few pitchers who have ever leaned that heavily on the pitch have found themselves on the DL soon afterward. Finally, Corbin's 2018 stands out in a career that had featured just two other good seasons, and nothing like the 3.15 ERA and 246 strikeouts he racked up last year. The Nationals bought high; don't make the same mistake.

CRAIG KIMBREL RP • FREE AGENT
Kimbrel looks for all the world like Wade Davis did a year ago, a great reliever at his peak who is hitting the free-agent market just in time to go south. Yes, the saves will still be there, as they were for Davis in 2018, but the skill set -- Kimbrel had his lowest fastball velocity in seven years, and he walked one of every eight batters he faced, 15th in MLB among relievers -- is fading. Whatever contract Kimbrel signs, he won't be a closer by the end of it.

ANDREW MCCUTCHEN RF • PHILLIES
McCutchen's sabermetric numbers support this signing, largely on the basis of a career-high walk rate driving his OBP, OPS+, and wRC+. That number, though, is a Trojan horse; many good hitters will see a spike in their walk rate in their early thirties as they lose the ability to hit power pitching, instead waiting out pitchers until they get something they can handle. At 32, McCutchen is now a .260 hitter with middling power and diminished speed, and he has as much collapse risk as any player in the game.

ADALBERTO MONDESI SS • ROYALS
Sharp readers may recall that Mondesi was in the first half of this piece a year ago before hitting 14 homers and swiping 32 bags in just 75 games. That performance has driven him up draft boards in the offseason, and has overpriced him heading into 2019. Mondesi had a .306 OBP in his breakout campaign, with a 77:11 K:BB ratio. He will probably produce another 15-30 season, just on volume, but it will come with batting average and OBP anchors, and without the runs and RBI you would hope for, because the Royals' lineup is terrible. Avoid this year.

CHRISTIAN YELICH LF • BREWERS
The NL MVP got the award thanks to an absurd second half in which 46% of the flyballs he hit went for home runs. Now, every one of those 24 homers count, but Yelich's season-long HR/FB of 35% was double his career mark. Yelich was less of a groundball hitter last year than he'd been, but still put more than half his batted balls in play on the ground. Yelich's 2018 is Joe Mauer's 2009, a good year inflated by a fluke HR/FB we will never see again. If you pay for 20 homers, much less 30, you're making a mistake.

This article appears in the 2019 RotoWire Fantasy Baseball Guide. You can order a copy here.