Fantasy Baseball: 10 Players With Huge Gaps in Value Between ESPN and Yahoo
Jose Bautista, Toronto Blue Jays
Yahoo ADP: 101.3 | ESPN ADP: 65.8
Recently, numberFire's John Stolnis argued that Jose Bautista was being undervalued in fantasy baseball drafts. That was based on Bautista's FantasyPros composite ADP, which has him as the 88th overall pick. He's going even later than that on Yahoo, so you can bet your bottoms this is a dude on our radars.
Even though Bautista drudged through injuries to record a .234/.366/.452 slash last year, he actually finished with the highest hard-hit rate in his entire career at 41.0%. It was 35.3% in 2015 when he launched 40 taters, and last year's mark ranked seventh in the entire league. This is before we even mention he had a better-than-average strikeout rate.
As with Pollock, it's easy to understand why the public would be hesitant on Bautista. He's coming off a relatively awful year and is entering his age-36 season. But there aren't many guys who can hit 40 bombs in a given year, and Bautsita is certainly one of them.
This could simultaneously be a call to pump the brakes on Bautista at his cost on ESPN. In the National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC), Bautista's ADP is 113.79 -- even lower than his Yahoo ADP -- and the highest he has been picked is 65th overall. That's his average slot on ESPN. NFBC has a bunch of smart people in it, and if they're hesitant on Bautista, maybe we should reconsider taking him where he's currently going -- at least on ESPN.