Fantasy Baseball: 10 Hitters Who Could Bounce Back in 2019
We're still a little under two months away from the start of the MLB season, so you can be forgiven if you haven't yet given much thought to the upcoming fantasy baseball campaign or are only just getting started on your research. But with football coming to a close, now isn't a bad time to jump back in and start unearthing potential draft values based on early-season average draft position (ADP) results.
The National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) has been hosting drafts since not long after last season ended, and with competitors putting a good chunk of change on the line in these high-stakes contests, this is a great resource to find reliable ADP data from some hardcore and sharp fantasy baseball enthusiasts.
One way to find good production at a potential discount is by looking at players who are coming off down 2018 campaigns. Whether due to injuries, bad luck, and/or simply poor performance, it's only natural that recency bias will lower their market value the following year, even for players with strong track records.
That grants us the perfect opportunity to buy low on some of these guys, and while chances are not all of them will regain their past glory, the ones who do will prove to be excellent bargains.
With that in mind, let's take a look at 10 hitters coming off disappointing years who could be poised to bounce back in 2019 (we'll touch on pitchers in a separate piece).
For the purposes of this exercise, we'll list them in order of their ADP in NFBC drafts since January 1, along with publicly available player projections -- per FanGraphs -- to provide some baseline expectations. In this case, we'll use their Depth Charts projections (Steamer and ZiPS combined with playing time adjusted) and Derek Carty's THE BAT.
