SPECULATOR: Avoiding this year's Ketel Marte
Feb 17 2021
We put a ton of effort into unearthing the next late-round "sleeper", but there's an underappreciated part of player evaluation that can be even more important: avoiding landmines, particularly early in drafts.
Ron Shandler's research in the 2020 Baseball Forecaster noted that the early rounds are littered with landmines. His key finding: in the first five rounds of drafts over the last two years, nearly half of our picks have been full-on "busts" (player returned a 4+ round loss vs. his draft round), while another 25% were a mere "loss" (a 1-3 round loss).
One of those landmines entering 2020 was Ketel Marte (2B, ARI). We actually panned Marte as an avoid in last year's version of this column—he came with several landmine-worthy traits...
Almost!
You’re just a few clicks away from accessing this feature and hundreds more throughout the year that have a singular goal in mind: Winning your league. Subscribe to BaseballHQ.com here!
Already a subscriber? Sign in here
More From Speculator
Baseball is back and we're here to overreact. We'll speculate on several Opening Weekend storylines.
Apr 2 2025 3:09am
Apr 2 2025 3:09am
Our annual Opening Day Eve exercise at category leaders who went outside the Top 200 this draft season.
Mar 26 2025 3:09am
Mar 26 2025 3:09am
They come from all stages of the draft. We'll use history as our guide to speculate on this season's Top 15 players.
Mar 19 2025 3:10am
Mar 19 2025 3:10am
Applying some of Flaherty's pre-breakout traits to this year's player pool.
Mar 12 2025 3:05am
Mar 12 2025 3:05am
We'll apply some lessons learned from last year's pool to speculate on this year's breakouts.
Mar 5 2025 3:09am
Mar 5 2025 3:09am
