Every single year we get players that don’t get drafted in ordinary 10-12 team leagues and end up making a large impact on fantasy teams. Typically you can find one or two of these types on the top teams in your league. Looking ahead to 2017 I hope to identify a few of these players that you can keep an eye on as they may gain playing time or start putting up numbers worthy of your roster. These will all likely go undrafted in all 12 team leagues. I will do 1 player at a time.
Alex Dickerson – OF – San Diego Padres – Baseball is a difficult sport to master, and while there are some who simply wake up and piss excellence in the morning there are others who take years to develop the skills to hack it in the major leagues. Alex Dickerson is a 26 year old former 3rd round pick. He’s a big guy at 6’3″/230 lbs. and despite getting drafted out of college in 2011 he’s taken 5 years in the minors before sticking with the big league club. He’s always progressed through the minors but it’s been slow going. He spent all of 2015 in AAA and started back there in 2016 for the first half. During that first half he tore the Pacific Coast League a new one. The PCL is a notorious hitter friendly league but he put up a 172 RC+ (a stat that is neutralized for park and league factors). He hit 10 home runs in 62 games along with a 11.3% strikeout rate, which I’d say is a good sign he’s got a good handle on PCL pitching.
Once the Padres promoted Dickerson he received close to full playing time. He put up a line of .257 average/39 runs/10 home runs/37 RBIs/5 stolen bases in 84 games. This is a rough way of projecting numbers but given full playing time for a full season, which he should get, Dickerson would’ve had a line in the range of .260 average/94 runs/24 home runs/89 rbis/12 stolen bases. That’s pretty close to where Jackie Brandley, George Springer, and Stephen Piscotty were last year and they were top 15-30 outfielders. Now typically its tough to say whether a second year player will do better or worse than their initial half season as they will be more experienced but pitchers also have seen the player more and can identify their weaknesses. But we can take a peek at their peripheral stats to get an idea of how they are doing.
For Alex Dickerson he had a .274 babip, which indicates slightly unlucky, which is good. 9.1 BB% and 15.4 K% both indicate he was not at all overwhelmed. 34.1% hard hit rate is definitely on the higher side for a rookie hitter and to go with a 40.5% fly ball percentage we can trust that even in Petco Park he could stumble into 20 home runs fairly easily. And finally the 82.6% contact rate suggests he could hang on to a fairly decent batting average in the .260-.270 range.
All in all this still isn’t a player I would draft. There’s no need to take a risk on him as there will be little interested in a 26 year old breakout. But I’d add him to your watch list and keep an eye on him in the early weeks of the season. At the very least Alex Dickerson could be one of the safer fill-ins if your OF is hit with an early injury.
*Thanks to Fangraphs for most of the statistics.
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