Drops & Disasters: Fantasy Baseball Roster Moves (4/6)

Before diving into this week’s potential drops and disasters, I want to cover two things. First, in evaluating potential fantasy baseball drops, it remains important to remember that we are only 11 days into the 2025 MLB season. We are not even at the two-week mark. While it is reasonable to drop players due to injuries or changed roles, it seems premature to drop players based solely on poor performance over what are very limited sample sizes.

To be sure, if a player is marginal, and there is a comparable player available in FAAB who may be better situated or have an attractive upcoming schedule, by all means go ahead and make that swap. But be careful about dropping hitters based on a slow start to the season, or pitchers after a bad start or two. By way of an example, last season, through April 6, Francisco Lindor was hitting .032 with one hit – a single – in his first 31 at bats. Lindor finished the season with significantly better numbers (33 HR, 107 R, 91 RBI, 29 SB, .273 AVG). Similarly, through April 6 last season, George Kirby had pitched to a 6.97 ERA and 1.35 WHIP, only to finish the season in much stronger fashion (3.53 ERA, 1.07 WHIP). Thus, in evaluating potential drops Sunday night, fantasy managers should strive to improve their rosters but be wary about overweighting poor performance in a very limited number of games.

Second, I want to discuss my first, somewhat regrettable drop of the season in the hope that others can learn from my flawed process. Last week, in one of my 11 FAAB leagues, I dropped Heston Kjerstad for Derek Hill. To be clear, I wanted Hill, and that swap of outfielders may work out just fine for me. My regret over that drop is not that Kjerstad is definitively better than Hill – or vice versa – but, rather, that my process in making the drop was poor. In this particular league, Hill was available, and my evaluation led me to target him in FAAB. At the time, Kjerstad was hardly playing (three at bats in the Orioles’ first three games), and I selected him as the drop in an outfielder bid string headlined by Hill (but containing numerous other outfielders who had accumulated more playing time in the first half-week than Kjerstad).

My process was flawed because, earlier that day, Colton Cowser injured his thumb on a slide and, while we did not find out until Monday that Cowser had fractured his thumb and will be facing an extended outage (more on him later), it was clear from the play Sunday – which I saw – that Cowser likely had suffered a serious injury. My process mistake was that having seen Cowser get hurt on Sunday, I failed to connect the dots that a Cowser IL stint likely would pave the way for increased playing time for Kjerstad. As it turns out, Baltimore apparently plans to restrict Kjerstad to the strong side of a platoon (with Ramón Laureano), but the fact remains that my evaluation of Kjerstad as a potential drop last Sunday failed to account for the likelihood of increased playing time due to the Cowser injury, and that was a mistake. Moving forward, when evaluating injuries as part of my FAAB process, I will make sure that such evaluation is not limited to injured players but, rather, always includes other players impacted by such injuries (something I normally strive to do but failed in this instance). Thus, when rostered or non-rostered players suffer injuries necessitating IL stints, managers should examine the fantasy implications of such injuries on all affected players, including those likely to gain playing time.

Some of the players who should at least be considered as potential drops this week are set forth below in the following two tables – the first includes hitters and the second includes pitchers. In addition to the player’s name, team and position, the tables include the player’s roster percentage in the premier 15- and 12-team contests: the NFBC’s Main Event and Online Championship, respectively. Finally, the tables list my rankings as to how strongly – or not – I feel each particular player should be dropped in those 15-team and 12-team formats, respectively. The key to these rankings, from 0-4, is as follows:

• 0 = Do not drop
• 1 = Team context dependent; probably should not be dropped on most teams
• 2 = Team context dependent; compelling arguments to drop and not drop
• 3 = Team context dependent; probably should be dropped on most teams
• 4 = Drop