Groovin’ with Govier: Fantasy Baseball Roundup (1/11)

You are now about to witness the strength of baseball’s ability to inform and entertain. Greetings to you all! Welcome to the first edition of Groovin’ with Govier for 2023!

If you’re back for more, it’s great to have you with us for another season. Clearly you’re a wise person who knows quality when you read it. If this is your first time with us at FTN, what took you so long?! I kid, I kid. I just wanted you to get a taste of what you’re in for. Obviously you’re just as wise as the regulars because you realize that RotoGut’s latest assembled team of baseball do-gooders will be setting the standard for fantasy baseball coverage in 2023. I can promise you two things this year from Groovin’ with Govier: I will inform you just as equally as I plan to entertain you (at worst it ends up being 60/40). 

If you need laurels from 2022 for buy-in, I can offer you a taste. I won my first NFBC OC (for the uninitiated, a 12-teamer FAAB league). There was also my combined victory with new FTN teammate and prospect overlord Eric Cross in the second annual Tag Team League run by another FTN stalwart in Matty Davis. That one is a 15-team FAAB league with a healthy first-place prize. So you see, whether it’s on my own or in concert with another, I have the goods. My most useful trait as an analyst is keeping it real with you about my disappointments. I finished ninth with my Main Event entry ($1,750) in 2022 after debuting with a third-place finish in my first foray into the prize of all prizes in 2021. Throw in a runner-up finish in my H2H Cats home league last year and what you get is the benefit of my strikes and gutters throughout the year. 

I can play with anybody, talk shop with the best of them and break down strategy like it ain’t no thang. Why you will benefit most from Groovin’ with Govier in 2023 is due to my ability to share honestly with you about what works and what doesn’t. There’s no time for pride up in here. I bust my hump on these articles because I want to engage in honest fantasy baseball analysis with my own foibles as the case study so you may be spared the error of my ways. Plus, I like to mix in a few laughs if I can along the way, because life is definitely more enjoyable that way. Thanks for being here this season. If you like what we do, consider spreading the word with the masses by any means necessary. 

And Where the Hell Was I?

Right now, I relate to Frank Drebin’s comment in The Naked Gun in reference to the current 2023 fantasy baseball landscape. And you know what? That’s totally fine! I live in the age of endless app notifications on my phone that continuously hound me like a hard-up in-law with the next Facebook-type idea. I’m a member of dozens of Discords, news sites and social media platforms. The last thing I am is uninformed. In fact, I think it’s an incredible feat these days to end up uninformed. The reason I’m walking around asking where the hell I am is because of an intent to avoid the groupthink that picks up a lot of steam around this time of year. ADP certainly plays a key role in this cohesion of analysis. After the new year, drafting becomes more prominent for a minority of diehards who can’t help but sign up for all types of drafts on many different platforms. I’m all for drafting! When you start winning though, you become more about the overall experience and particularly, the winnings! Imagine the trading floor from the movie Wall Street in the early stages when Bud Fox is learning some harsh capitalist lessons before he becomes the scumbag he learned to be from Gordon Gekko. That mania on the trading floor represents the interior of the fantasy minds of roughly 75 people who are drafting like fiends right now. The rest of us are biding our time. Playing it slow and steady like Hal Holbrook’s character Lou Mannheim. 

I have a whole rant about ADP in store for you in an upcoming episode of this series. For now, just know this: ADP is set early by a small number of early drafters who may be the experts who see inefficiencies in an early market, thrill seekers peppered with spare time who are looking to fill a hole in their hearts or they’re fantasy football players who had teams crap out early so they’re looking to relive the feeling of draft season last summer. Either way, ADP is just another tool. The problem becomes when people swear by it, just like a list of rankings that becomes obsolete the moment the creator publishes it. 

Why So Serious?

My home league’s text thread is the gift that keeps on giving all year long. Recently I found myself surprised by the notion from others in my league that Yankee prospect Anthony Volpe is a keeper or a possible high-round draft pick in our league after six keepers for all 14 teams are declared. I had a strong reaction that was marinating in what can best be identified as fatigue over the prospect industrial complex, which inflates certain prospects more than others. Especially those who call the Yankee farm system home. I was incredulous at the aspect that Volpe could be a viable player in redraft leagues in 2023. He spent most of 2022 at AA with 497 PA hammering out a rock-solid 122 wRC+, a K rate just under 18% and most tantalizing of all: 44 swipes! Steals! Steals! Steals! 

Volpe turns 22 in late April. He’s close in age to Atlanta’s 2022 NL ROY Michael Harris. That certainly doesn’t imply that Volpe translates in any way to Harris or how the reigning NL ROY got his call-up. To identify who gets the call up to The Show when, is a process that is rife with variables and uncertainties that all come together at an ideal moment in time. Some opportunities are preordained like with Bryce Harper or Julio Rodríguez. Others happen more suddenly to the absolute bliss of all, like when Juan Soto or Spencer Strider arrived on the scene (The Nationals had a potential dynasty brewing, didn’t they?). 

Anthony Volpe’s defensive ability and position are at the heart of where the greatest sense of panic overcame me when I realized that people were starting to look to him for output in 2023. Not only are Harris and Volpe similar in age, but people are starting to unfairly place similar expectations on both of them just because Harris and Spencer Strider — and even Vaughn Grissom too for that matter — were able to produce the way they did. Are these three Braves setting an unrealistic market of expectations for the next wave of prospects on the come? Or are we seeing more prospect reinforcements coming up in timely handfuls for the same team because of the bozo pandemic year in 2020? If you’re looking for support that the bozo pandemic year created mysteries about the workload and growth certain prospects received outside of certified minor league games, leading to small platoons of prospect arrivals for one team in the same season, the Kansas City Royals could assist in that cause. 

In 2022 the Royals rostered Bobby Witt Jr., MJ Melendez and possibly the darling of all darling prospects: Vinnie Pasquantino/ I think those three stand tall next to the Atlanta trio. Another point of contention in support of these prospect invasions is that teams are intentionally aligning their best players together on a similar timeline, so they can build a rapport together in the minors instead of just showing up independently of one another once they arrive at the parent ballclub. Full credit to my former Pallazzo pal Phil Goyette for pulling an Inception on me when he first told me that he believed Adley Rutschman was intentionally being brought along simultaneously with the best Oriole starting pitchers in order to form chemistry between potential future battery mates in the bigs. It hasn’t exactly worked out that way, but I think MLB teams are intentionally creating this aligned structure of their most prized talent who are on similar timelines. 

All this to say, who does Anthony Volpe fit in with if the Yankees were applying a similar approach? Well, one of the players who would qualify for this scenario plays the same position plus he was already called up last year for a taste of the good life: Oswald Peraza. Does Volpe leap over Peraza or join him by moving to 2B along possibly with catcher Austin Wells who is in a similar range of age and advancement? Anything is possible, but I find this far from likely. That brings me back to the beginning leaving me with my displeasure for Volpe’s viability as a means of quality MLB output in 2023. Despite a few revelations about the future of MLB call-up plans, we’re still back at square one. Until I hear otherwise, I will not be overextending myself for Volpe. 

I Want to Break Free

These immortal words released upon us by the precious vocal cords of Freddie Mercury are more than words for Carlos Correa at this moment. I am typing these words on the most tenuous of eggshells. At any moment the fourth other shoe may drop on Correa. As of now though, he has a deal with the Twins to play the game he loves where his heart truly was all along throughout this maddening free agent process, which has few rivals in MLB free agent history lore. This has to top the betrayal Freddie Freeman found out about later on during the last free agent bizarre. Not bazaar, but the bizarre experience of the manic deals leading up to the lockout Dec. 1, 2021, followed by nearly three months of dead air before Freeman found a home post-lockout. 

All this to say Correa stays where he originally was before this whirlwind of speculation began. Is he better off in Minnesota? If you’re in a keeper or dynasty league, where did you think his fantasy value offered the greatest return between the Giants, Mets and Twins? That’s a question best left for the fantasy baseball subreddit. Those of you who have already tweeted or are writing up your analysis like me, are you writing with gusto convinced of the fact that Correa is stuck at SS now? Slow your roll. I’m not the enemy. The Twins have Kyle Farmer in house now fresh off the truck from Cincinnati. Farmer may not make you feel a twitch in the cockles of your heart from a fantasy perspective (92 wRC+ in 583 PA in 2022), but in real life baseball a veteran, full season .255 hitter who plays solid defense on a team who needs defensive assistance for their pitching staff may make Correa’s switch to 3B more realistic. 

That doesn’t really matter though to us fantasy savants. The only concern we should have is how the position he plays impacts the possibility of further injury time off for the oldest-feeling 28-year-old I can remember since Delmon Young. All I know is Jose Miranda needs a full-time playing opportunity in 2023. That bat is too damn sexy to be stifled by Luis Arraez or Alex Kirilloff. Ha! I was kidding about Kirilloff. That wrist isn’t scaring anybody on a mound. But it’s scaring everybody else in fantasy baseball who hoped he would be an imposing hitter.