With great risk comes great reward in baseball, whether played on actual diamonds or the ones found in digital fantasy leagues. It's not a monumental challenge to assemble an 81-win team in Major League Baseball or finish fifth in your 12-team fantasy league. But who wants to be an also-ran?
At some point, every victor is going to have to risk something, take a chance on that delicious upside even when the benefits are far from guaranteed. Going through the ZiPS projections for 2020, here are some of my favorite high-upside gambles, for real life teams or in fantasy. This will also include the 90% and 10% projections for ERA and FanGraphs-blend WAR for pitchers, and average, OBP and slugging for hitters, as best- and worst-case scenarios for each player to give you a sense of the range of the risk for each of these 10 players.
1B Daniel Murphy, Colorado Rockies
It's very tempting to write Murphy off after two injury-filled seasons and a rather lackluster 2019 campaign for the Rockies. ZiPS only projects a .296/.345/.480 season, good enough for only 0.7 WAR in 121 games. But projecting an injury-prone player is very difficult, and Murphy is not so far gone down this road to think that it would be impossible for him to stay healthy at first base. Even oft-injured Eric Davis in the days of mid-yore found relative health playing at lower-impact positions than center field. Murphy was rushed back from a broken finger in 2019 and that kind of injury can have a big impact on offensive numbers.
Murphy was an extremely valuable offensive player as recently as 2017, and the Rockies don't appear to be have any notions that he can still play second base. Ryan Zimmerman 's 2017 mini-resurgence is the kind of season that Murphy could put together. And for fantasy purposes, if you're taking the approach of sifting through the interchangeable third-tier first basemen towards the end of the draft, an adequate first baseman in Coors is almost always recommendable. ZiPS actually has Murphy projected as the second-most likely first baseman to hit .325 at 11.6%, behind only Freddie Freeman.
Upside: .311/.370/.558, 3.4 fWAR | Downside: .270/.315/.416, -0.2 fWAR
Darvish's injury history makes him a significant risk. In eight seasons since coming over from Japan, Darvish has spent a chunk of the season injured in four of them. But what you shouldn't be skeptical about is his performance. Darvish is perceived as riskier than he actually is because of his dreadful early-season performance, but he literally stopped walking batters last summer, going from allowing 49 walks before the All-Star break to just seven after, while seeing his strikeout rate simultaneously improve.
The thing about strikeout and walk rates is that changes become predictive very quickly, so there's little need to worry about sample size here. If Darvish is healthy enough to pitch 180 innings, ZiPS projects him to strike out the fifth-most batters in baseball.
Upside: 2.55 ERA, 4.8 fWAR | Downside: 4.95 ERA, 0.5 fWAR
SS Didi Gregorius, Philadelphia Phillies
Gregorius spent half of 2019 recovering from Tommy John surgery and put up his worst season since his early days with the Diamondbacks. As a result, he has gone cheaply in both real life and fantasy, the Phillies signing him to a one-year contract and fantasy players drafting him in the 200s overall and in the 20s among players who qualify at short.
ZiPS, however, projects Gregorius as the No. 14 shortstop in MLB and that's with the computer's grumpy assumption that he only plays 120 games. The opportunity is there; Gregorius is not 35 years old, he's 30 and he hit 27 homers, scored 89 runs and tallied 86 RBIs in 2018. ZiPS projects a .497 slugging percentage for Gregorius in Philadelphia -- which would do plenty to help propel the Phillies into contention -- as well as a .277 batting average. Unless you're in an OBP-league, those are fine numbers for a shortstop you can pick up deep into your draft.
Upside: .288/.333/.546, 4.9 fWAR | Downside: .245/.280/.408, 1.1 fWAR
SP Trevor Bauer, Cincinnati Reds
Bauer had a disappointing follow-up to his 12-6, 2.21 ERA season in 2018, but that was largely due to unrealistic expectations. Bauer's 0.46 HR/9 in that breakout season had approximately zero chance of being an actual level of ability, but nevertheless too many people expected him to be a Cy Young contender in 2019. Now people have gone too far the other direction, treating Bauer almost as a nonentity.
But the Reds didn't trade away one of their top prospects in Taylor Trammell on a whim. ZiPS projects a 3.74 ERA and 222 strikeouts for Bauer in 2020. There's a risk that the increasingly fly ball-prone Bauer wilts in Cincinnati as he did in his 10 starts for the Reds last summer, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Upside: 3.00 ERA, 5.3 fWAR | Downside: 4.95 ERA, 1.2 fWAR
SP Mike Foltynewicz, Atlanta Braves
Of the second-tier starting pitchers, no pitcher projects as riskier in ZiPS than Folty does. His whole statistical record is a set of contradictions. He's the pitcher who can hit 96 mph but has trouble punching out batters at a rate proportional to his stuff. ZiPS always saw Nathan Eovaldi as risky for similar reasons.
But injuries can mask performance upside and he was surely brought back too quickly by the Braves last year. And the fact that Foltynewicz has room to improve his strikeout rate -- he actually had a higher swinging-strike percentage in his mediocre 2019 than his excellent 2018 -- gives him realistic upside. He's being nearly forgotten in both expectations for the Braves' rotation this season and in fantasy, and he ought not be so underestimated in 2020.
Upside: 3.31 ERA, 4.2 fWAR | Downside: 5.77 ERA, -0.5 fWAR
OF/3B Yoshitomo Tsutsugo, Tampa Bay Rays
A two-year, $12 million contract is hardly a major signing for most teams, but the Rays don't make those kinds of signings unless they really like a player. Tsutsugo didn't attract a ton of press this winter, but he has a career .910 OPS in Japan, and unlike some hitters who come over, he is still in his prime at age 28.
There's always more risk with a player from the Japanese leagues, but Tsutsugo's profile is very MLB-like, awash with Three True Outcomes goodness. ZiPS projects 27 homers and 81 RBI for him, plus the ability to use him at third base, which makes him an interesting flier. Remember, projections can be wrong in two directions; if ZiPS is wrong, it could be underrating him, not overrating.
Upside: .261/.347/.480, 3.0 fWAR | Downside: .230/.280/.415, 0.4 fWAR
2B Mike Moustakas, Cincinnati Reds
The Brewers took the initial risk, daring to use Moustakas at second base, a position he had never played professionally (although he was initially drafted as a shortstop). That gamble paid off as Moose turned out to be surprisingly adequate in his 40 games at second. Now the Reds are doubling down on that bet, counting on Moustakas as their full-time second baseman for years, without an obvious place to move him if he falls short of his very small-sample defensive numbers from 2019.
Moustakas isn't as well-rounded in fantasy as someone like Ketel Marte at second base or Gleyber Torres. But if you're thinking of drafting Moose, guys like that are long off the board. Though Eric Karabell ranks Moustakas 13th on his fantasy cheat sheet and later in the draft, getting a player who could conceivably lead second basemen in two offensive categories is interesting value. Plus, if you already did get one of those well-rounded second basemen, Moustakas works at third, too.
Upside: .281/.350/.578, 4.5 fWAR | Downside: .254/.312/.450, 1.1 fWAR
SP Kevin Gausman, San Francisco Giants
Gausman is a fascinating pitcher with a roller coaster ride of a career. He avoided the injury bug that hit fellow O's prospect Dylan Bundy for years, but he never became the ace that Baltimore was hoping for given his fastball that once could brush near 100 mph.
It's risky to put all your chips into a pitcher coming off a 5.72 ERA in 2019, but the Giants are hardly doing that on a one-year, $9 million contract. FIP has proved to be far more predictive of future ERAs than actual ERAs are, and Gausman's 3.98 FIP in 2019 was actually his best since his first full season back in 2014. Pitchers with sudden jumps in strikeout rate tend to be good gambles and Gausman, even when struggling, saw his K-rate jump 30% last year.
The Giants aren't going to compete and their offense won't get Gausman enough wins to make him a fantasy star for you, but he's an interesting stash if your team is competitive this year.
Upside: 3.08 ERA, 3.3 fWAR | Downside: 5.52 ERA, -0.9 fWAR
1B Justin Smoak, Milwaukee Brewers
Projecting Smoak with all 30 teams, the park in which he projects for the most WAR in ZiPS is Milwaukee's Miller Park. So it's quite fitting that Milwaukee is the team that signed the former Blue Jay given that we're long past the years in which teams have a casual ignorance of modern analytics.
Miller Park is an especially comfortable home for a left-handed pull slugger, and while Smoak is a switch-hitter, he causes more damage hitting from that side of the plate. Smoak is incentivized to take advantage of this park, and when he has hit the ball to right field hitting left-handed, he's a career .348 hitter with a .715 slugging percentage. The Brewers are betting on that kind of outcome.
As fantasy gambles go in deeper leagues, Smoak may be a perfect fit; he could hit a full season's worth of homers while platooning, preventing him from doing too much damage to your team's batting average.
Upside: .246/.369/.497, 3.1 fWAR | Downside: .225/.326/.393, 0.1 fWAR
RP Craig Kimbrel, Chicago Cubs
Once the steadiest of elite closers, Kimbrel's 6.53 ERA and nine homers allowed in just 20 ⅔ innings for the Cubs has changed the certainty of that outlook. Kimbrel's control may not ever recover to his pre-Boston years, but short-term homer totals like that tend to be flukes. Also working in Kimbrel's favor is the fact that 2019 was such an odd year for him; the whole offseason free-agent fiasco left him unsigned until midseason, and in his short time, he had both knee and elbow injuries.
An offseason to recover and actually starting the year with an employer gives Kimbrel an opportunity for a fresh start and a chance to deliver something more like the results he provided in Atlanta and Boston as a top-tier closer.
Upside: 2.12 ERA, 1.6 fWAR | Downside: 4.56 ERA, 0.0 fWAR