Jesse Winker (OF, CIN) - 2018 Fantasy Baseball Sleepers & Draft Values

BALLER MOVE: Target ~275 or end of your draft

CURRENT ADP:  324

ANALYSIS: It’s hard to find a better sleeper candidate than Winker heading into the 2018 season. The Reds outfielder has fallen on the MLB Pipeline top 100 prospects list over each of the past three seasons. He opens the 2018 season as the #82 overall prospect according to MLB Pipeline, his lowest rank since entering the list in 2015. The reason for this is not exactly clear, especially when looking at how Winker has performed during his time in the minors, as well as his brief stint in the majors last season.

Winker was a .298/.398/.449 hitter over 2438 minor league PA. He hit a rather unimpressive 56 HR over six minor league seasons, but Winker has legitimate HR power and is still a young 24-years-old, so he has time to develop. In 2016 and 2017, Winker’s minor league HR/FB was below 3% (the average is typically around 10%). This can be mostly attributed to luck, and we can see that Winker was getting unlucky by taking a look at his MLB stats from last season. In 137 MLB PA Winker triple-slashed .298/.375/.529 with 7 HR. His HR/FB was a little inflated at 23.3%, but Winker was due for some positive regression. Those numbers over a full season would translate to a top-20 outfielder pretty easily with a shot at top-10.

Winker also has shown good plate discipline over his career. He’s never walked less than 10.9% of the time at any level and has never had a strikeout rate of more than 18.5% at any level where he got more than 95 PA. Winker hits the ball hard (only 12.2% of balls he put in play in 2017 were hit softly), so his success from last season should continue to a degree. He is currently going as the 81st outfielder off the board in mixed leagues, so it seems like a no-brainer to scoop on Winker and hope he shows everyone why he has been a top-100 prospect for each of the past three seasons.