Overvalued, Undervalued Trade Targets - Buy/Sell for Fantasy Baseball (Week 17)

July 21, 2023

Trade candidates to buy or sell in fantasy baseball after Week 17 of the 2023 MLB season. Ben Rosener lists overvalued and undervalued players to target or trade away.

Making the right trades can be crucial to championship success in fantasy baseball. It's almost as important as the draft, if not more. While most trades can have a significant impact on your fantasy team, it’s the deals where you acquire undervalued players and witness their production improve that can really tip the scales in your favor in terms of the standings.

The same can certainly be said about trading away players at the right time when they have the most fantasy trade value. Those deals could happen in the second week of April or the last week of August, but they’re impactful all the same.

Here are some candidates who are currently undervalued and worth pursuing in trades, as well as some overvalued players who you should consider dealing if they currently occupy a spot on your roster.

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Undervalued Players To Trade For

Pete Alonso, 1B, New York Mets

Alonso was mentioned in this column a few months ago as a player to target in trade talks for fantasy managers due to his excellent underlying metrics, but a set of surface-level metrics that didn’t quite line up.

That was May.

Now we’re nearly through July and Alonso is still making plenty of quality contact, yet the surface-level results aren’t there yet – or rather they’re not as productive as they could be.

For the season, Alonso is batting .205 with a .305 on-base percentage, 26 home runs, and three stolen bases in 364 plate appearances. He’s added 50 runs scored and has driven in 62 runs as of the beginning of play on Wednesday.

However, the slugger is also sporting a .373 xwOBA and a 14.2% barrel rate on the season, which rank in the 89^th and 90^th percentiles respectively.

Locked into the cleanup spot in the Mets’ lineup – literally, all of Alonso’s starts this year have come with him hitting fourth – the 28-year-old also owns the Majors’ lowest BABIP among qualified hitters.

So far, only four batters have a BABIP south of the .330 mark this season. The fourth-lowest belongs to Miguel Vargas at .224. Kyle Schwarber checks in with a .200 BABIP while Vargas’ Dodgers teammate Max Muncy is sporting a .184 BABIP. Alonso entered play Wednesday with a .182 BABIP.

His drop in hard-hit rate – it’s at 39.6% currently, which would be a career low – isn’t ideal. However, with such a high xwOBA and a lower chase rate than he's logged in a single season in his career, Alonso seems poised for a serious uptick in production sometime soon.

For reference, the first baseman's previous career low for a chase rate was 30.8%, this season it’s down to 27.1%.

Clarke Schmidt, SP, New York Yankees

Like Alonso, Schmidt has some encouraging underlying metrics, or rather promising signs beyond his surface-level metrics – more on those in a bit – but his season-long stats have been severely impacted by a poor stretch to start the year.

The Yankees starter was tagged for 33 runs, 28 earned runs, 14 walks, and eight home runs in his first 40 innings (nine starts), posting a 6.30 ERA. And while he struck out 48 during that span and had a somewhat more reasonable FIP (4.70) it was still a rough stretch to start the year for Schmidt. The right-hander also failed to reach the five-inning mark in six of those nine outings.

Since then, things have been markedly different for the right-hander. In 10 appearances, which included nine starts and a brief relief outing prior to the All-Star break, Schmidt has pitched to a 2.83 ERA and a 3.89 FIP. He’s thrown at least five innings in all but one of those nine starts, registering four pitcher wins in the process.

Perhaps most crucially for fantasy purposes, the 27-year-old hasn’t allowed more than three earned runs in any of those nine outings.

And while the right-hander is striking out 7.83 batters per nine frames during that span – to go along with 2.17 walks and 1.00 home runs surrendered per nine innings – his overall stuff this season has been encouraging despite the recent decrease in strikeouts.

For the year, Schmidt is sporting a 111 Stuff+, per FanGraphs. Among starters with at least 90 innings pitched this season, it’s tied for the 10^th-highest metric in the league with Los Angeles’ Clayton Kershaw and ahead of other impact fantasy starters like Zac Gallen, Hunter Brown, George Kirby, Logan Gilbert, Aaron Nola, and Nathan Eovaldi.

Elsewhere, among the same group of starters with a minimum of 90 innings, only nine own a higher metric than Schmidt’s 107 number, per FanGraphs.

In short, or long rather, Clarke Schmidt is probably better than his 4.31 ERA would indicate. The same can probably be said for his 4.23 FIP. Those metrics might, in theory, make it easier for fantasy managers to work out a deal involving the starter, who has the ceiling and recent track record of an above-average fantasy starter.

Overvalued Players To Trade Away

Chris Bassitt, SP, Toronto Blue Jays

Pitcher wins aren’t at the same level importance-wise as they used to be, but the stat can be particularly crucial in most fantasy formats. Like saves, it can be worth chasing in some formats.

And speaking of pitcher wins, Chris Bassitt has been very good at accumulating them this season. Pitching for a Toronto team 10 games over the .500 mark, Bassitt has rattled off nine wins this season. Only 10 starters have more this year, and most likely aren’t easily available via trade. Zac Gallen, Spencer Strider, Nathan Eovaldi, Shane McClanahan, Taijuan Walker, Zach Eflin, Marcus Stroman, Clayton Kershaw, Charlie Morton, and Dean Kremer are the 10 starting pitchers in question here.

If someone in your league is chasing pitcher wins, now might be the time to trade away Bassitt, especially in Roto formats where his nine wins are already a part of your stat totals for the season.

Because while the Blue Jays starter does have nine wins so far, six of those victories came in a 12-game stretch to start the season where the veteran logged a 3.41 ERA in 74 innings. However, he also turned in a 4.81 FIP during the same stretch.

Since then, Bassitt does have three more pitcher wins in his last eight starts, but his ERA (5.40) and FIP (4.40) are still rather elevated.

The 34-year-old did turn in a quality outing in his last start, allowing seven hits and a pair of earned runs while striking out five batters in six innings against the Arizona Diamondbacks. That should, in theory, only help his fantasy trade value.

Bassitt simply has struggled too much at times this season. And while the wins certainly help, this is still a starter who ranks in the 40^th percentile or lower in each of the following: strikeout rate (21.9%, 40^th percentile), xBA (.252, 35^th percentile), chase rate (27.2%, 34^th percentile)  xwOBA (.329, 33rd percentile), xSLG (.427, 33^rd percentile), barrel rate (9.2%, 28^th percentile), and whiff rate (21.4%, 18^th percentile).

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