As the season approaches, your fantasy draft strategy is a necessarily dynamic and dangerously fluid conversation you're having with yourself. It's easy to set one's sights on elite producers and disregard what you could be giving up to land a stud. The truly disciplined fantasy owner must identify the players who are being projected to post drastically better numbers than they realistically may attain and patiently pass on them until the time and value are right. It's a gamble to wait for the guys you want, but keep opportunity cost in mind before impulsively taking a player earlier than his fantasy value might warrant.
Here is your primer to the 9 batters who are experiencing the most extreme cases of overrating in 2017. To clarify, these are not guys you need to avoid entirely (nearly everyone should be drafted for the right price), but their exploits are being hyped so far and wide that you might need to let a fellow league member use an egregiously early pick on these guys, so that you can swoop in and claim better value at a more competitive cost.
Billy Hamilton (Cincinnati Reds) — Hamilton is the fantasy equivalent of an otherwise mundane word that happens to freakishly fall upon a triple word score square in Scrabble to get you 21 points in a game you're losing by 60. He will absolutely excel at steals—all while hitting for a pedestrian average, manufacturing paltry run totals, and struggling in the power department. But inexperienced drafters are going to get googly-eyed over his SB numbers and amateurishly take him early, thinking they snagged a valuable weapon. Fantasy baseball success is about affordably loading your arsenal with multifaceted threats while refusing to compromise on versatility. Taking Hamilton as early as his projected ADP (69th according to Fantasy Pros) completely contradicts that objective. He is a total liability in every 5x5 category except steals and even more so if he is taken mid-draft. He's a real-life asset as a switch hitter who's intelligently quick on the base path; in Fantasyland you can get more and better for less.
