I just can’t shake that second half with James Wood. That’s why he’s being added to Busts 2.0.
Wood had an excellent first full season in the majors, but it was one of the more extreme “tale of two seasons” situations you’re ever likely to encounter. In the first half, he looked like a possible first-rounder for Fantasy, but hit a wall around the first week of July and never recovered – after a five-hit game on July 3rd, he hit just .210/.291/.369 with a 39% strikeout rate through the end of the season.
Ultimately, you can just take the overall season and declare him worth his price, and that’s more or less how I rank it. But every time it comes time to actually hit the draft button, I can’t bring myself to do it.
Wood is an incredible talent, and the highest end of the range of outcomes for him would probably make him a top-five player in baseball – we’re talking Aaron Judge-esque quality of contact and at least comparable athleticism. But Wood put up near-40% whiff rates against both breaking and offspeed pitches, and he still doesn’t have a swing geared for maximizing his ludicrous raw power. When Wood makes contact and hits it in the air, he crushes it – his 99.4 mph average exit velocity on line drives and flyballs was the fourth-best mark among all hitters last season, just ahead of Judge. But he only hit the ball in the air 50.3% of the time, the 22nd-lowest mark among all hitters, and he only hit the ball in the air to the pull side 11.3% of the time, the 21st-lowest mark.
That’s not a death sentence, of course. Christian Yelich elevates the ball to the pull side even less than Wood does; so does Elly De La Cruz, and he goes off the board even higher than Wood! But Yelich has a much better eye at the plate and makes a lot more contact, and De La Cruz has elite athleticism to elevate him (in addition to better swing decisions and contact skills, generally, though the gap is smaller. Wood has plenty of athleticism, but he also stole just 15 bases last season; a non-negligible amount, but not enough to elevate him if the worst-case scenario comes to fruition.
I think he’ll be fine. I think Wood is going to hit 30 homers and put up a respectable batting average, and may even take a big step forward and emerge as a reasonable facsimile of Aaron Judge from the left side of the plate. And that upside matters, and it’s worth chasing.
But the downside matters too, and when it comes time to actually draft Wood, I can’t get the second half of last year out of my head. That sure sounds like a bust candidate to me, so we’re adding him to Busts 2.0.
Here are four other big names I’m adding to my list, and you can read on to learn about the seven players I’m keeping from Busts 1.0, as well as the four I’m removing from my lists for the last few weeks of drafts.
But before we get to all of that, I wanted to make sure you all know about what we’re doing on the Fantasy Baseball Today YouTube channel on Thursday: The second annual Mock Draft Megastream Marathon! Scott White, Frank Stampfl, and I will be live beginning at 3:30 p.m. ET, and we’ll be staying live until we finish four complete drafts:
- One on the CBS platform at 3:30, where we’ll be joined by Vlad Sedler for a 12-team Roto draft.
- At 5 pm, we’ll be jumping over to the Yahoo! Platform to do a 12-team H2H categories draft with Joe Orrico.
- At 6:30, we’ll be doing a 12-team H2H points draft on ESPN with Ariel Cohen.
- And then at 8:30, the ‘Beat FBT’ NFBC draft will be happening, with Frank, Scott, and I sharing a team in a 12-team Roto league in their RotoWire Online Championship format.
That’s probably going to take us through around 11 pm, so we’ll be live on the FBT YouTube channel all day and well into the night. The goal here is to help you, our audience, no matter what kind of league you play in, and we’re going to have some fun with some great guests along the way.
Subscribe to the YouTube channel (“40K by Opening Day!”) and set notifications for when the stream goes live to make sure you don’t miss it.
Busts 2.0
Zack Wheeler, SP, Phillies
I hope I’m wrong. I ranked Wheeler optimistically coming into the spring, but always with the caveat that I wouldn’t really know how to approach him until we see him on the mound. And unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen before the start of the season.
Oh, Wheeler has pitched off a mound this spring, but only in bullpen sessions. Right now, on March 11, he’s around the second week of what is expected to be a six-week ramp-up process that will culminate, if all goes according to plan, with a mid-April return for the Phillies. Given that we weren’t sure we would see him pitch again when he suffered a blood clot that ultimately led to Thoracic Outlet surgery last fall, that alone feels like a big win.
But, as the man once mentioned, “Moral victories is for minor league coaches,” and if you’re drafting Wheeler right now, you’re doing it based on total blind faith. He might still be an effective major-league pitcher; he might still be an ace! But there’s really no way of knowing that until we see him on a mound, facing hitters, in a competitive environment, preferably with some Statcast data available to let us know how his stuff looks.
As it stands, that hasn’t happened yet, and yet he’s still going off the board around 120 in drafts. I want to be optimistic. I want to believe. But I can’t spend a ninth or 10th round pick on blind faith.
Noelvi Marte, 3B, Reds
I get that third base is a bit of a wasteland these days, but are we sure we want to spend a 10th-round pick on Marte?
Don’t get me wrong, I can see the case for it: Former top prospect who struggled in 2024 amid a PED suspension figured it out in 2025, putting up 14 homers and 10 steals in just 90 games. If all you do is project that out to 162, that’s 25 homers and 18 steals, and Marte will be in a very good home park and what should be an improved (and possibly quite good!) Reds lineup.
That’s the surface-level case. But it starts to fall apart under scrutiny. For one thing, the underlying numbers don’t quite back it up – Marte’s .321 wOBA came with just a .304 xwOBA, mostly because, while his high-end exit velocities are borderline elite, Marte doesn’t get there consistently. And then there’s this: Marte had an .842 OPS at the end of August, but slumped so badly in September that it dropped nearly 100 points by the end of the season. He hit just .191/.214/.287 with a 33% strikeout rate. Whenever we have the breakout, I’m always more confident in it repeating when they run through the finish line; Marte tripped and fell a few meters before the tape.
On top of that, I don’t think Marte’s playing time is nearly secure enough to justify his price. He’s being treated as if he’s the everyday right fielder, and he certainly could be that. But manager Terry Francona is on record as saying Marte “struggled so bad against lefties” that he can’t really consider him as a top-of-the-lineup option, and Marte’s struggles defensively have been an ongoing topic of conversation in Reds camp. I’m not saying I don’t expect Marte to make the team, but I do think there’s a lot more playing time risk here than his price allows for. He has to be on the busts list at this point.
Luis Robert, OF, Mets
I mean … have we not seen how the past two seasons went? Robert wasn’t useless in 2025, especially, but he was more or less a stolen bases specialist as he struggled through another poor hitting season. It was relatively easy to write off his struggles in 2024 as an unrepresentative fluke, but you know what they say about getting fooled twice.
And there just isn’t enough of a discount for Robert coming off his second poor showing as a hitter. His ADP has fallen from 83.2 last season to 108.9 so far in the month of May, ahead of the likes of Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman, and Jo Adell, all of whom were better than Robert last season. Maybe the trade to the Mets will motivate him, and he’ll snap out of his funk. It’s possible, I suppose. But then you have the ever-present injury risk layered on top there, and it just all makes me think maybe Robert isn’t worth the trouble anymore.
Carlos Estevez, RP, Royals
It’s not just because Estevez’s fastball velocity is down like 5 mph this spring. I’m smarter than that!
But it doesn’t help!
The truth is, Estevez was already one of the more obvious bust candidates coming off a 2.45 ERA and 42 saves. He had an identical 2.45 ERA the previous year, of course, but he did that with both a higher strikeout rate and lower walk rate than he managed in 2025. Last season, he pitched to a 3.69 xERA, so we already would have expected some serious regression here. Now, if he doesn’t get the velocity back, we’re also likely talking about a lower baseline talent level than even the 3.69 xERA would indicate. There’s a lot of ways for that to go wrong, it would seem. I’m drafting a lot of Matt Strahm or Lucas Erceg in the late rounds in case this falls apart quickly.
Players I’m keeping from Busts 1.0
We did this exercise the first time before Spring Training. Here’s what hasn’t changed in the past two months:
- Oneil Cruz, OF, Pirates – I can certainly see the upside case for Cruz. He’s an electric athlete who nearly stole 40 bases last season, and we only need some small improvements in his contact skills or optimization of his swing to see some 30-homer upside. But when we’re talking about a top-100 pick, the downside looms a whole lot larger. There is real platoon risk here, and he just hit .200. I’ll bet on some improvement there, but not at his price.
- Nick Kurtz, 1B, Athletics – Kurtz is awesome. But he’s probably not as good as Aaron Judge, and Judge followed up his historic rookie season by falling short of a 1.000 OPS or 40 homers for four straight seasons. Kurtz overperformed his expected wOBA by more than 40 points, one of the biggest gaps in baseball, and he really struggled against lefties, especially. I expect him to be awesome, but I’m not so certain he’ll be better than, say, Rafael Devers, that I’m willing to spend a top-20 pick to find out.
- Nick Pivetta, SP, Padres – “Fade the 33-year-old coming off a career year” is usually advice that won’t steer you wrong. Pivetta should be pretty helpful with WHIP and strikeouts, so I can certainly see the appeal. But it’s still a top-100 pick on a veteran with exactly one season with an ERA under 4.00 in his career. I’m not too worried about the arm fatigue Pivetta has been dealing with this spring, but it certainly doesn’t help his case.
- Spencer Strider, SP, Braves – I went deep on the problems with the Strider optimism here, and while there was some expected improvement to Strider’s fastball velocity in his second start of the spring, he’s still a long way from where he was when he was one of the best pitchers in baseball. He doesn’t need to be one of the best pitchers in baseball to justify an ADP around pick 120, of course, but he surely needs to be significantly better than he was last season, and I just don’t have any reason to believe he’s figured that out yet. There are enough interesting pitchers available even later in the top 200 to make Strider worth this price in my eyes.
- Chandler Simpson, OF, Rays – Simpson has earned positive marks for the work he has put in on defense so far this spring, but we haven’t seen much evidence to back up the idea that he’s significantly improved since he has played just four games. The defense matters because Simpson’s limitations as a hitter are pretty clear and locked in – he’s going to hit for a strong batting average and steal a bunch of bases, but he also might be the least impactful power hitter in the game, and is unlikely to draw many walks. To be a viable starting outfielder for the Rays, he needs to be a plus defender, and he was a long way from that. And now he’s dealing with a hamstring injury this spring, which is definitely not what we want to see from a guy whose entire game is built around speed. As a cheap-ish source of steals, he’s fine, but I’d prefer to not get to the point in my draft where I feel like I need to take him.
- Cedanne Rafaela, 2B/OF, Red Sox – I’m just not a believer in the bat. As a hitter, Rafaela checks off basically every box as below-average, and while his home park and baseline athleticism help him overcome that somewhat, the margin for error here is just extremely slim – he had an OPS below .700 in four of six calendar months last season. The multi-eligibility is a nice bonus, but I have Rafaela ranked about 50 spots lower than his ADP. I’m not 100% certain Rafaela is better than Otto Lopez, honestly.
- Roki Sasaki, SP, Dodgers – I’m hardly climbing out on a ledge here on Sasaki (his ADP has dropped to 277.2 in March), so if you want to argue he doesn’t count because he’s too cheap, I’m sympathetic to that argument. But this is still about planting a flag on the belief that Sasaki just isn’t a viable major-league starting pitcher right now. The Dodgers have the luxury of giving him a long-ish look in the rotation, but I’m just not sure he’s anywhere near being ready to contribute.
Players I’m removing from Busts 1.0
- Nolan McLean, SP, Mets – My case against McLean mostly came down to his price relative to the other second-year pitchers, and that just isn’t a strong enough reason to be out on a pitcher as talented as McLean.
- Ben Rice, C, Yankees – It’s a similar case here, where Rice was starting to be pushed into the top-50 or higher in some drafts, and I can’t get on board with that. But the breakout case here is stronger than the bust case, even if I’m not sure I really want to pay the premium for Rice right now.
- Jacob Wilson, SS, Athletics – Ultimately, Wilson is just too cheap to really justify a bust case. It seems like a lot of people think he’s a more dynamic version of Luis Arraez (and I don’t really agree), but when it comes time to draft, he ends up going around 180. That’s fine, even if I don’t love the player.
- Shane Bieber, SP, Blue Jays – When I wrote Busts 1.0, it didn’t seem as if the news about Bieber’s forearm fatigue from last season had really settled in with people. With his ADP dropping outside of the top 300 in March, however, that complaint no longer qualifies.
- Blake Snell, SP, Dodgers – Snell was never a good bet for innings or health, which was why he was an easy bust call when he was going inside the top 75. Now that we know he won’t be ready for Opening Day and will be limited after dealing with shoulder issues last season, he’s dropped outside of the top 150, which makes it a lot easier to stomach the risk and picture the upside.
