Fantasy Baseball: Who are the Pittsburgh Pirates?

The Pittsburgh Pirates have quietly made the postseason as a National League Wild Card team three consecutive seasons and enter 2016 looking for a fourth straight trip to the postseason. While the team would like to avoid the Wild Card Playoff round for obvious reasons I am pretty sure the team will take any playoff spot they can get. The same can likely be said for you and your fantasy baseball league this season. Just get into the playoffs and give yourself a shot to do some maneuvering to win the league championship. Maybe these Pittsburgh Pirates can help you.

While everyone salivates over drafting McCutchen you may want to keep an eye out for Starling Marte. Marte has stolen over 100 bases in the last three seasons combined and set career highs in home runs (19) and RBI (81) in 2015. Marte is getting closer and closer to his prime and he may become a perennial fantasy stud as soon as this season. The same can be said for Gerrit Cole who enters his fourth MLB season fresh off a 19 win and 2.60 ERA campaign in 2015.

While we’ve covered McCutchen and Marte we would be silly not to at least mention their fellow outfielder Gregory Polanco in this post. Polanco is at least a step or two behind his battery mates in the outfield but he possesses the same speed and power combination as the other two do. Polanco should be fully recovered from the knee injury that hampered his 2015 production for much of the season and should be able to give you good quality from a later round pick.

The final pick for you today is not a pick that will help you on draft day but could help you by the end of the season. Every year we see a class of prospects that come up around June or July and take the league by storm for the second half of the season, see Carlos Correa’s 2015 campaign as a recent example of this, and the 2016 class may be led by Josh Bell. Bell, now 23-years old, is an outfielder by trade but was moved to first base simply because he’s blocked by so many talented players. Pittsburgh looks to have a combination of Michael Morse and Jon Jaso at the position to begin the year but they can only keep Bell down for so long and when they finally let him out he is likely going to take out all his frustration on opposing National League pitchers. Keep him on your watch list.

So there you have it, technically four players that could help you in your fantasy draft and they are all either young or prospects. I love Prospects Month and I love fantasy baseball so I really enjoy putting these posts up and I hope you enjoy reading them just as much. Pass them along if they help.