Keeper Landscape Blog 2026
Dave took his family to a football game instead of paying his mortgage last month, sort of, maybe more like instead of getting a trip to Cabo paid for. Perhaps he was just reminiscing on the last two times that Georgia Tech and Miami played that went the Jackets won. Who knows.
It's the blog at least two of you have been waiting for, Keepers!
Yours truly has become far more draft-dollars focused in the last few years instead of draft-round-number focused, so its only natural that this line of thinking carry over into Keepers analysis, and you'll see one good example below.
Since the screenshots I sent out earlier, I've been able to dig into Floored-specific valuations instead of just Average Draft Position values, which don't take our rules into account. I've also pulled out the three year keepers (sorry Paul, can't keep Julio or Framber) and for keepers that had to be taken in later rounds due to a manager having multiple keepers with the same valuation, I normalized those back to their planned-value (such as Dean having Garret Crochet and Jacob deGrom who are both "9th" round keepers this year). Finally, I want to note that these are using fangraphs stat projections, run through their auction value calculators, again using our rules. It is NOT Yahoo's ranking of these players. I'll show both ADP and Fangraphs values for these players and typically Yahoo's are somewhere in between. A good example is Max's CJ Abrams: ADP 56, Yahoo rank (with our rules considered) 82, Fangraphs rank 151. Keepable in the 10th round, he looked like a good keeper at ADP, a meh keeper in yahoo, and a bad keeper per Fangraphs. Believe what you want to believe.
Keeper Values using Average Draft Position
Keeper Values using Floored-Rules with Fangraphs Player Projections
Manager Outlook for 2026's Keepers
Cumulative Draft Capital Values
- Cory has run away with keeper values this year, $90 of excess value from his keepers is needle-moving. I wrote earlier about how keepers have lost their 'juice' with our expanded rosters, but don't tell Cory that. Cory's top keepers being pitchers slightly increase his keeper value with the addition of two hitting spots. More hitters needed means the value of top hitters slightly goes down. Fewer pitchers (theoretically) needed means the value of top pitchers slightly goes up.
- check this chart out for reference, using our rules from 2025 vs 2026, here is how the top 20 players changed value, again, using the fangraphs value calculator
- These aren't league-ruining dollar value changes, it just nudges the scale Cory's way a little bit.
- Remember that player who's round of value was more valuable than the rest? Look at Cory's Junior Caminero. While in year's past, his 2 rounds of value may not have jumped off the page, because those two rounds are rounds 3 and 4, he is projecting to be more valuable of a keeper than players with double that number of value. That's why dollar values are more helpful than rounds of value, as a keeper metric.
- ok but what about trading?
- Cory and Dave (~$9), Michael (~$7), and Dean (~$4) have the most keeper value to trade away from their 4th keeper.
- Arthur, Kevin, Keith, Max, and Paul would all be increasing their team value by finding a trade with one of these partners and getting a deal
- for example, that ~$7 to Michael is wasted if he doesn't sell a player. we can control 4 players but can only keep 3. Nathan Eovaldi ($6.71 of keeper capital) for a 16th round pick (~$5 of draft capital), who says no?
- I'm feeling the eye glaze of draft capital talk setting in so let's get back to an observation about how this might apply to the draft
- There are only 6 players from the top 20 ranked players that will be kept this year, that's basically the same number as has been kept from the top 20 the last few years; but 9 players are projected to be kept between ranks 21 and 40, that's notably more than the last few years.
That will wrap the keeper landscape blog for this year. Happy trading!
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