Week 17, Can Players Actually Have Keeper Value By Now?

 

Dave's son Tyler starts 1st grade today as a young buck of only 5.5 years. Tyler must be as good at school as Dave is at finding draft day breakouts, as long as they aren't named Austin Riley.

• It was Dave's turn to pop this week. It was his best week of the year and it came at a great time against a playoff contender in Dean, knocking Dean out of a playoff spot, for one week at least.
• Kevin's big week had a bigger impact on his Year to Date Power Rank, launching him into first in that valuation. Arthur still holds the slimmest of leads in the YTD EWW tracker. It was not all sunshine and rainbows for Kevin last week though as three top 100 players of his went down with injury: Soto, Bellinger, Langeliers. He'll need his new acquisitions to fill the void because we're quickly reaching that time of year where many injuries can end one's season.
• Arthur's summer of mid continued as his injuries keep piling up and his plate appearance totals keep lagging. This week it was matchup luck that kept him afloat by posting a 4.32 wins over expected as he played a struggling Cory team. It continues to always be something for this Arthur team this year. Stay out of his way.
• Dean and Michael round out what has become a clear cut top 5 teams now with 6 weeks left in the regular season. These two managers will face off against each other in the last week of the season.
• With Paul beginning his sell off, his team decided to not make him regret it, this week at least, by having a rough weekend in what could have been a crucial matchup for the standings and falling further down the leaderboards.

We've reached the trade deadline season, both in MLB and in Floored. Keeper trading has fallen out of style for a number of reasons in our league, but the topic does still come up. I would also like to update our keeper rules to make them more interesting again because we have not updated keeper valuations since expanding rosters from 21 players to 30 players. It is VERY hard to turn an undrafted player into a top 100 pick to get that player keeper value. But how often does it happen? Do we know by August 1st if a player will be a keeper? I dove in.

I used 2024 and 2025 player data: draft pick values of players, comparing them to values as of August 1st of that year, and then compared it to their value at the following draft. We're trying to figure out if the breakouts of 2026 could be keepers in 2027, so let's start from who were the breakouts of 2024:

As of August 1, 2024, here were the highest out-performing-their-draft-value players (breakouts), what their draft value was ($0 for undrafted), what their year to date value by August 1st was, therefore we can determine their profit to that point, then we know what their 2025 preseason rank ended up being so we know their keeper value was. There's a lot of ways to examine this, so stay with me.

Let's start with the top 30 breakouts that year:

• First observation: the best breakouts weren't necessarily the best keeper values. Seth Lugo? Yeah he had been great, but he was a mid-career player who largely kept it up the rest of the year; but the 2025 rankings didn't really buy it, and his 2025 wasn't that great.
• On the hitting side, we have another story: Jordan Westburg. 2024 could have been his prospect breakout year...but he trailed off at the end of the year and has mostly been middling since.
• There are success stories here as well. Paul Skenes arrived in 2024, so did Tarik Skubal after his injury. Marcell Ozuna was 'real' for a few more months and into the 2025 draft, but 2025 was not kind to him.
• The correlation of these 30 breakout players to their keeper value is 0.46, not bad

Let's keep going, what if we just pared this down to players that had a preseason value above $0.

• There's a lot more keeper value here. Not a huge surprise. If a player is established one year, fantasy rankings tends to believe you are 'real' more than a one year breakout.
• Fewer players go from breakouts to zero keeper value here: Ragans (injury), Abrams (valuations didn't trust his power was real yet), Gilbert (was already a pretty high pick by 2024 so he didn't quite keep that level down the stretch)
• Fewer players have keeper value here though. Once drafted, its very hard to improve your stock by at least two rounds
• Among these top 20 players, the correlation is actually negative: -0.08 (it's basically 0) 
• If we narrow this in to drafted players but players from outside the top 10 rounds, the correlation goes up to 0.38. Better than negative, but not as good as simply looking at who the breakouts were.

OK but what about 2025?

• 2025 performance into 2026 draft was a great year for continuity. Studs Skubal and Skenes held their value while Raleigh, Sanchez, and Woo did the same (even if one manager stuck his nose up at said value)
• Undrafted breakout players almost entirely lost their value other than Kurtz
• The correlation from Aug 1 Profit to Keeper Value among these 30 players was 0.77, a very strong number
• Even removing Skubal and Skenes who really tilt the data, the correlation is still 0.58, another relatively strong correlation, as far as fantasy statistics go.

How are things looking in 2026?

• This year is looking a lot more like 2024 performance into the 2025 where most of the breakouts didn't keep as much of their keeper value as the 2025 breakouts did into 2026
• You can see all of the undrafted (or projected value less than $0 like Wetherholt) players that have resulted in significant profit so far. It would take a major fall off for once-top-prospect Jordan Walker to not be a top 100 player at the draft next year, but Justin Wrobleski would still have a wide variance bar on his draft day projection with his low strikeout totals and iffy underlying metrics early in 2026 followed up what has turned into a stellar campaign in the summer months.
• 2026 has been the year of the catcher, but will Dingler and Hicks really be top 100 picks next year?
• Journeymen Jake McCarthy and Jake Bauers will be interesting names to watch, their performance has mostly been real this year, but will the fantasy industry really want to pay for what should be the back side of the aging curve next year?
• If you have a player that you think should have keeper value that isn't on this list? It could be worth talking about. If next year is more like 2024 into 2025, then if a player was drafted and outperformed expectations, they were more likely to be kept than if they were undrafted and outperformed, but the return on that keeper was not much value. Here are the 30 highest profit players among drafted and keeper-eligible:

So what's the takeaway? If you're trying to project the likelihood of someone being a keeper, a player is more likely to turn August 1 profit into draft day keeper value if they were drafted the year before, but ideally not if they were drafted in the top 11 rounds.

Does this actually matter anymore, as our current rules are set up? Not really.

With 30 player rosters, depth is more important than top end talent or a few-round discount on a player. Cory had the two top keepers this year in Skenes and Skubal but has been unable to build a full roster around them. Arthur way overpaid via offseason keeper trading to acquire James Wood and Elly De La Cruz, but those players have been great and Arthur found a number of breakouts elsewhere. Any strategy works if you pick the right players.

Keepers used to be a more impactful aspect to our league's strategy that has largely dissipated. If that's what everyone wants, that's cool. We certainly have plenty to think about in our silly little game. I think keepers add a fun aspect to team building and certainly to offseason trading, so I'd love for them be more valuable again. Comments are always welcomed, but we'll save the debate and any rule changes for the off-season.