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Target skills over stats at your fantasy baseball draft

Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports / Reuters

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Accurate fantasy projections are impossible. To rely on any single prediction is to rely on guesswork. Past statistics aren't useless, but it's what they represent that is notable. Perennial instances of 30-40 home runs suggests sustainable power, while a single season surge provides less certainty. You can count on power in the former sense more readily than in the latter.

Without context, these stats are meaningless and relying on them too much on draft day can force you to overlook or overvalue certain players. Instead of relying on a small sample size of a player's production, take a larger look at their profile. What do they offer?

Multiple Skills

The reason Arizona Diamondbacks 1B Paul Goldschmidt is a top-5 pick might be weighted by his batting average and stolen bases relative to his position. While 30 steals seems unlikely again (you never know!), what you do know is he will run because it is an established element of his game. Speed (for a 1B), a great batter's eye, and power make him a multi-faceted option.

You can't easily find success by plugging and playing category-specific players, exclusively. One or two will help, but it's a rocky design for an entire team. Players like Colorado's Charlie Blackmon and Pittsburgh's Starling Marte offer balance, which will boost their respective ADPs in 2017.

Draft players who benefit your team in a variety of ways and save the less dynamic players for the waiver wire. If you come to a crossroads where you have two players of similar ADP available and you're uncertain where to go, err on the side of caution and take the player who provides a wide variety of returns, even if the alternative is elite in a single category.

Good and Bad Luck

The big reason you can't get too caught up in a single season's worth of statistics is that sample size never accounts for luck. Baseball is a long season, but it's abnormal for a player to have a good or bad season sustained by an extended sequence of luck.

Take Washington Nationals OF Bryce Harper, a consensus top-3 pick in 2016. He could very easily fall out of the first round in 2017 because of his .243/.373/.441 slash line. All were below his carer averages, exacerbated by a .264 BABIP. Harper actually posted the best strikeout rate of his career (18.7 percent) and made more contact while also flashing his speed again (21 SB).

Harper's short career has been plagued by inconsistency. Maybe the steals are a mirage, or they could be part of his total package. When you look at the whole player, you can see Harper will usually provide expert power, a good batting eye and speed. His failures in 2016 could be chalked up to bad luck.

Instead of anticipating a specific number in any one category, look at where the most consistent returns have been. The 21 stolen bases could be anomalous, so you know you'll have to add speed elsewhere, too, but you also can't expect him to be a net negative in batting average again.

Rolling the Dice on Injuries

While ignoring injuries is a poor strategy, weighing them too heavily is equally obtuse. Giancarlo Stanton has an excellent skills profile with very few weaknesses attached other than being injury-prone. His batting average is not likely to hurt you (his .240 line from last year was his lowest) and he's never going to showcase much speed. But the power is tantalizing.

Stanton is the ultimate risk-reward option. Since making it to the big leagues in 2010, he has made it to 150 games only once in seven tries. Conversely, he's failed to play 100 games only once. In each instance, he has hit over 20 home runs, thrice topping 30.

Obviously, oft-injured players can suddenly be healthy for a full season while otherwise paragons of health can turn fragile. Giants OF Hunter Pence played no fewer than 154 games over seven consecutive seasons between 2008 and 2014. This raised his fantasy profile, not because of other numbers but a certain steady reliability. He was assured of being on the field.

A player's ability to stay healthy is worth factoring into your draft day decision making. Taking too many injury-risk picks is playing with fire. The fewer games you lose to the DL, the better.

Age Isn't Just A Number

You can't look at Los Angeles Angels 1B Albert Pujols circa 2001-11 when with the St. Louis Cardinals and expect a return to form. He hit 46 home runs, in the middle of a Hall of Fame solidifying stretch where he slashed .328/.420/.617. It was the highlight of an 11-year period where Pujols was pretty much perfect. Then he inched toward his mid-30s with a bum foot.

He hasn't been the same player with the Angels, but he shouldn't have been expected to be. While the decline seems harsh, it's only because he was literally one of the best hitters of all time until 2012. He still has averaged 144 games per season, and while his batting average has dropped consistently, batter's eye could be to blame as he's gotten older. It's a natural decline.

Once you develop a better understanding and more critical eye of what feeds a player's stats from age to situation to skill, you will have a better entry point into balancing your returns. Stack your skills and the stats will follow.

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