We’re moving along with the Shuffle Up series — my version of tiered rankings — for the new fantasy baseball draft season. The dollar values you’ll see below are unscientific in nature but reflect how I see the clusters of talent for players that qualify in the corner infield (first base, third base or both).
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Have some disagreements? Good, that’s why we have a game. I welcome your reasoned disagreement over at X (@scott_pianowski) or on Blue Sky (@pianow.bsky.social).
Corner Infield Overview
You’ll find a lot of back-nine players in the corner infield spots, which is why I think you need to address these positions more proactively than perhaps you did a few years back. It was a messy year for first base last season, and third base also has some players who make me nervous.
Tier 1: The Big Tickets
Kid Guerrero’s takeoff hasn’t been linear through six seasons, but let’s respect that he just posted the second-best year of his career, with a juicy 165 OPS+ and positive impact in four categories. He’s stepping into his age-26 season, which often coincides with peak performance. So long as you accept the 48 home runs from 2021 as an unrepeatable outlier, Guerrero feels like an easy player to project, a high-floor candidate with plenty of plausible upside. He’s also been notably durable for five years, missing just 12 games over that period.
I’ll probably be underweight on Freeman during draft season and that hurts, because I’ve been an enormous Freeman fan his entire career. And his disappointing 2024 regular season (no one forgets the World Series heroics) came as an excused absence — he had ankle and thumb injuries, along with a cruel off-field distraction (his young son is dealing with Guillian-Barre syndrome). The Los Angeles lineup offers plenty of buoyancy, but Freeman steps into his age-35 season, so last year’s power and average drops could be seen as expected skill erosion. Player development isn’t always linear in the front half of a career, but skill leakage has a more reliable trend line.
Ramírez is a five-category monster at a notoriously thin position; sounds like first-round fun to me. Ramírez will shut down the running sooner or later, but that wasn’t a problem in his age-31 season. Cleveland was 14th in runs scored last year, which is probably close to the floor.
I don’t know if it’s particularly predictive, but Olson has been much better in his odd-numbered seasons,…