The MLB offseason has kicked into full gear with free agency and the Rule 5 draft, so I felt like it was time to take stock of what happened in 2024 and see what lessons we can learn for 2025. In order to do that, we’re going to go position by position to break down the overall landscape and help find the best pockets of value.
Similar to last year, when I wrote my State of the Union for each position, I’m going to look at the value produced in 2024 by regular starters at each position to see where the most value is coming from each position and identify areas of strength that we can target in our drafts and areas of weakness that we can try and avoid. Last year, much of my analysis was based on the impact of the new rule changes, so this year we’ll just look at the overall landscape and see how much carried over.
Table of Contents
We started with first base last week and will move on to second base today. To get a quick sense of the position, I looked at how many second basemen earned $10 in value according to the Fangraphs Player Rater.
Well, that’s certainly not a lot of players at the second base position who are bringing back double-digit fantasy value. Only two of those players even produced over $12 of value and there were 65 hitters overall who produced at least $12 of fantasy value this season. That means that not a lot of high-end talent is coming from the second base spot.
Now, some of that had to do with injuries to Ozzie Albies, Jordan Westburg, and Xander Bogaerts and production fall-off from Gleyber Torres, but this immediately feels like a really weak spot in our fantasy lineups. Only four players at the position have returned double-digit value on the FanGraphs Player Rater in back-to-back seasons: Ketel Marte, Marcus Semien, Nico Hoerner, and Luis Arraez. Now if you wanted to say that Albies in 2024 and Jose Altuve in 2023 likely would have gotten there without injuries, I’ll grant you that, but that means only six players produced at least $10 of fantasy value in back-to-back seasons. That’s not a lot of consistently strong production we can rely on at this position.
Right off the bat, I’d say we’ll need to jump on the high end of the talent pool at the second base position or simply wait until the much later rounds in our drafts, and I’d strongly favor jumping on the high end of the talent pool.
Category Breakdown
Now we’ll see what value the second base position provided in each standard category…