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We were witness to an interesting phenomenon in last year's fantasy drafts. Early in the drafting season, smart owners were spending late-round picks on Matt Wieters, a very interesting fantasy prospect with the Baltimore Orioles. Blue-chippers such as Wieters make for good investments in leagues that feature a large bench, as they are usually called up in June or July (if at all), giving owners the opportunity to benefit from a future stud's first half season in the big leagues.What made the Wieters pick interesting is that the price started to rise on the young catcher, and it never stopped. By the time the last preseason drafts were over, Wieters was coming off the board as a top-10 catcher, despite the near certainty he wouldn't be accruing stats for half a season. It seemed fantasy owners were so sure Wieters would dominate that they were willing to use a valuable mid-round pick on a bench player before filling out the rest of their starting rosters.
Wieters did indeed receive a callup late in May and it was none too soon, as WietersMania was at a fever pitch with multiple owners in wonderment on a daily basis that Wieters hadn't received a promotion to the Orioles yet. The owners that had been sitting on him for months were finally ready to reap their inevitable reward.
But then the craziest thing happened -- Matt Wieters proved human, posting an average under .250 and just two HRs in 85 at-bats through June. The slow start even landed him on the wire in several leagues, proving again that no prospect, no matter how promising, should be looked at as a sure thing right out of the gate.
The youngster rebounded in the second half of the season, hitting .301 with seven HRs, but that was largely thanks to an extremely high hit rate, with an abnormally high numbers of balls in play dropping for hits. The how seems unimportant to many fantasy owners, as Wieters is currently finding himself as the fourth catcher off the board in fantasy leagues, drafted as about the 100th player overall.
That's quite a price to again pay for an unproven commodity. Wieters is on the verge of breaking out, but we have no way of knowing whether the breakout will happen in 2010 or beyond. I'd love to have him this year, but that price seems a little high for the second-year player. Still though, it's proof positive that Wieters has everyone watching, waiting and wishing.
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