Dylan Cease (SP, CHW) - Fantasy Baseball Draft Sleeper

Chicago White Sox starting pitcher Dylan Cease is a 2020 fantasy baseball draft value. His ADP is undervalued, making him a potential draft bargain and late-round sleeper to target.

BALLER MOVE: Draft target ~250

CURRENT ADP: ~275 overall

ANALYSIS: The White Sox have a few young arms of intrigue in Cease, Michael Kopech and Reynaldo Lopez; however, Cease may have the most upside for 2020. He has elite stuff, with a curveball that seemed electric last season and, according to FanGraphs, had the fourth most drop of any curve in the league. He also had positive pVALs on both his change and slider, which is a good thing because, despite his velocity, his fastball was not great last year, registering a -15 pVAL. The good news is that Cease seems to know that and spent all offseason reportedly working on improving his fastball command.

Command, in general, remains his biggest issue. Cease had a 1.55 WHIP supported by an ugly 10.7% walk rate. It was only 73 MLB innings at age 23 but some of Cease's spring starts exhibited the same tendency to unravel when he's unable to put batters away. In the few at-bats I saw, he went from 0-2 to 2-2 to walks far too quickly to instill confidence.

However, Cease is a young, dynamic arm with a much better catcher in 2020. According to BaseballProspectus’ Framing Adjusted Metric, the 2019 White Sox offered their emerging pitching talents James McCann and his -7.6 score (101st out of 113 catchers tracked) or Welington Castillo and his -14 mark (112th). Now Cease will throw to Yasmani Grandal, who had the third-best score with 20.9.

With a young pitcher who notched 81 K’s in 73 innings spending his first full MLB offseason focused on improving his weaknesses, and now working with an elite veteran catcher, it's easy to see how Cease could follow Lucas Giolito in 2020.