Comparing Early Closer Depth Charts

I’m a big fan of bullpens in fantasy baseball. I kind of like the volatility, craziness, and, most importantly, the way you can get an elite option off the waiver wire in the middle of the season. You can’t do that at too many positions. With all that volatility comes a lot of uncertainty in predicting who will close for some teams. Most fantasy baseball websites post closer grids, depth charts, bullpen reports, etc. tracking each team’s bullpen roles. This time of year we know very little about how managers will use their relievers, but that doesn’t stop everyone from taking a stab at it.

In this post, I’ve collected all of these bullpen depth charts from five different sites. If you are wondering where Yahoo, CBS, Rotographs, and Closer Monkey are, well, they haven’t updated their depth charts yet for 2017. I thought it would be useful to have all of these in one place as you prepare for drafts. I’ve got a table for the presumed closer(s) on each team and another for the next in line guys. The cells with “x” in them just mean that all of the sites had the same name as ESPN did.

As you can see, there is much disagreement on the teams with very fluid open competitions, but agreement on almost all of the stable situations. The Reds have already said they will use Iglesias, Lorenzen, and Storen in the role. I can’t trust Greg Holland since he hasn’t really been the same since his surgery in 2015. Ottavino also had Tommy John, but he looked better than Holland in 2016, so my money’s on him. No, I didn’t literally gamble money on Ottavino being the closer, it’s just an expression. Sheesh.

As for the other murky situations, I think the returning incumbents in Philly, Minnesota, Oakland, and Washington will start with the job again. I would prefer Feliz in Milwaukee and Bedrosian in Anaheim, but maybe the teams won’t think the same way as I do. Street has looked rough in the past couple seasons.

There is much more disagreement between the sites when it comes to the next in line guys. There are some very intriguing names here like Carter Capps, Matt Bush, Brad Brach, Blake Treinen, Kyle Barraclough, and Carl Edwards, to name a few. They all have great skill and are just waiting for an opportunity. Although not shown, Shae Simmons in Seattle is interesting and could easily jump over Cishek into second position.

Update: I just added Rotoworld’s depth charts to the tables and they have some, er, curious choices. Benoit as closer in Philly? Mark Lowe as first in line behind K-Rod in Detroit? I’m not sure where they got these ideas, but the rest of their projections seem reasonable.

Those are my initial thoughts on these lists. I hope they provide some value at this early point. We should know much more about these situations near the end of spring training. Until later, Tschus!