Does this article really need much of a preamble? The title pretty much says it all. Here are three guys that have the chance to finish the season with a ranking that is significantly higher than their average draft position.

Bo Bichette , TOR

Maybe Bichette already had his breakout last year with a 142 wRC+ over 212 PA in his major league debut. But if he did, it’s not being respected by early drafters as he’s going around pick 70 overall and around 50th overall among hitters. The young Blue Jay has upside that could have him ending the season as a top-25 hitter.

The tough parts about Bichette’s debut numbers are a high BABIP and HR/FB rate. Regression should be expected in those stats, which means his batting average and home run total won’t be in line with where he was last year on a per plate appearance basis. However, if Bichette sees his strikeout rate and GB/FB ratio move toward where his numbers were in the minors, he will be able to offset some of the regression.

In almost 1,500 minor league plate appearances, Bichette had a strikeout rate under 20-percent at each stop along the way. He struck out at a 23.6-percent clip in his debut last year, which is an impressive rate for a rookie. We often see rookies come up and have strikeout rates well in excess of 30-percent, so we know swings and misses are not going to be an Achilles heel for Bichette. Assuming he cuts his strikeout rate to around 20-percent, he’s going to get more balls in play to offset the regression that may come for his HR/FB rate, and it will obviously help his batting average.

Bichette also saw his groundball rate last year be higher than it was at any stop in the minors. Assuming the soon-to-be 22-year-old is also able to make an incremental improvement in that department, he will further offset the regression of his fly balls leaving the yard less often by hitting more balls in the air.

Let’s say Bichette gets his strikeout rate to 20-percent with a walk rate around seven-percent, which is slightly better than last year. That means roughly 73-percent of his plate appearances will end with a ball in play, which would be up from about 69-percent last year. Assuming 670 PA, that four-percent difference means an extra 27 balls in play. With a 40-percent groundball rate, that would mean an extra 17 balls in the air, which is an extra three or four home runs, even if Bichette’s HR/FB rate falls closer to league average than 22.4-percent.

An extra three-to-four home runs and an extra five-to-ten points in batting average might not seem like much, but if Bichette were to have 25 home runs, a batting average north of .280, and the 93/75/24 in runs/RBI/steals that Steamer projects for him, we’re looking at something very similar to what Starling Marte put up last year. With similar projections to what he did last year, ESPN has Marte projected to be a top-20 fantasy hitter this season.

Can Bichette make the improvements in contact and elevation that he needs to offset some of the good fortune he benefitted from last year? Maybe, maybe not. But if he does, he’s going to finish the season much higher than just a top-50 fantasy hitter.

Alex Verdugo , BOS

Boston has been roundly excoriated for trading away Mookie Betts , and rightly so. But don’t let the general negativity surrounding the trade sully you on Verdugo as a fantasy option. Verdugo has one exceptional skill, and it’s the most important one to have for a young hitter, plate discipline. Verdugo has flaws, which we will address, but he does not have the one flaw that will forever limit a hitter’s upside. Guys with a lot of swing-and-miss in their game can bring you production in a couple categories, but they will always be limited fantasy options.

In 488 big league plate appearances, Verdugo has a 13.7-percent strikeout rate, 7.4-percent walk rate and a .282 average. Verdugo never had a strikeout rate higher than 13-percent at any stop in the minors where he had more than 20 PA. Last year he had one of the 20 lowest swinging strike rates and one of the 30 best contact rates in the league (min. 350 PA). Verdugo had above average speed scores throughout the minors, so a high contact rate and decent speed means Verdugo is always going to have a plus batting average absent significantly bad BABIP luck.

It’s the counting stats where Verdugo is lacking. He did not run much in the minors, but he does have some potential there. Between Triple-A and the majors, he is a 75-percent base stealer, which is slightly better than league average. He might be able to get to double-digits there if allowed to run, but speed isn’t where Verdugo’s upside lies. The real upside will come if Verdugo can get regular plate appearances in the top two-thirds of the lineup and if he can learn to elevate the ball.

Let’s start with the lineup he is moving into. It’s obviously a good one as the Sox project to score the fourth-most runs per game according to Fangraphs. The key will be hitting up the order as the bulk of his work with the Dodgers last year came in the bottom third. The top third of Boston’s order will be tough to crack with Andrew Benintendi , Rafael Devers and Xander Bogaerts projected to hit 1-2-3, and J.D Martinez locked into the cleanup spot. But if one the top three were to be injured, Verdugo would seem to be an obvious option to fill in as a very high contact hitter. His competition for the five and six spots in the lineup comes from Mitch Moreland and Michael Chavis , who both have more pop than Verdugo. Verdugo could easily drive in 75-plus from the seven-spot in that lineup, but if he ever works his way up, he could end up 80/80-plus in runs and RBI.

Where Verdugo could really improve is in his batted ball profile. He hits way too many balls on the ground as he was T-43 in ground ball rate among 241 hitters with at least 350 PA last year, and he ranked around 200 in average launch angle among 250 qualified hitters. It’s not as if he has no pop as his .181 ISO last year was almost exactly league average. There were five hitters last season with an ISO in the .180’s who hit 20 home runs in less than 550 PA, which is the number of plate appearances Verdugo is projected to see this year (baking in the latest news which states he won't open the season on-time). If he could get his fly ball rate anywhere near the league average of 35-percent, which was his FB rate in 495 PA in Triple-A in 2017, he would hit 21 home runs with 550 PA and the same slightly below average HR/FB rate he had last season.

The best-case scenario here is something like .305-.310, 80 runs and 80 RBI, and North of 20 home runs with high single-digit or maybe ten steals. Call me crazy, but that’s similar to what Yoán Moncada did last year, and Moncada is going on average as a top-50 hitter while Verdugo is going outside the top 130 hitters. Is he going to replicate Moncada’s numbers? Probably not, but it’s at least feasible in theory. And he would not have to match Moncada’s numbers to be worth a pick outside the top 200.

Mitch Keller , PIT

You never expect to be writing up a guy who posted an ERA North of 7.00 in his first 11 big league starts, but here we are. Keller had a disastrous 2019 debut allowing five or more earned runs in five of those 11 starts. However, he allowed two or fewer runs in the other six, so he was the personification of all-or-nothing. The base stats of a 7.13 ERA, 1.83 WHIP and a 1-5 record look horrendous, but if you looked at some of his other stats, you might think Keller’s first exposure to the big leagues went swimmingly.

Keller posted a sub-4.00 SIERA and xFIP last season, so you might be wondering how his ERA ended up North of 7.00. Well, his strand rate was 59.6-percent, which was the ninth-lowest strand rate among 183 starters who threw at least 40 innings last season. His .475 BABIP? That was the highest BABIP among those 183 starters, and it was more than 100 points higher than the guy with the second-highest BABIP. That is historically bad luck. Among the 366 pitchers who faced at least 200 batters last season, none of them had a bigger difference between their wOBA allowed and their expected wOBA allowed as calculated by Statcast. It is not a stretch at all to say that no pitcher got results less in line with their performance than Keller last season.

Going back to the 183 starters who threw at least 40 innings last season, only 33 of them had a K-BB% better than 20-percent, and Keller was one of them ranking 21st in that stat. That was driven more by his 28.6-percent strikeout rate , which ranked 28th of those 183, but his 7.1-percent walk rate was well under the league average rate of 8.5-percent. The strikeouts look legit as his swinging strike rate was above league average, and he posted a 28-percent strikeout rate in 19 Triple-A starts prior to his call up.

You often worry about a starter not having a third pitch, but that’s not an issue for Keller. He features two breaking balls, a slider and a curve, and he threw them both between 15-and-20-percent last season. According to the weighted pitch values on Fangraphs, both pitches were above league average. He did not get great results with his fastball last year, but he definitely has sufficient velocity with it. His 95.4 mph average velocity on his fastball was 22nd-highest among the 183 starters with 40-plus innings.

You may ultimately not be able to get past the 7.00-plus ERA, but you could have easily had the same issue with Lucas Giolito last season. Giolito was coming off a 6.13 ERA and 1.48 ERA in 2018, but he cut those to 3.41 and 1.06 last season and is going in the top 20 among pitchers on average this draft season. There was far less reason to believe in a Giolito breakout than there is for Keller. In 2018 Giolito sucked over 173 innings, not the small sample size of 48 we have from Keller. And Giolito literally had the worst K-BB% in the league among starters with 100-plus innings in 2018. The worst! And now he is going in the fifth round of 12-team mixed league drafts. Wild.

To be clear, Keller does not need to end up as a top 25 starter to deliver significant value. He’s going outside the top 100 pitchers and outside the top 300 overall. He’s basically free and will largely go undrafted in shallower leagues. Simply turning into a mid-rotation arm with 150 innings should be enough for Keller to be worth owning. But the upside is there for even more.