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Many consider February to be the fantasy sports abyss. The NFL season is behind us after an amazing Super Bowl on Sunday, and the NBA and NHL are in the middle of their long and mostly unimportant regular seasons.

(In my best WWF announcing voice) Wait, what? What’s that sound? Is that fantasy baseball’s music? 

You bet your sweet behind it is.

It’s draft prep time. It’s mock draft time. It’s number-crunching-spreadsheet-creating time. This is easily my favorite time of year in fantasy sports, and if you’re reading this in the first week of February, than I bet it’s yours, too. I want to help you get started on your journey by taking a look at a couple of different tools that I find helpful in uncovering value in fantasy drafts. I’m going to merge these tools together today and see what we find.

The first one is FantasyPros.com and their Expert Consensus Rankings (ECR). If you aren’t using FantasyPros, then I don’t know what to tell you. You’re at a disadvantage in my opinion with the ECR in particular being a great resource in February and March. It’s a one stop shop ranking platform with the best names in the fantasy industry. The rankings for each position along with a full player pool ranking are available all in one place, and you can customize it as well. A successful draft is one where you can extrapolate the most value from each pick. Using projections and formulating your rankings are important, but understanding things like ECR and ADP (average draft position) are vital on draft day because your league-mates are using them. Think back to last season. If you would’ve drafted Jose Abreu in round five and Michael Brantley in round six you would’ve had a pretty strong core, but that’s a terrible draft. Even if you used projections that suggested you do so, those are terrible picks because you suck any and all value out of them in that spot. ECR helps you get the most value out of each pick.

Secondly, I want to look at the projections from Steamer. There are a number of well respected projections out there, but for this exercise we’ll use Steamer. Recently, Zach Sanders from Fangraphs took the 2015 Steamer projections and used z-score to create a fantasy value above replacement, or FVARz. Zach’s work allows us to look at the overall value of each player, and essentially creates a Steamer ranking and auction value. Today I want to compare the rankings from FantasyPros ECR and Steamer FVARz and see if we can find any market inefficiencies.  To get started, I want to take a look at the top-40 from each group. As the weeks progress, I’ll take a closer and deeper look at the player pool.

Here’s the list of players that Steamer FVARz likes more than the experts:

Off the top I want to address the pitchers.  It would be more helpful to look at the pitchers independently of the hitters to contextualize their value, but here they are. Steamer likes Stephen Strasburg to bring his HR/FB ratio down, which brings his ERA and FIP closer in line. Zack Greinke appears to be in line for some better batted ball luck according to Steamer, but they anticipate his K/BB ratio to drop closer to his career numbers after he set a career best 1.91 BB/9 last season.

Aroldis Chapman jumps off the page, with a differential of 29 spots. This is one of those instances where you don’t need to draft a player this high (33), but understanding his ranking here highlights his value. ‘Don’t pay for saves’ is a common theme among fantasy pundits, but it’s a sweeping generality that keeps the likes of Chapman on the board far too long in most drafts. He doesn’t JUST give you saves. He’ll raise your entire staff’s K/9 to an elite level, allowing you to draft value arms late (think Doug Fister or Rick Porcello) who’ll help you elsewhere despite their repressed strikeout totals.

Lastly we have Masahiro Tanaka at 40. Huh? He’s 40th overall? Yeah, that seems a tad high to me as well. Simply put, Steamer has Tanaka at 192 IP, and we just don’t know enough about his elbow yet to feel comfortable with that as rankers. He threw an electric 132 innings last year, and if the reports are positive in the spring, then I’ll be all-in. I recently landed him in round 13 as my SP4 in an industry mock draft. I don’t think that’ll be the case come March.

Now let’s look at the hitters. There’s no way around it, Troy Tulowitzki is polarizing. He’s an absolute; he’s absolutely the best shortstop in the game, and he’s absolutely not playing in 155-160 games. How good is he? Steamer has his games-played at 138 and he STILL comes in at 7th overall. Steamer likes the change of scenery for Hanley Ramirez, and so do I. Multi-position eligibility is a coup, as well.

Ryan Braun comes in as a second round pick instead of a third round pick, and I can support that idea. Bryce Harper and Carlos Gonzalez are still holding strong with Steamer, but the ECR is down on both players. They’re both high risk/high reward plays that are a bit easier to swallow in the ECR range versus where Steamer has them. I’m enamored with each of these players’ skill sets, but I’m not sure I’ll own a lot of shares this season.

Billy Hamilton’s price is too rich for my blood. I don’t expect a repeat in his ‘power’ and I just can’t get on board when a top-50 pick has an OBP south of .300. I’m sure he’ll continue to have a green light, but he was caught 23 times last season. I’ll let someone else ‘win steals’ here.  Think Charlie Blackmon was a fluke? Steamer doesn’t. He may not be an elite talent, but we’re talking about fantasy value here, people. He gets 81 games at Coors Field, where he slashed .331/.391/.524 with a wRC+ of 123. That’s elite. Don’t take him at 35 but he’s worth it at 74 according to ECR. Now here’s the list of players that the experts like more than Steamer:

The big difference here is that you see no pitchers. That tells us that overall, experts abide by the ‘wait on pitching’ approach. Right, wrong or indifferent.

You can find my rankings on FantasyPros as well, and while I’ve just started tweaking them, I’m likely to have Paul Goldschmidt right behind Mike Trout as my number 2. He offers exactly what I want in a first round pick; he has an extremely high floor AND a high ceiling. His value is suppressed since he only appeared in 109 games last season, and while Steamer projects him to play 148 this season, there’s no reason to think his hand injury will linger. I believe the Diamondbacks lineup has improved during the off-season.

We need to feel safe about Carlos Gomez. He’s had three consecutive seasons of elite production, and he’s blossomed into the player the Twins thought they were getting when they gave up Johan Santana to the Mets. He’s been a .260 hitter when he has an average BABIP, but he’s been a .284 hitter in back to back seasons with a BABIP around .340. His LD% supports the .340 BABIP so I’m buying him as a top-10 commodity.

Edwin Encarnacion is another player that’ll go way before his Steamer ranking. In limited action last season, Encarnacion showed his elite power and plate discipline, both assets that translate well to future success. Power is at such a premium, it’s hard to envision a scenario where Encarnacion falls out of the top 20.

I’m going to side with Steamer in regard to Michael Brantley. I’m not sure I’m buying a full repeat of the power, and his success rate on stolen base attempts will be hard to duplicate. I like the player, but I don’t want to pay for him in round 2.

Anthony Rizzo is trending up.  If he builds on his improved walk rate from the first half on 2014 and continues to hit lefties, he could return late first/early second round value.

I don’t have a good feel for Anthony Rendon. The 17 steals came out of nowhere, and it’ll be hard to duplicate such strong runs scored and RBI totals. I like the player a lot, but I think he’s priced out of range for me as a 20 player, and Steamer agrees.  Rendon’s teammate, Ian Desmond, isn’t highly regarded either. I’m guessing it stems from his already poor contact rates taking a huge dip last season despite maintaining fairly strong fantasy production. Desmond’s shortstop eligibility makes him appealing to drafters, but don’t pay the going rate in round three.

Early drafters are deciding between Rizzo and Freddie Freeman around pick 20, but Steamer doesn’t think it’s particularly close. They do not care for Freddie Freeman this season. Freeman proved that RBI totals can be a bit wonky from year to year, and his precipitous drop curtailed a lot of his value last season. I expect more of the same with a Braves club that’s clearly rebuilding.

I expect the ECR of Josh Donaldson to climb as the season draws near. I believe the top level talent at third base is the weakest it’s been in years, and the move to Toronto is a great one for Donaldson. Surrounded by elite power/discipline guys like Jose Bautista and the previously mentioned Edwin Encarnacion, look for Donaldson to expand on his patient approach and continue to mash north of the boarder.

Hunter Pence plays like his pants are on fire. That’s fun. He typically provides decent value on draft day but upper echelon players that last deep into the post-season often come at a steep price on draft day, and that’s the case here.

We round it out here with a couple of relative ‘oldies but goodies’ in Albert Pujols and Adrian Gonzalez. Albert had a nice bounce back last season and has seemingly settled into this ‘back-9’ Pujols we’ve seen over the past four seasons. The days of a .300 batting average are a thing of the past, but an increase of starts at DH will keep his plate appearances high, and he still possesses a strong run producing bat. The same can be said for Adrian Gonzalez, though he doesn’t benefit from occasional DH duty like Pujols. Gonzalez had a strong 2014 campaign and is worthy of a top 50 pick on draft day.

Follow Ryan on Twitter, @RyNoonan.