Bargain Shopping: Doug Baldwin

Let’s start this out with a little blind player comparison.

The title gave away one of these wideouts — Doug Baldwin — but the other two are a pair of football’s top weapons and two of the more valuable dynasty assets out there. Without looking at the text below the table, see if you can guess who they are, along which player Baldwin is.

All in all, these three receivers have put up pretty comparable numbers over the past two seasons. They’ve ranked among the game’s best in fantasy points per game, and all three of them are currently 28 years old. Despite that, Baldwin, who is Player C, isn’t valued nearly as highly as Player A and Player B.

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Those guys are Julio Jones (Player A) and A.J. Green (Player B).

In this series, we try to identify good buy-low options, using our DLF staff rankings and average draft position (ADP) data as dynasty market barometers. A player can be undervalued for any number of reasons. Already this off-season we’ve looked at a receiver who had a very quiet 1,000-yard campaign but hates playing with good quarterbacks, and we peeked under the hood of a solid mid-range wideout who just doesn’t get enough love.

Today, let’s dig into Baldwin, another underpriced wideout who can pay dividends for your fantasy team.

The Price Is Wrong

Typically, in-their-prime elite wideouts are some of the most expensive dynasty assets in the game. Relatively safe players, at least compared to running backs, these receivers can be the foundational blocks around which a consistently contending dynasty team is built. 

As such, it’s extremely rare to find a mid-aged wideout coming off two straight really good seasons who is being undervalued, but that’s exactly what we have here with Baldwin.

Per our position ranks, Baldwin is the 17th-ranked wideout. Five of the ten rankers have him outside the top 20, and our May ADP numbers are similar, with Baldwin checking in as WR18.

So that begs the question — why is a 28-year-old who was a WR1 in each of the past two seasons (one of just four players to achieve that, h/t Jeff Miller) not being valued like the big boys? That’s a really good question.

Well, some of it is probably due to a few of the receivers most would rank up in the top 10 — Allen Robinson, DeAndre Hopkins and Sammy Watkins, to name a few — having down years in 2016. Amari Cooper is another top wideout who should be ranked in front of Baldwin even though he hasn’t out-produced the Seattle stud in either of the last two years.

Once you factor in situations like that, it keeps pushing Baldwin down the board, but he really shouldn’t be falling down around 20 — right?

In the aforementioned May ADP data, Corey Davis, Keenan Allen and Alshon Jeffery are all in front of Baldwin. I probably tend to overvalue the present versus the future, but Jeffery is likely the only guy I would really think hard about taking before Baldwin. Again, that’s just me and how I like to operate, but it seems like a middle-aged guy who is basically a shoo-in (barring injury) to be a top-15 wideout in 2017 would be coveted a little more.

How did we get here?

Baldwin’s Big Breakout

Something Baldwin doesn’t have which most elite dynasty wideouts do is a sparkling track record. He wasn’t a star in college, and he went undrafted in 2011. That alone puts him on a very long road to becoming a top-ten dynasty wideout, and the fact he’s made it this close tells you how great he’s been the past two seasons.

Speaking of how great he’s been in the last two seasons, man, he’s been really outstanding. After a pair of solid seasons in 2013 and 2014, campaigns in which he averaged 58 grabs for 801.5 yards and four scores, Baldwin pieced together a 2015 breakout. It was kickstarted by a ridiculous late-season streak as he scored a hard-to-fathom 11 touchdowns over a five-game run.

Obviously, no one is going to sustain that kind of pace, but it appears that most people at the time — and you can lump me in with this group — kind of brushed it off. According to our January 2016 ADP numbers, which would’ve been right after his season-ending tear, Baldwin was only WR43. He was one spot behind (here comes the vomit) Nelson Agholor — whew, that was tough to type.

It wasn’t until the following October we finally started realizing there was more to this than a flukey five-game streak. After coming in as WR36 in September of 2016, Baldwin jumped to WR26 in October of last year as he was proving he was here to stay. In 2016, he went on to post his second straight 1,000-yard season, and his 21 receiving touchdowns over the past two years ranks third — trailing only Odell Beckham Jr. (23) and Antonio Brown (22).

Moving Forward

All of this past production is lovely, but we don’t get fantasy points this fall based off what a player did in 2015 and 2016. (I’d be much better at this stuff if we did.) Fortunately, there are no legit red flags to speak of for Baldwin.

For starters, he’s paired with Russell Wilson, a young, in-his-prime signal caller who is a stud already and should keep improving. Tyler Lockett flashed prior to his injury, but there’s no real threat on Seattle’s depth chart who could approach Baldwin’s top-wideout status for the ‘Hawks. (Jimmy Graham saw 95 targets last season.) Baldwin was targeted 103 and 125 times, respectively, in 2015 and 2016. It’s safe to assume he should see 110 to 130 targets for at least the next couple seasons, and considering that he’s hauled in 172 of his 228 targets (75.4 percent) over the past two years, we can feel good about him producing with the volume he gets. 

Really, there’s nothing here to scare us.

Comparing dynasty value to redraft value doesn’t usually work for all the obvious reasons, but Baldwin may be one instance where we can learn a thing from those bums who only play fantasy in the fall. It’s early as heck, but Baldwin is currently the 13th wideout off the board in redraft formats, per FantasyFootballCalculator.

He’s an elite producer who is in his prime, has a secure role and is playing with a really good quarterback. Unless I’m missing something, Baldwin checks every box we want in a high-end dynasty wideout, and it’s past time we start valuing him as one.

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