Welcome to episode 1455 of The Sleeper in the Bust.

I am Justin Mason live from First Pitch, Arizona.

Usually Paul would be doing this, but he decided he was not going to show for this episode, apparently.

But I am joined by two much better analysts, and that is Joe O'Riko and Jason Colette. How are you guys doing? Doing well. Me and this empty chair here that should be Paul? You know, not here. So doing fantastic. Besides, if your name doesn't start with the letter J, you're not a lot up here today. That's a good rule to have, yeah. He can be Jall or he can stay away. No, it's great to be up here.

I've been coming here for four years now and I think this has arguably been my favorite year

to this point. So really looking forward to this. We got a great episode plan. And you're 100%

healthy this year. Yeah, no kidney stones this year, which is, perfect.

We do have a Paul look-alike in the building who may join us at some point if Paul doesn't actually

show up. Hopefully he will, but we're just going to continue without him. We have 10,000 people in this room

waiting to hear us talk some fantasy baseball.

And we have a lot of fantasy baseball to talk about.

We're going to talk about some premium price surges after a breakout.

There are going to be a number of guys this year in fantasy that their prices are going

to jump tremendously from where they were because of what they did in the

2025 season. And so we're going to just kind of discuss, are we willing to pay the prices

that the early ADPs are starting to show? And we have to start with probably the biggest

breakout that we saw in 2025. And that's Nick Kurtz. You want to be a lot of the biggest breakout that we saw in 2025, and that's Nick Kurtz.

He went undrafted to 80p of 15 in these early NFPC drafts.

That's 12 draft champions, leagues.

So we'll start here with you, Joe.

Are you going to be paying a first round price on Nick Kurtz, a guy who, I mean, really came out of nowhere.

I mean, he was, what, drafted into Major League Baseball last year and then, you know, had a huge breakout for fantasy managers.

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