'09 Draft Prep: Our Top 27 under 27

We get criticized quite a bit about an overreliance of general Fantasy Baseball draft theories like breakout 27-year-olds. Other Mickey Mouse organizations even take the time to pull stats to try to debunk it. Billy Beane also told us he sees the beginning of a player's prime a year earlier at age 26.

Nobody's perfect.

With that in mind, we present the Top 27 players under the age of 27 before opening day. Why 27? We like the number. It also happens to be the number of outs you are from a perfect game.

This is just one piece in our pre-draft series on sleepers and breakouts, the top players who haven't yet reached their prime. We have already dealt with the 27-year-olds, third-year starting pitchers, injury-risk sleepers, top 25 rookies, top 100 prospects and overlooked sophomores. Still to come are the players in a contract year and the top names you might not know but should.

The Top 27 under 27 debuted a year ago and it was a who's who of sound Fantasy picks. Save for those who graduated to 27 years of age, the lone "dropoffs" on this year's list are: SP Justin Verlander, OF Hunter Pence, 3B Ryan Zimmerman, 2B Robinson Cano and 2B Rickie Weeks.

We still like those players as sleepers, but some fresher talent had to have room made for them. They include: the reigning AL MVP, NL Cy Young and both rookies of the year. They are marked below with asterisks.

So, clearly our 27 under 27 doesn't go deep enough. Players who haven't yet reached their prime are very, very likely to outperform their draft position. That makes them great picks on all tiers of your draft boards.

We might have not gone deep enough for those award winners, but last season my editor (he's a genius) placed an Ian Kinsler photo in the draft prep feature on our website. The cutline: "Ian Kinsler could very well fly under the radar on Draft Day."

Brilliant!

Now you're going to be hard-pressed to get Kinsler on your Fantasy team this season, because so many recognize him as one of the game's burgeoning superstars. Here are the other 26:

That is quite an impressive list of Fantasy talent. If it is possible, you might even consider drafting no player older than 28. That would be a decent strategy, perhaps. Players beyond that age tend to be more experienced, but they also come with established résumés that make them expensive and less capable of outperforming their Draft Day value.

A Derek Jeter comes to mind. His best years are behind him, but he will be drafted highly as always on name recognition and on the promise of his supporting cast. Most significantly, as players age, their bodies become more and more fragile and they are slower to rebound from injury or are just unable to manage the daily grind. Reducing risk is a significant factor in how to make your picks count in Fantasy.

You will notice many of the projections for these players above are cautious or conservative and many of them have totals easily reachable. Some are even downgraded from the seasons they have already had, like Fielder and Ellsbury.

That is great news, especially if you pick in our live draft rooms, where our projections produce the rankings everyone gets to stare at. We can't guarantee improvement on great years by sub-27s, but you can certainly anticipate a player with less wear to outproduce what we projected for him.

There are many, many more players we could add to this list to stretch it past 27 -- some of which have yet to even appear in the big leagues. It would take a whole series of lists, like say our multifaceted draft prep sleepers and breakouts series. The main point is: be very, very aware of a player's age and mileage.

You can e-mail Emack your Fantasy Baseball questions to DMFantasyBaseball@cbs.com. Be sure to put 27 under 27 in the subject field. Please include your full name, hometown and state. Be aware, due to the large volume of submissions received, we cannot guarantee personal responses to all questions.