Consensus Ranks: OF, C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, and RP and SP.

Tiered Ranks: C, 1B, 2B, SS, 3B, NL OF, AL SP, NL SP, Holds.

The main hullabaloo will probably be about the relievers-turned-starters. There’s a bit of a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don’t thing going on. If you don’t rank the reliever/starters because they won’t be traditional relievers getting saves, then those pitchers will fall out of the player ranking universe for the most part. Most of them don’t have ‘starter’ eligibility. Add to that the difficulty of projecting a dominant reliever into a new role, and, well, you get a difficult situation. So that’s what happened with Matt Moore, Chris Sale, Daniel Bard, Neftali Feliz and Cory Luebke.

As for the traditional relievers, there’s a lot of agreement. Well, Zimmerman thinks the magic will run out for Mariano Rivera this year, Podhorzer hates Heath Bell, half of us thought J.J. Putz would stay healthy and half of us thought he’d crap out again, Zimmerman put Kenley Jansen right into the closer’s role while the rest of us were more cautious, and Carlos Marmol inspired some differing opinions.

The relievers!

Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Barr put up a great piece earlier this week on the siren song of spring stats, and why fans and fantasy players should enjoy the ride this time of year rather than worrying about diminished velocity or a 1-for-9 start. That said, not everything that happens this time of year can be chalked up to irrelevance; especially where playing time is concerned, now is the time that teams are a little more open with their plans for how they would like the season to go.

Most of the high- or even middle-round draft picks for most leagues aren’t going to be subject to these shocks, but the difference between a good sleeper and a bad sleeper can often be whether they get enough playing time to show what they can do. To that end, here are three players who got good news for their potential playing time this week. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll let you in on a secret – I actually play in one non-ottoneu league. I know, I know…crazy, right? But this did give me an insight into a format that I know many of you use, but that I have never done before: the rookie draft.

In this 12-team, 25-man roster, 13-keeper league, the only way to add prospects to your roster is via trade or a two-round rookie draft, held just prior to the annual auction. We just completed that draft and some analysis could offer insight to those of you doing similar drafts in your leagues, or even to those of you trying to figure out who to bid on in an ottoneu league.

Read the rest of this entry »

Consensus Ranks: OF, C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, and RP and SP.

Tiered Ranks: C, 1B, 2B, SS, 3B, NL OF, AL SP, NL SP, Holds.

Our consensus ranks may have suffered a bit from positional shenanigans. Sure, you can rank Mike Napoli and Carlos Santana at first base, but why would you ever play them there? Is Billy Butler a first baseman in your league?

When we all ranked a guy, we agreed for the most part — well one of us really likes something about Michael Cuddyer that the rest of us don’t see. And Paul Goldschmidt inspires consternation wherever he goes, so it was no surprise that he wasn’t ranked the same by all of us. But Carlos Lee? Must be something about .270 and 18 homers at first base that tickles Podhorzer’s fancy. Then again, he liked James Loney more than the rest of us too.

Take a look and pick your poison.

Read the rest of this entry »

From Hisashi Iwakuma to Matt Moore.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am foregoing my weekly AL starting pitcher post to hit on a more timely topic today. As you know, we have been unveiling our consensus rankings by position, and yesterday, we published the second sackers. As expected with any set of rankings from multiple people, there were many examples where our opinions diverged. Jose Altuve was one such player, so I thought it would be fitting to jump back onto the Pod hitter projections train and analyze my projection and how I got to that number nine ranking. In addition, if I find my ranking of a player is far off from the consensus, I then go back to my own projection to make sure I wasn’t unreasonably optimistic or pessimistic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Eno Sarris just published the Rotographs 2012 composite rankings for 2B. I will be concentrating on covering 2B for this upcoming season. Besides over analyzing 2B, I will contributing to the composite rankings. Today, I am going to go over some of my thoughts on the initial rankings and then give an overview of how I ranked the players.

2B Rankings

-The four of us are in general agreement over the first 6 picks with not one ranking really diverging. The first disagreement happens at the 7th and 8th spot where Eno likes Rickie Weeks more than the rest of us and he is not fond of Howie Kendrick.

Read the rest of this entry »

Consensus Ranks: OF, C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, and RP and SP.

Tiered Ranks: C, 1B, 2B, SS, 3B, NL OF, AL SP, NL SP, Holds.

After all of our talk about Jason Kipnis and Dustin Ackley, you may still be surprised about where they sit in our consensus ranks. A degenerative knee condition has pushed Chase Utley down. Each of us had a different opinion about Jose Altuve. We all agreed about Omar Infante’s mediocrity.

Enjoy our Fantasy Baseball Second Base RotoGraphs Consensus Ranks! Brevity is not our strong point.

Read the rest of this entry »

The perception of age is one of the more interesting facets of player evaluation to me, and I don’t mean that in the Miguel Tejada sense. Highly touted prospects who make their debuts at a particularly young age or who don’t find an extremely high level of success shortly after debuting often lose some of their notoriety, despite being in the part of their career where some failure ought to be expected. Without checking, name the ages of these players: Delmon Young, Justin Upton, Dayan Viciedo, and Dexter Fowler. I’m going to guess that for the people who guessed and got it wrong, overestimating the players’ ages was more uncommon than underestimating. Each of these guys made news a few years ago, but only Upton has made a substantial mark so far, and even he is probably underappreciated relative to his performance.

With the exception of Young, I like these guys for reasons beyond their age, but seeing the 26-year-old Fowler on the cusp of coming into his own is especially gratifying for me. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I have a fantasy addiction to Fowler — I think I’ve owned him in at least one league every year since his first full season in 2009 — and while toolsy players are always on my radar, having him play his home games in Coors made Fowler the player I’m almost always willing to take a flier on. Heading into the 2012 season, however, Fowler finally looks less like a bundle of tools and more like a composed baseball player. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cardinal’s new manager, Mike Matheny, officially named Jason Motte closer a few weeks ago, but pretty much everyone expected him to land the gig even before the announcement. Motte finished last season in the role and had a solid postseason as the ninth inning man under Tony La Russa, with an 8-1 strikeout-to-walk rate and a 2.19 ERA in 12.1 October innings.

More than just being a useful closer, Motte has developed into a top notch pitcher. He has seen his K/BB rate increase in each of the past three seasons, from 2.35 to 3.00 to 3.94. It appears that he is getting more comfortable on the mound each year removed from his transition from catcher to pitcher, which is a logical reason for his continued improvement. He also ditched the curveball that he threw 11% of the time in 2009, which was a rather ineffective pitch.
Read the rest of this entry »