It’s time to update our first base tiered rankings now that we’re into June and more than one-third of the way through the season. Due to popular demand, I’m leaving the catchers (Mike Napoli, Buster Posey, Joe Mauer, Carlos Santana) and middle infielders (Michael Young, Howie Kendrick) out of the rankings since they’re so obviously more valuable at other positions despite having first base eligibility in most leagues. Here are the preseason and May tiers for reference.

Tier One
Miguel Cabrera
Joey Votto
Paul Konerko
Prince Fielder
Albert Pujols

Konerko makes the long overdue jump into the top tier thanks to his MLB-best 189 wRC+. That latest minor wrist procedure doesn’t concern me much, the man has gotten better and better with age.

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His start today against the Cardinal’s right-handed heavy offense will certainly be a very big test, but I still like J.A. Happ for the rest of the season.

Happ has improved most of his meaningful, predictive numbers. His strikeout rate is way up, at 23.1% (9.05 K/9) against a career average of 19.2% (7.39 K/9) and his walk rate has actually dropped to 8.5% (3.34 BB/9) against a career rate of 10.3% (3.99). The improvement of his strikeout and walk rates have allowed him to record a reasonable 2.71 K/BB, which is significantly better than the 1.85 mark he has for his career. While a 2.71 K/BB rate is not a tremendous number, it does show that he has improved.

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Watch out, keeper league owners.  It’s that time of year again.  The hot starts have cooled down, the cold starts have heated up, your waiver wire has been picked clean, and you’re seeing a separation in your standings between the haves and the have nots.  The haves are trying to make deals to solidify their roster for a championship run while the have nots are already looking towards next year.  It doesn’t matter that there’s still almost four months left in the season and plenty of time to mount a comeback, there are those that accept defeat a little too easily and all they care about is which stud protect they can pick up just by unloading their roster to someone in the hunt for a title.  It’s time for the dump deal. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s saves mini-series week here at RotoGraphs! We tried one look into whether or not bad teams provide save opportunities, and then we tried another. We looked at lefty closers. The results seem to indicate that bad teams are almost as good as good teams at providing save opportunities, and managers don’t seem to prefer lefty closers.

But ‘bad teams’ and ‘good teams’ are not all alike. Commenters rightly pointed out that there might certain types of teams that create more save opportunities. How about teams with small run differentials? They seemingly play in more close games which could end in saves. How about teams with good pitching staffs? They might keep the score down and create more save situations. Or even teams with good bullpens. They might be able to keep the score close and hand the ball to the closer more often.

These are all testable questions. So it’s time to run the correlations — this time with teams since 1990, in order to reflect current bullpen usage more accurately. There are still over 600 team-seasons in our sample. SVO stands for Save Opportunities.

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What do two rehabbing big leaguers and a hot shot closer-of-the-future candidate have in common? That’s right: All three are in this week’s episode of Mining the Minors.

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It is ranking tiers update week and today are the American League starting pitchers. By this time in the season, peripherals are stabilizing and I can now put a lot more stock into skills surges and declines. As a reminder, these rankings are only supposed to reflect how I expect pitchers to perform going forward. How a pitcher has already performed to date bears no weighting here. Refresh your memory with my May update.

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Today’s Roto Riteup is full of fun and adventure. Just kidding, it’s full of baseball, you silly goose!

• Interleague play starts up again today, so you’ll have to be extra careful when setting your lineups to assure certain American League players will be seeing the field.

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• Huston Street was activated from the disabled list yesterday and proceeded to get the save last night against the Giants. It wasn’t the prettiest of saves with Street letting three batters reach base, but he didn’t surrender a run and looks primed to continue the great year he was having before his injury. The Dale Thayer experiment is officially over for now but it could rear its head again if Street were to miss time again or be traded because fellow setup man Andrew Cashner is now expected to enter the rotation at some point this year, leaving an open spot for the Padres to breed another reliever. Padres GM Josh Byrnes didn’t give a timetable for when Cashner can be expected to start but look for him to enter the starting rotation in the near future.

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Howie Kendrick had what seemed to be a breakout season in 2011. Most of his improvement came from a career high 18 home runs. He is not having the same level of production in 2012. He is just hitting over .250 with four home runs. Howie has several factors leading to his decline this year.

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We all know there’s the absurdly tall Chris Young, the talented pitcher who refuses to stay healthy and then there’s also the absurdly athletic Chris Young who patrols center field in Arizona and has a penchant for the swing-and-miss.

But this post isn’t some kind of wacky odd-couple attempt at finding commonalities between the respective ballplayers, it’s about the outfielder Chris Young and the unexpected and rather peculiar trends in looking at his results so far in 2012.

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