With all due congratulations to the San Francisco Giants, it is now time to fully look ahead to the 2013 baseball season, and perhaps just as importantly, the 2013 fantasy baseball season!

• Rumors are swirling about what the Los Angeles Angels will do with one of — or both — Dan Haren and Ervin Santana. Despite having a down season by all accounts, Haren was an elite pitcher as recently as 2011. The primary cause for concern regarding Haren is his slumping fastball velocity. For the first time in his career, his four-seamer averaged less than 90 mph. Or even 89 for that matter. In fact, his velocity on all of his pitches was down across the board. Pure speed isn’t the absolute critical factor in pitching, but it certainly does help. Santana has been more consistently inconsistent. Given that he posted his worst K%, BB%, ERA, FIP, and xFIP in five years, it is highly possible that Santana might not see his 2013, $13 million dollar option exercised. Santana’s biggest issue was that he always seemed to give up a home run. He actually lead the league in home runs allowed, despite making half of his starts in a home park that suppresses home runs from both left and right-handed hitters. At this point, it seems most likely that the Angels will pursue Zack Greinke and not Santana nor Haren for next season, let alone the long term.
Read the rest of this entry »

Fantasy owners hoped Mike Moustakas would breakout in 2012 after a disappointing rookie season in 2011. For a few months it looked like the breakout would happen as he hit .268 AVG with 15 home runs in the first half of the season. In the second half, the production dropped as he barely hit over .200 with only 5 HRs. In 2013, his talent level will be tough to predict due to his up and down production.

In Mike’s short career, he looks to have three distinct “seasons” — 2011 and the first and the second halves of 2012.

Read the rest of this entry »

Adrian Beltre turned 33 before this season. No matter if you look at his plate discipline or power components, the aging curves say that he’s post-peak and we should see some decline. Not every player follows the curves the same, but look at Beltre’s recent years, and it just looks like he’s getting better. Impossible.

Read the rest of this entry »

It was a nice comeback season for Ryan Zimmerman. After injuries held him to just 101 games in 2011, Zimmerman was going to need a good 2012 to restore the faith of fantasy owners. And while Zimmerman’s final slash line of .282/.346/.478 looks strong, he gave owners a bit of a scare early in the year. With his numbers seemingly back to normal, can fantasy owners expect bigger and better things from Zimmerman next season?

Read the rest of this entry »

This week is all about the hot corner. Our own mathemagician Zach Sanders published his final season rankings and dollar values for third basemen this morning. Sitting all the way down at a disappointing 19, with just $4 earned, is the Blue Jays’ third sacker Brett Lawrie. In the pre-season, we were pretty consistent with our opinon on Lawrie and ranked him fifth overall, tied with Adrian Beltre. Were we suckered in by his sizzling play in 2011 in a small sample of just 150 at-bats?

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2012 fantasy baseball season has come to a close, so it is time to look back at the season past and determine which players were the most valuable at each position. This week focuses on third baseman, a hotly contested position on draft day.

The players were ranked based on their 2012 production, using the evaluation system explained and updated on this site some time ago. To keep things manageable and avoid skewing the numbers, players were only considered if they amassed 350 plate appearances over the course of the year. The replacement level was also adjusted to account for players eligible at multiples positions. The valuations are built for $260 budgets and traditional 5×5 roto fantasy leagues.

One important thing to note is the premium (or lack thereof) placed on the position a player occupies in your lineup. For example, while a first baseman may be able to accumulate superior overall numbers, the availability of such production lower in the rankings severely dampers the amount the player was worth.

These rankings are meant to reflect a player’s value should he have occupied this spot in your lineup for the entire year. So, a player who missed time due to injury but put up great numbers during his time on the field would be worth less.

With all this in mind, here are your rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

I have little doubt at this point that you the reader hasn’t figured out what we should have all figured at some point this fantasy season: second base was pretty deep. In fact, there were 29 different keystoners whom Zach Sanders listed at $0 and up, with Darwin Barney reeling in that break-even evaluation.

Today I’m tasked with evaluating Dan Uggla, a player with plenty of real-life utility — 3.5 WAR ranks as his fourth-best season out of seven — but one who was probably over-drafted given his season-ending 17th-place ranking. The list of players he finished behind contains some surprises, namely Omar Infante and Danny Espinosa, but again that’s more due in part to the depth at the position than anything. Read the rest of this entry »

Jose Altuve is like Major League Baseball’s version of Earl Boykins; whenever you watch him standing at the plate you can’t help but think “wait, the Little League World Series started already?” He might be big league ball’s shortest active player, but his fantasy exploits per inch stack up well with any of the other second basemen you stand him up against. Altuve came in 11th on Zach Sanders’ end-of-season 2B rankings, meaning that in 2012 he was a viable starting 2B in all but the shallowest of fantasy formats, not bad for a guy who was 22nd off the board at his position and 230th overall (by way of ESPN, at least).

Read the rest of this entry »

This season was rough for Julio Teheran after he scorched the minors in his first four seasons. Relying on a mid-90s fastball Teheran punished the lower leagues before making the jump to Triple-A in 2011 and earning the International League’s MVP award. But, after posting a 5.08 ERA in 2012 the question on fantasy owners’ minds is whether he’ll regain his past form. To try to answer this question I watched 5 games from the past year starting with his blow up start in Buffalo on May 17. Read the rest of this entry »