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 catchers.

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 multiple 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’m rarely much of a political person — at least publicly — but the hardest I’ve ever campaigned was for the Twins to NOT trade J.J. Hardy after the 2010 season. It wasn’t as though I had any emotional connection to Hardy; the closest I ever came to even speaking to the guy was that I stood a few lockers away from him while I interviewed a few of his teammates.

But what I never really understood was what went wrong in that relationship. Hardy had a very good second half with the Twins. He was finally healthy and started hitting the ball better, and was essentially what the Twins and everyone could have dreamed for: a solid shortstop on both sides of the field. Read the rest of this entry »

Every spring fantasy columns tend to say the same old thing about Derek Jeter. “He’s old. He’s getting older. He can’t keep doing this forever. Let someone else pay the pinstripe tax.” Maybe owners have been taking this more to heart recently, as the days of that one Yankee fan in your league snagging Jeter in round two appear to be rapidly disappearing into the rear-view mirror. This year, using ESPN’s average draft tracker, Jeter actually fell all the way to tenth among shortstops, going around 119th overall — which is right where the Rotographs end of season 2011 FVAR rankings stuck him. But owners who stuck with him this year (be it out of sentimentality or the fact that they suddenly realized they needed a shortstop in round 10) were paid handsomely, as Zach Sanders’ aforementioned FVAR rankings show he not only didn’t fall further but actually climbed four spots (from 2011) to sixth when the dust settled on the 2012 campaign.

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The Arizona Fall League as long been considered prospect finishing school. Most recently uber-talented youngsters Mike Trout and Bryce Harper decimated the pitching-light league prior to ascending to Triple-A and then the Major Leagues. But the 2012 crop in Arizona doesn’t feel as talented as previous years had. Is the talent level in the league dropping?

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The Major League Baseball season is over, but prospect season is just getting started.

Various sites, including FanGraphs, featuring Canada’s own Mr. Marc Hulet, have begun posting prospect rankings. And of course, the Arizona Fall League, the annual six-team collection of future stars-in-the-making, is entering its final week. Which makes this the perfect time for an update on a batch of young players whose AFL performances, small sample sizes be damned, just might help them make an impact in the bigs come 2013.

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I have to admit, when looking at Zach Sanders’ End of Season Shortstop rankings, I was initially slightly surprised to see that Elvis Andrus didn’t finish in the top 10. After all, Andrus is coming off another solid season, one in which he finished fifth among shortstops in WAR – that’s fourth if you don’t really consider Ben Zobrist a shortstop – and he grabbed the 50^th and final spot in Dave Cameron’s 2012 Trade Value series over the summer. With top prospect Jurickson Profar nearly ready to step in for Texas, Andrus’ name has become even more prominent lately as a possible trade solution over a fishing in a weak shortstop market, regularly coming up as a potential fit with Arizona as part of a deal for Justin Upton. At just 24 years old, Andrus would seem to be one of the brightest young shortstops in the game.

Then again, this might be a case where we need to separate things that don’t really matter in fantasy from things that do. The fact that he’s a well-regarded defensive shortstop matters a lot more to the Rangers than it does to fantasy teams, and you could say the same thing about the team-friendly contract that helped to land him in the Trade Value series. For fantasy purposes, what you have here is a durable player with little power (only three homers, better than just four of the thirty-three other shortstops on Sanders’ list), a good but non-elite batting average, and a stolen base total that declined from 32 or more in each of his first three seasons to just 21 in 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

It all started out so promising. Just when it looked like Rafael Furcal’s career was in jeopardy, he started to turn things around. Furcal got off to a blazing start in 2012, hitting .315/.384/.427 in March and April, and improving that line to .349/.397/.486 in May. People had started to think that the 34-year-old Furcal had found the fountain of youth. It didn’t last, and regression hit pretty hard. If his midseason slump wasn’t bad enough, Furcal injured his elbow at the end of August. The injury kept him out for the rest of the season, including the Cardinals playoff run. Now entering his age-35 season, and coming off an elbow injury, it’s a good time to wonder if Furcal is finished.

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Still baseball, fantasy baseball and beer in thirds, more or less, still me, still that Friday fresh feeling, but now on Thursdays.

If there’s one thing that we can take away from reviewing Zach Sanders’ Shortstop End of Season Rankings, it’s that the position, on the whole, is not very strong. The overall drop-off going from Jimmy Rollins at number one with a $22 value to say, J.J. Hardy at number 17 ($8) or even Zack Cozart at number 22 ($1) isn’t that dramatic and Rollins’ numbers really weren’t anything to freak out about. So if you choose to wait on the position in 2013 and not invest big money in one of the top five, you’re not exactly slitting your fantasy throat. In fact, when you start scraping the bottom of the barrel and end up with Jhonny Peralta or Yunel Escobar, you’re not really doing damage to your team, but you’re also not doing much to help it either. Read the rest of this entry »

In real life, Ruben Tejada had a decent season, especially at his cost. For a half mill, the Mets got a player that put up average defense at a premium position. He added a stick that was only eight percent worse than league average, and actually above-average for his position (86 wRC+). All of that together added up to a league-average player getting paid just about the league minimum.

Fantasy baseball doesn’t care. Linear weights, 4×4, 5×5 — there’s virtually no format in which Tejada’s offensive contributions last year were above replacement in a mixed league. Even in deeper leagues, his skills just don’t translate. In 5×5 roto leagues, he was the 27th-best shortstop and worth negative four dollars this year.

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