Before I begin, I wanted to get something out of the way first. I have never played in a keeper league for more than a season (therefore never having the opportunity to make keeper selections), and so I might be wrong about my feelings on this strategy. But, I don’t think I am. On Saturday, I was asked to participate in an online auction for a FanGraphs reader who was unable to attend. Being the awesome person that I am and unwilling to pass on a chance to participate in another auction, the player selection format I enjoy significantly more than the snake draft, I said yes with little convincing necessary.

This was a 12-team 5×5 mixed rotisserie keeper league, where if an owner chooses to keep a player, his salary would increase $3. Standard roster size, except the league uses just one catcher instead of two. Oh, and you also use your auction budget ($270, instead of $260) to bid on your 5 reserves. Anyway, having had little experience in a keeper league auction to compare, this one seemed insane. Let me tell you how.

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We know y’all are starting to draft, so we’re going to pump the rankings out two at a time. We even started over the weekend, you might have noticed. The first baseman were first, the catchers were second, and now we get to the second basemen.

I’m partial to these guys — as a bad glove, no-bat youngster, I usually ended up at second base when I played. And it’s one of those positions that teams seem to find. There, among the failed shortstops and slightly athletic former tweener third basemen, they find a guy that works for them. And no, Matt Carpenter is not ranked here yet, (I might put him around 22nd), because you can’t play a guy in a position where he’s not eligible.

No matter where you find your second baseman, though, you need to find one. On to the ranks.

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Even though I personally find two-catcher leagues torture, I did have to pony up and get two guys in AL-LABR this weekend, so we thought we’d go pretty deep to help you out.

If you’re in a mixed league, with one catcher, it looks like you might as well wait until the end of your draft and spend less than your competitors. There’s a decent group at the top. A Mike Napoli / Brian McCann pairing would have plenty of upside and cost a lot less than Buster Posey.

But get down into the dregs of this position, and we know how bad it can get.

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Thing might look a little different this year. We’ve got tools upon tools for your drafts this year, and they should be easier to get to now. But we will still do consensus rankings, and we’ll still do tiered rankings. Because it’s all helpful in different ways.

But it’s time for the consensus ranks first.

It’s also worth putting down on ‘paper’ why we do the consensus ranks the way we do them. We have Jeff Zimmerman, Mike Podhorzer and Zach Sanders submitting their individual ranks alongside mine for a couple of reasons. The first is that four is the minimum ‘n’ we can give you: more of a sample should give you a better ranking. It’s like a mini crowd-source. And the second reason is really the same, in an alternate package: each of us uses projections to a different extent, and each of us uses intuition and research to a different extent. And yes, we have the Steamer projection numbers listed here, but no, none of the rankings is solely based on those projections. In any case, you’ll get five numbers to look at, and you can choose which one you like.

To the first basemen!

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There are two positions clearly occupied in the Detroit Tiger outfield but there’s one very much up for grabs. The clear starter in center is Austin Jackson and the obvious starter in right is Torii Hunter. Neither will be subject to platoons and you should expect to see both of them in the lineup just about every day, given good health. Left field however has some fairly interesting possibilities relative to your fantasy squad.

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The Pirates enter 2013 looking to parlay three-straight seasons of increased win totals into the club’s first .500 or better finish since the George H.W. Bush administration. It shouldn’t take much, as the club went from 63-47 on August 8 to 79-83 to finish the season. To do some rudimentary math, that’s a .308 winning percentage in the last seven or so weeks in the season.

That’s not to say it’ll be easy for the Bucs to buck the trend; Houston is now in the AL West, and the Cubs appear to have a competent rotation and are trending the right way. The Pirates made a few moves in the offseason to shore up the entire team, but today we’ll just focus on the infield. Read the rest of this entry »

In case you haven’t noticed, the past few weeks have brought the unveilings of many of the baseball industry’s most respected and reputable Top Prospects lists. As is, these make for good discussion and great debate, but there’s also a difference between evaluating prospects for real life Major League Baseball and evaluating them from a fantasy baseball perspective. With four Top 100s available for perusal, it’s time to focus on the latter.

This week, we’ll highlight some prospects who are really, really good — in fact, each is included in all four of the Top 100s — but actually might be underrated in fantasy compared to reality, given where they stand in these rankings.

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Rebirth. A new beginning. Like the Phoenix rising from the ashes. Life anew. A fresh start. Read the rest of this entry »

The Milwaukee Brewers return an offense that scored the third-most runs in Major League Baseball. Their team .329 wOBA ranked second in the National League behind the Colorado Rockies, their 202 home runs topped in the NL, and their 158 stolen bases were the best in baseball last season.

Combine that prolific offense with minimal personnel turnover, and it’s not difficult to see why the Brewers have very few positional battles in camp this spring. That extends to the infield, which has entrenched starters around the diamond. A preseason injury to Corey Hart throws a wrench into the depth chart to begin the year, but he’s only expected to miss approximately a month. After his return, the Brewers will feature the same infield they trotted out throughout the final two months last season.

Missing Opening Day is nothing new for Corey Hart, who will miss the start of the season for the third time in the past four years. His absence creates a void at first base for the Brewers for the first month, and perhaps longer. The organization wants to focus on internal options this spring, and the leading candidates for playing time at first base with Hart on the DL appear to be veteran Alex Gonzalez and 26-year-old Taylor Green.

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Breaking news out of Cincinnati: Joey Votto is awesome. He was awesome in each of his four full seasons leading up to 2012. He was awesome before he injured his knee last year, taking a ridiculous .354/.476/.639 line into the June 30 game in San Francisco that saw him leave after five innings due to the injury. He was a different kind of awesome in 25 September games after returning from surgery, failing to hit a homer but still managing to compile a .316/.505/.421 line. That’s not a typo; Votto had 105 September plate appearances, and despite being on the shelf for two months, he reached 57 times.

I’ll take your standard disclaimers about small sample size and varying September competition and I will reply with, simply, Joey Votto is awesome. That’s not to say he’s infallible, because there’s a conversation to be had about the fact that he never did hit another homer after taking Scott Diamond deep on June 24, which led to his somewhat disappointing total of 14 on the season. That’s fair, but his powerless September showed that he’s more than capable of being a very dangerous hitter even if he’s not going deep; that is, even if he never matches his career-high mark of 37 from 2010, he’s still going to be contributing in the other main offensive categories. It would sure be nice to see him showing some of that past power in the spring, now that he’s so much further from surgery, but at a first base position that is no longer as strong as it used to be, Votto belongs in an elite trio along with Albert Pujols & Prince Fielder. Read the rest of this entry »