I don’t know about you, but I’m thrilled that Opening Day has come (for most franchises). I assume that if you’re reading Fan/Not/RotoGraphs, you’re probably pretty stoked as well. And nothing says “irrational exuberance” like making changes to the way you look at fantasy players based on a single game on Opening Day.

Nevertheless, there are some things worth talking about — for fantasy — that came out of the past two days worth of baseball. While nothing should dramatically change the way you look at players, a few things happened that seemed to confirm previous theories, or show indications of potential events in the future. So let’s talk about some of the funnest stuff from yesterday and how maybe it’ll be a sign of things to come in fantasy this season.

Chase Utley: Still Great At Baseball

In fantasy, Chase Utley was usually drafted about tenth among second basemen, according to Mock Draft Central. Utley usually popped in the middle rounds (between 8-12), and behind players like Jose Altuve and Aaron Hill and Brandon Phillips. This is not because Utley is a bad, or even average hitter, but because of lingering concerns about joint health in his balky knees.

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Another year has begun and, as always, ottoneu players are actively working the free agent pool, searching for that missing piece that can put them over the top. Or maybe we are all just busy trying to find replacements for those guys we really didn’t want but got stuck with at the auction.

With the auction-wire red hot right now, I thought I’d take a look at the six players who are in the most active auctions at the moment.

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We here at RotoGraphs preach patience. There is nothing worse than making a reactionary transaction based on a small performance sample and then a month later looking back and realizing your mistake. Unfortunately, every league has at least a couple of owners who simply cannot stop themselves from dropping the slow starter after a week and adding the flavor of the day. This means that your patient approach is going to almost guarantee you will miss out on the breakouts who went undrafted. So with that in mind, let’s look at the ultra tiny sample of one game to analyze some of the lesser owned hitters who launched a home run on opening day.

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Well, now that we have a sufficient sample size to go on, let us judge some players!

On today’s agenda:
1. Potentially (read: almost certainly) available power hitting catchers
2. Ryan Ludwick goes down with an injury
3. Jackie Bradley goes hitless, but still has a big day
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Hoping you all had a wonderful Opening Day. I’m not sure if we will see the closer type of carousel that we saw last year, but on the first day there was already some drama so here it goes: Read the rest of this entry »

Mainly I have spent my time over the last couple of days getting the list of players officially on DL updated. I have divided out the players officially on the DL and others who may not play because of injuries. These list will become clearer over the next few days as teams must decided if the player is healed enough to play.

To start the season, 104 players were placed on the disabled list. Last season almost 500 trips were made to the DL, so a fifth of the DL trips have happened before the season starts.

Recent injury data

 • Johan Santana is done for 2013 with a re-torn shoulder. No fantasy value here.

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Gotta pick him up. Chris Coghlan won a rookie of the year, y’all. And he’s got a job. Sort of — a platoon with Justin Ruggiano — but he’s got a job in center field in Florida and he’s a former ROY winner and he hit .321 once.

If you take Coghlan’s rookie of the year season and extrapolate it out to 700 plate appearances, he had a .321/11/10 season. And that was when he was pre-peak. He’s now 27 and likely to be the fastest and strongest he’ll ever be.

And now his career is on the line. Justin Ruggiano strikes out too much to be an impediment. Expect Coghlan to take this job and run with it, hitting .300 with 15 home runs and 15 steals. That would make him one of the better values of the season, considering he’s owned in zero percent of leagues. Zero percent, guys, what’s going on here. He was the rookie of the year!

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It’s time for the second annual Top 100 Fantasy Rookies, a list of 100 prospects who should make an impact on the 2013 fantasy baseball season. Just how much impact? In some cases, a lot; but in others, it may be minimal — or even negligible. That’s the inherent risk in predicting and projecting not only prospects’ development curves but also how these players possibly fit into their big league teams’ plans during the upcoming season.

That’s why, much like with my Mining the Minors columns, I’ve incorporated both talent and opportunity into each prospect’s ranking. Sometimes, a player’s talent is so elite that it’s worth bumping him up the rankings even if his path to playing time isn’t all that clear (think: Mike Trout last year). But there are also plenty of players in these rankings who skew toward the opportunity side of the spectrum, because they’re (nearly) ready to be in the majors on Opening Day (read: David Phelps, 2012). Trying to weigh and balance these two aspects — talent and opportunity — is what makes a list like this so challenging. And so fluid. Which is to say, my mind could change on any of the players on the list between today and tomorrow. Or even today and later today.

Here’s the fourth batch, from Brett Jackson to Bruce Rondon.

Nos. 100-81
Nos. 80-61
Nos. 60-41

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The Texas Rangers reportedly agreed to an eight-year, $120M contract extension with shortstop Elvis Andrus, effectively making him the focal point of the franchise for the next decade. Contract extensions don’t generally have a huge impact on fantasy baseball for the individual signing the extension. Perhaps it slightly increases Andrus’ long-term value because he will remain in a positive run environment, but that only matters in extreme keeper leagues.

This Andrus extension does impact fantasy baseball in a different way, though. It essentially guarantees one of two scenarios will happen with top-prospect Jurickson Profar: (1) he will be moved to second base with the Rangers, or (2) he will be traded and play shortstop for another organization.

Since this is not the space for trade speculation regarding one of the top prospects in all of baseball, we can focus upon Profar’s assumed move to second base and what that means for his value in standard roto formats.

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If you’re looking for a starter to stream or if you’re trying to find some value in some sort of salary cap daily format, here are three guys I like to begin with and like even more given their matchups in the opening week.

A.J. Griffin, Oakland Athletics – 4/4 home to Seattle

Griffin was solid in an 82.1 inning debut last season. He posted a 3.06 ERA and 1.13 WHIP with a strikeout rate around league average (19.1%) and above average control (5.7%). He might have a bit of upside in the strikeout rate as his swinging strike rate was above average. But because Griffin doesn’t have a huge fastball, I’d expect any improvement to be fairly small. But a league average strikeout rate can go along with an above average pitcher when the pitcher has some other skills as Griffin does. Read the rest of this entry »