On Monday, I identified four second half breakout candidates based on a combination of traditional evaluation methods I use, which include looks at both average batted ball distance and xBABIP marks. Today I check in on some potential busts for the rest of the season. Owners should strongly consider shopping these players in the hopes of executing a sell high trade.
Episode 38
Today’s episode of The Sleeper and the Bust stars yours truly and features RotoGraphs editor Eno Sarris. We discuss players in the context of what to expect in the 2nd half, including breakout candidates and updated consensus rankings.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @mikepodhorzer or @enosarris on Twitter and tweet us any fantasy questions you have that we may answer on our next episode.
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via the feed.
Intro by DJ Sinton (no, contrary to popular belief, I do not moonlight as a rap star)
Approximately 43 min of joyous analysis.
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There’s some decent movement in the shortstop rankings.
A lot of the movement was a long time coming. Larger samples have made the starts by Jean Segura, Everth Cabrera and Jed Lowrie more believable. Segura’s batting average came back to earth, but there are more reasons to believe in his power now. Everth Cabrera still doesn’t have any power, and is pretty bad with the glove, but his new contact rate now comes in a bigger sample now. Maybe he isn’t doomed to hit .250+ going forward. Jed Lowrie has managed to avoid catastrophic injury too. He’s one or two games away from a career high in plate appearances!
He has obviously had a phenomenal rookie season so far, exceeding pretty much every expectation the team or fans could have reasonably had for him. Everyone had hoped Gattis could prevail and become a legitimate major league player, but it is hard to imagine anyone expected him to hit 14 home runs in the first half (in under 200 plate appearances no less).
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Last week, I wrote about Hanley Ramirez in this space. Because it was a look at Ramirez’ success over the past eight years, the natural comparison to another top shortstop in that span, Jose Reyes, came up.
But it was an interesting question in the comments that I wanted to dive into today: Is Jean Segura going to be a Jose Reyes-type fantasy value for the next decade?
No two players are ever identical, so that’s the kind of question that is very difficult to answer effectively. However, we have some data that we can look at to try and compare the two, and it bears out striking resemblances.
At the beginning of the year, I thought this might be the worst position in baseball. It might still be when all is said and done, but there are positive things you can say about this group, too.
There are actually some great young players at the position. Jason Kipnis has zoomed to the top. Jose Altuve probably won’t ever be a true-talent top three guy, but for batting average and speed, he looks like a steady contributor. Kyle Seager is a find. Matt Carpenter was a favorite of ours, but he’s outproduced even our more rosy projections. Jedd Gyorko has a nice compact, fast swing and looks like he’ll have a bit of power. Anthony Rendon, well we have to see about his strikeout rate, but he’s looking good too. Nick Franklin! And maybe even Jurickson Profar.
As those of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen, I spend some time digging into the ottoneu data the last week or so, looking at which players are on the most winning teams. Basically, I was figuring out what percentage of teams a player was on were in each standings spot. This gave me all sorts of wonderful insights, including that 25% of Dioner Navarro owners are in 4th place or that Jake Marisnick is equally likely to be in 12th place as 3rd place.
But it also provided an interesting look into what players (and what kinds of players) are driving success.
If you are familiar with my feelings on pitchers, you know that I put little stock in ERA over smaller samples. Instead, I choose to largely ignore perhaps the most accepted metric to describe a pitcher’s performance by focusing on his peripherals and ERA estimators, my favorite of which is SIERA. Sure, over a long career, ERA is most certainly the better of the two to judge a player’s performance, but at the all-star break of a season, give me SIERA. With most starting pitchers having thrown only about 120 innings, the sample size remains far too small for ERA to provide significant predictive value over the remainder of the season.
There might not be any games but the Bullpen Report keeps going!
• Ron Harper showed a solid cutter pitching to his son Bryce in the Home Run Derby and there is some chatter that the Cubs might give him a look if/when Kevin Gregg is moved at the deadline. Additionally, Jose Cano showed some velocity and although he last pitched in 1989 for the Astros, there were whispers at Citi Field that a return to Houston is imminent for Robinson Cano’s father.
I wrote up the home run derby contestants on our sister site The Hardball Times earlier in the day, but I thought I would give you some additional charts in case you were thinking about putting down some gummi bears on the outcome of the home run derby coming up soon. All stats in the charts are current Through Monday, July 15, and the odds come from Sports.Bodog.Eu. It looks like there are two front-runners according to these numbers.