Today has been a newsful day for the Philadelphia Phillies. They acquired a 37-year-old, front of the rotation starter while announcing that their putative number two would miss the start of the season. Big fantasy news abounds.
About four times a season, Eno unleashes the shocky monkeys and a few of us slow-footed writers are forced to enjoy ranking all the players. For the next few days, I am going to go over how I prepared my rankings.
Note: I am trying to keep the amount of math to a minimum. If somewhere you get lost in the procedure let me know and I can explain the procedure in more detail.
The first item to remember is all leagues are not even close to being the same. In my three keeper leagues, two are points based and the other is an AL only league with one pitcher category being Wins+Saves+Holds. Additionally, some leagues have keepers. How the keeper’s “salary” is set determines a their value. Other league options have innings pitched limits (good rates stats needed) or as in the case of my league with W+S+H, an IP minimum is set to keep owners from only using relief pitchers. Catcher rankings can vary quite a bit from a one catcher to two catcher leagues or even two catcher slots with a 162 game limit as in Ottoneu. For my rankings, I did them off a basic 5×5 12-team league with 23 positions (14 position players, 9 pitchers).
Fellow RotoGraphs contributor Howard Bender was kind enough to allow me to participate in a mock draft yesterday afternoon. What follows is pick-by-pick breakdown of the team I ended with. I’m a pretty tough critic on myself, but I really do think this team would not have played out very well for me had this been a real draft. It was a standard non-keeper 5×5 roto league. It had 2-catchers, no bench, but corner and middle infield instead, making them 23-man rosters. The full draft results can be found here.
Round One, Pick Five
Carlos Gonzalez
Gonzalez has gone 20-20 for four straight seasons, which is even more impressive given that he has averaged just 130 games per season. Health is always a question mark when it comes to fantasy baseball, but with CarGo, that question mark is in bold, italics, and underlined size 72 font.
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In every draft you do, there are players who you target and players who you settle for. As we move through these depth chart discussions, it’s good to look at outfields such as that of the Indians, because, while you have your draft strategy mapped out and have your list of targets, something always goes awry and you need to settle for Plan B. Not to worry, though. Plan B isn’t so bad as you have some potential upside. The ceiling has the potential to be high, the floor isn’t too bad and more often than not, they end up somewhere in the middle. These Indians are your Plan B. Read the rest of this entry »
The White Sox made waves this offseason by bringing in younger, more talented players. Problem is, that excitement will mostly be saved for the outfield. Jose Abreu was brought in, and should make an immediate impact, but the team has been somewhat hesitant to talk up Matt Davidson. That leaves the usual, boring suspects to fill out the rest of the infield. The question is whether any of them can contribute enough to be a fantasy asset.
Last year, I was optimistic about Indians pitchers given that the team had a very speedy outfield to gobble up fly balls. But alas, the pitching staff allowed a .302 BABIP, eighth highest in baseball and the defense compiled a weak -4.5 UZR/150, ranking 26th overall. Although the defense will mostly be the same, so that won’t be one of the reasons to like the pitching staff, it’s an exciting group despite the potential lack of help from the fielding unit.
Episode 93
The latest episode of The Sleeper and the Bust is now live! Jason Collette joins Eno Sarris to preview the Baltimore Orioles and the San Diego Padres
As usual, don’t hesitate to 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.
Thanks to Ian Miller aka Teen Archer, for the new intro music
Approximately 61 min of joyous analysis.
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When drafting hitters for a traditional five category league, my standard strategy is to target players who contribute in many categories – preferably all five. Today, in deference to my jet lag, we’re mostly going to dispense with analysis and break out some lists of players who fall into different buckets of production. All of the values below come from Steamer’s 2014 projections. Steamer and projection systems in general aren’t the best at predicting runs and RBI, so keep that in mind.
At first base in Atlanta, you’ve got a line drive, batting average on balls in play god with maybe a lower power ceiling than some of the others at his position. At third base in Atlanta, you’ve got a line drive, batting average on balls in play demi-god with maybe a lower power ceiling than some of the others at his position. At catcher, you have two grip-it-and-rip-it guys with power and little else. There isn’t too much science to those parts of the Braves’ infield depth chart.
In between the three positions, you’ve got some strange batted-ball distributions that make for more interesting conversations.
The Kansas City Royals rotation had a clear edict in 2013: don’t blow anybody away, but don’t hand the opposition anything. As such, they ranked 27th in strikeout rate, 17th in walk rate and relied on a rangy defensive outfit to make up the difference with all of those balls in play. It worked out well enough, though perhaps below expectations, as the Royals rotation was roughly league average (18th in ERA and fourth in innings pitched).
Well, Ervin Santana is out, replaced by Jason Vargas, and everything else remains largely the same. Does it make sense to commit $36.6 million, 45 percent of your entire payroll, to a rotation that looks to be league average at best? Probably not, but here we are, with perhaps the most unspectacular two-through-four in baseball.
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