Besides going through the normal injuries, I decided to give a detailed injury outlook for a  starting pitcher. Today’s pitcher is Clay Buchholz (a Paul Swydan request), but please let me know if you want anyone else. I am now sure how many I will have time for in the future, but I will try.

• Josh Hamilton may not be ready to go for the regular season after injuring his ankle.

Asked if he believes Hamilton will get enough Spring Training action to be ready to go by Opening Day on March 31, Scioscia said: “Under the guidelines we’ve been given, he should, but this thing has to heal on its own terms and we’ll just see where this leads.”

Hamilton is so frustrating. I am glad someone else usually believes in him (and Matt Kemp) more than me during drafts, so I don’t have to live with the fustration.

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Starting pitchers are the best. For whatever reason — perhaps their true talent changes more year to year, or they have less control over their results than hitters, or injury is more pervasive — pitchers are harder to project than hitters. I personally believe it’s because the power of changing your pitching mix can make you a new pitcher.

Look at Dallas Keuchel. He used to have a meh curve, he ditched it for a good slider. How relevant are his past stats now? You move a pitcher from the tougher league to the easier one, and you have to guess at how much that will matter, to some extent. Because the defense behind them will change too. In Doug Fister’s case, it always seemed like he’d get better defense at his new stop. Is that the case? Or consider the case of Jose Fernandez and the lack of major league sample size. You regress him, and he’s still great. Or Masahiro Tanaka, the complete lack of major league stats.

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I participated in my first auction draft of the season on Wednesday night and oh boy, was it a doozy. An 18-team mixed league auction with 29-player rosters (5×5 but with OBP in place of AVG), and while it doesn’t quite qualify as an “industry league,” it may as well have for the amount of talent in there.

This league also happened to be the worst finish on my ledge in 2013, so I had some additional motivation. While writing assignments and preparing for Sloan distracted me some and a brief loss of connection gave me Aramis Ramirez at $18 when I didn’t really need another expensive corner infielder, it went pretty well, I think.

Since it was such an early draft and such a deep one (522 players selected), I thought I’d post some reflections today.
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One of the most interesting trends of the offseason has been the investment analytical teams like the Athletics and Rays have made in their bullpens. With the Rays, specifically, a pair of trades and a free agent signing have added two relievers with experience closing games to a bullpen that already boasted more than 100 career saves. Together, they should form one the most dominant bullpens in all of baseball with several attractive options for deeper fantasy leagues.

The Rays landed a likely bargain in Grant Balfour for two years and $12 million thanks to his failed physical with the Orioles. It is difficult to be overly concerned with his health status given that Orioles seem to have had more failed physicals than actual signings this offseason. The real reason owners should be pessimistic of Balfour is the handful of excellent arms behind him that boast numbers as good as he has in their careers, if for fewer seasons. In fact, Balfour is one of four Rays relievers to have struck out at least a batter per inning in his career.

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In the past, it used to be difficult to determine how legitimate a batter’s HR/FB rate spike was. We could consider factors like the hitter’s age, his career history including minor leagues and any changes in environment such as home park. Unfortunately, it felt more like a guessing game with the conclusion usually being that the hitter was going to regress the following year back to his career levels. But that doesn’t always happen of course and Jose Bautista wants to make sure you know this. Jeff Zimmerman’s average fly ball and home run distance leaderboard makes it easy for us to find exactly the stat we need when on the hunt to validate a power surge. Did the hitter’s distance rise in conjunction with his HR/FB rate like we would expect to see or not?

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This article is intended for owners in a fairly standard 12 team league; the kind where maybe the top 28 closers are rostered (hands off Kevin Gregg) and maybe a handful of ultra-elite setup men like Kenley Jansen, David Robertson, or Mike Adams before they became closers/got hurt. I know a lot of RotoGraphs readers are not in standard leagues, so while I’ll try to include names that will be available in a large range of formats, I can’t help everyone.

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Foreshadowed by my rather impotent title, this isn’t a strategy likely to bring you home the gold. This isn’t about who to take in the first round, or building your rotation, or sleeper picks. Or even post-hype sleeper picks, to be thorough. Rather, I spend probably far too much time thinking about that last pick, or last few to be precise. When half of your league has checked out from the stress of the draft, or the number of adult beverages they’ve consumed during that span, this is your chance to stockpile opportunity.

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We, as fantasy writers, tend to make a lot of favorable recommendations throughout the year. We talk about which players we like, which ones we anticipate having a breakout season, which ones you should think about picking up during the year and which ones you should watch for in-season call-ups. And while all of that “draft this guy” and “pick up that guy” prove to be valuable pieces of information, rarely do we see the equally valuable “I wouldn’t draft this guy if you paid me.” Well, since I’ve already been accused of writing some mean-spirited things about players in the past, I’ve decided to turn that negativity into an entire post and tell you three players who I refuse to draft this season and why you shouldn’t touch them either. Read the rest of this entry »

The Outfield. It’s a bear. If you’re in a three-outfielder league, it’s easy: wait. There are so many outfielders that actually play the outfield, and then when you add outfield-eligible players, there’s even more. Most leagues have responded by going to five outfielders to create a little positional scarcity, so we rank with five outfielders.

There’s a consensus number one, but that’s where the love between our rankers ends. That’s being a bit dramatic, but since we rank 1-105 on these, you’ll see wider disparities in the raw numbers of our rankings. The difference in opinion is about the same.

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The Red Sox still control the majority of the key bullpen cogs from their World Championship run, so the team that posted the fifth best SIERA in the American League should be in the neighborhood of repeating that mark in 2014. With the return of a couple injured arms (note: mercifully not Joel Hanrahan and Andrew Bailey) and the addition of a few pitchers fitting the mold of Boston’s already low-walk relief corps, there is also upside for the defending champs to own one of the better (and more fantasy relevant) bullpens in baseball.

The closer
Koji Uehara

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