Now we’re talking. You can keep my interest all the way down to the high twenties on this list of third basemen. I love Chris Johnson’s line drive game as much now as I used to distrust it. Todd Frazier grips it and rips it, but has power. Anthony Rendon is on the cusp. Matt Dominguez finished strong. Nolan Arenado makes contact and has power. Cody Asche even has something going in his favor — a little bit of everything.

I don’t even have many questions about the top six or seven. Sure, Josh Donaldson broke out, but most of his rates are right in line with his minor league numbers. Ryan Zimmerman has the health thing and the throwing thing, but otherwise, he’s good when he’s in.

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When Boston won the 2013 World Series (spoiler alert!), many pundits anticipated the reality that the team would look very different in 2014. Expiring deals for key cogs like Jacoby Ellsbury, Mike Napoli, Stephen Drew and Jarrod Saltalamacchia made that the case. And yet, on the verge of the 2014 season, the Red Sox infield has many familiar faces.

Except, of course, at shortstop. The Red Sox don’t seem to have a concrete plan there, which is a strange position for a defending champ to be in during spring training. How this all shakes out will matter a great deal to fantasy owners, so it bears watching. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a big fan of keeper leagues. The thing I like most about them isn’t that I get to keep a core of talent from year to year, it’s that I can make fair and reasonable trades at just about any point in the season. In redraft leagues, I’m convinced that the optimal strategy is to never trade unless someone is offering you insane value. Usually, a trade is mutually beneficial such that both owners gain a similar number of points. There are cases where that’s useful, but generally speaking, there aren’t many opportunities available.

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• A report stated Ike Davis supposedly hid an oblique injury from the Mets because he was worried about his job.

Ike Davis concealed an oblique injury from Mets officials for most of last season because of bad timing and the fact he was struggling and didn’t want to surrender his spot in the lineup, the beleaguered first baseman told The Post on Sunday.

Ultimately, his season concluded on Aug. 31 in Washington when the oblique “popped,” but Davis’ issues with the muscle began in mid-May and got to the point he was ready to ask for a disabled-list stint.

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It had been a relatively quiet offseason for the Baltimore Orioles, but they’ve recently turned up the heat by signing Ubaldo Jimenez, Nelson Cruz and right-hander Suk-min Yoon over the past week. It’s been a flurry of moves that has personnel ramifications throughout the roster. However, perhaps the most significant addition comes in the starting rotation with former All-Star hurler Jimenez.

The rotation has proven to be an  a problem for the Orioles in recent years. No team has trotted out a worse collection of starting pitchers than the O’s over the last half-decade. Their 4.87 ERA and 4.82 FIP are the highest in Major League Baseball over that time frame. They’ve accumulated the highest home-run rate, the lowest ground-ball rate (which makes sense, considering the home-run rate) and the second-lowest strikeout rate. In short, it hasn’t been pretty and Orioles fans deserve a medal of some sort for coping with such dreadful pitching.

The organization is hoping to turn it around in 2014, though. The addition of Ubaldo Jimenez, the improvement of Chris Tillman, and the maturation of Kevin Gausman are all supposed to help right the ship. Miguel Gonzalez, Wei-Yin Chen and Bud Norris all simply need to not take on water, and the rotation has a decent chance at being league-average. Considering the potent lineup that now adds Nelson Cruz to the mix, the Orioles only need their starters to be average to compete for a postseason berth.

Of course, that’s not something on which I’m comfortable betting as draft day rolls around this spring.

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The Baltimore infield gave us quite a few fantasy relevant options last year. They had a player finish inside the top 12 at every position other than second base, and Chris Davis emerged as a complete stud. Their four fantasy relevant guys will return to their positions, but there are some questions about whether they’ll be able to repeat their value from last year.

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Today’s Pod Projection is the Orioles young third sacker, Manny Machado. In his first full season, the sophomore accumulated a mightily impressive 6.2 WAR. Unfortunately, his season ended with a serious knee injury that required surgery. As a result, he may not be ready for opening day and the uncertainty is reducing his draft cost.

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You’ve been told position scarcity doesn’t exist because you can get a shortstop late in the draft, he’ll be there for you, he’ll exist. Position scarcity never meant an abject lack of players at a position to me, though. It just meant, to me, that finding useful players at that position gets really hard late in the draft. Just because there was once a Ben Zobrist or a Jean Segura available late in the draft, just because Yunel Escobar exists at the plate for a full season and has some value in a deep league, doesn’t mean the position doesn’t suck pretty hard core once you get about 18 deep.

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I’ve said it before, ottoneu leagues are great because there are so many strategies available to enterprising owners. You can play it straight if you’re the unimaginative sort (or maybe too nice to backstab), or you can deep dive into a rich meta-world of strategy. One of those areas is how to handle prospects.

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With the exception of catcher, the Rays bring back the entirely same infield unit from the 2013 season. It’s a fantastic group defensively, but for all intents and purposes there are only two strong fantasy factors.

The Starting Unit

1B James Loney (2014 Steamer Projection .271/.328/.398 | .316 wOBA)

Loney is not one of the strong fantasy factors, though his rebound last year was nothing short of, well, what the Rays do with guys like him. To that end, re-upping with the Rays might have been the smart move. The .299/.348/.430 line from last year is nice, if a bit short on thump for a first baseman, and doesn’t quite tell the whole story. Loney was awesome in the first half (.315/.366/.466), and rather pedestrian in the second (.276/.322/.378). More befuddling yet is that he had a .291 wOBA at home (.261 BABIP), and a .385 mark on the road (.391 BABIP). Projection systems seem to think Loney’s slated for a bit of a bump, but to me there are a lot of entanglements here. My guess is the Rays view him as a +2.5-3.0 win first baseman — largely because I think his defense is viewed in a more positive light than metrics suggest — and that a little regression offensively can be withstood as long as he doesn’t fall back into the 2012 abyss. For my money, he has to hit more like 2013 — or his 2014 Oliver — to even merit back-end consideration in deep leagues. Read the rest of this entry »