It’s time for our Depth Chart Discussions to begin. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, bullpen, and rotation) and will begin breaking them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find them gathered here.

The Pirates have clearly learned lessons from the Rays and A’s. Those two scrappy clubs frequently contend by virtue of depth and unexpected breakouts. As a franchise, you make your own luck finding cheap talent. From the outside, it looks like they roster as many average major leaguers as possible and then hope for the best. Perhaps it looks the same from the inside.

In any case, the Pirates have enviable infield depth.

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It’s time to talk about Brett Lawrie and Justin Smoak yet again. These two have been through the spin cycle from hyped prospects, to busts, to post-hype sleepers, to post-hype busts. The majority of the fantasy community appears to have moved on from Smoak and is close to doing so on Lawrie. This is exactly the reason they’re interesting again. Rock-bottom prices (Lawrie is ranked at 272 in the RotoGraphs group top 300 and Smoak is unranked) and a change in scenery for both bring the slightest glimmer of hope.

Brett Lawrie

Sadly, this may be the last season the Standard Brett Lawrie Fantasy Analysis form letter still works: “But he’s still just _ (fill in age here)!” Having said that, I may as well dust it off one last time: But he’s still just 25! It’s true. Lawrie is younger than George Springer. This guy could have a lot of baseball left in him. He qualifies at both third base and second base, but I’ll consider him mostly at second base because that’s where his value is highest.

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This 30-part series will look at the projected Top 5 freshman contributors for each big league club for the year ahead. The rankings take into consideration a mixture of ceiling, readiness and potential playing time allocation, which is to say some players with lower ceilings may be ranked ahead of others with higher ceilings because they project to have a greater impact in the coming season.

In a Nutshell: Four of the five players listed below joined the Athletics via trades during the recent off-season. There isn’t a superstar-in-the-making among the bunch but the club has impressive, young depth at a variety of positions — both on offence and on the mound.

1. Sean Nolin, LHP: Traded to Oakland in the offseason Josh Donaldson deal, Nolin is a promising southpaw starter with the ceiling of a No. 4 starter. He should benefit from the move to a more spacious park where his fly-ball tendencies will be less detrimental. He’s probably been MLB ready for at least half a season but the upper level depth, as well as an injury, kept Nolin in the minors — except for one late season MLB appearance. With that said, he still has some work to do to reach his full potential, including improved command.

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Episode 203

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris do their first base preview!! First, they discuss Eno’s AL LABR team as he now battles with two pitching injuries and then they deep-dive into the deepest position on the diamond:

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My Tout Wars evening almost went a very different way on Tuesday night. We had 15 of us gathered for the Tout Wars Mixed Draft and I had the 11^th overall pick. This is an OBP league which severely changes the value of some players, so keep that in mind when you’re looking at the draft board. We had to run the draft on RTSports through one of their mock drafts even though the league will be hosted on OnRoto in-season. This caused some issues right out of the gate and nearly set my night down a vastly different path.

On my end, the draft didn’t start at 7:00 PM central as scheduled. There were no sounders and nothing was moving. At about 7:04, it jumped live to the 14^th pick and I had been auto’d with Adam Jones. He is an unquestionably great player, but I wouldn’t necessarily take him there in a standard league with AVG and I certainly wouldn’t take him there in an OBP league. He experiences one of the biggest value shifts going from AVG to OBP. He has hit a composite .284 over the last five seasons, ranging from .280 to .287, but an unspectacular 3.9% walk rate leaves him with just a .321 OBP in that same span (.334 high, .311 low). I was pretty livid.

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With the news that Kenley Jansen is going to be sidelined into May after undergoing surgery on his landing foot, the Dodgers are going to need to find someone to close games for them in his stead. Over the past five seasons, Andrew Friedman has cobbled together bullpens in Tampa that ranked 11th in WAR in the majors. Not stellar, but definitely better than the 24th place the Dodgers have ranked over that same span. Has he given Don Mattingly the right mix to fill the hole left by Jansen, or is he going to go out and add a Rafael Soriano through free agency, or will he reach out to the Phillies and try to make a deal for Jonathan Papelbon?

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• Marcus Stroman will miss all of the 2015 season with a torn ACL. Sadly, there is just nothing to discuss about him until he returns next year. The Blue Jays talked about some of the options for his rotation spot.

Right-hander Aaron Sanchez immediately jumps to the forefront of that discussion as he’ll likely compete with right-hander Marco Estrada and left-hander Daniel Norris for the final two spots on the staff.

“Our plan for Sanchez was always the same,” general manager Alex Anthopoulos insisted Tuesday afternoon. “I think it certainly gives him a better opportunity to start but we still have Estrada being stretched out, still have Norris being stretched out, still have the remainder of camp.

• The earliest Chris Sale could be ready for the season is April 12th. It could take longer.

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An unambiguously true fact: Matt Holliday is an old man in baseball years and in dog years. Another unambiguously true fact: Holliday has been remarkably consistent throughout his career. Hear ye:

• He has hit at least 20 home runs in nine straight years, a streak currently matched only by David Ortiz and Miguel Cabrera;
• His walk rate has hovered between 10 and 12 percent for the better part of a decade, and his strikeout rate has always resided in the mid-teens;
• He has averaged 647 plate appearances per season dating back to 2006;
• And honestly, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a batted ball profile so absurdly consistent.

Yet a slight dip in power and a career-worst batting average (.272, aka what some players can only dream of hitting) in 2014 couldn’t have come at a worse age, and it all has fans and projection systems alike running for the hills, as shown below.
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This 30-part series will look at the projected Top 5 freshman contributors for each big league club for the year ahead. The rankings take into consideration a mixture of ceiling, readiness and potential playing time allocation, which is to say some players with lower ceilings may be ranked ahead of others with higher ceilings because they project to have a greater impact in the coming season.

In a Nutshell: The Angels system has been one of the worst for a while now (even though it produced Mike Trout) but things are starting to look up for the organization. There aren’t any high-ceiling players on the immediate horizon but there are some solid arms and role players that should begin surfacing in 2015.

1. Cam Bedrosian, RHP: Bedrosian rocketed through the minors in 2014 after he began the year in A-ball. He spent the bulk of the year in Double-A but also made 17 big league appearances and set the stage for a larger role in 2015. The starter-turned-reliever is a hard-thrower that has high-leverage potential and could eventually rack up saves for the Angels like his father Steve Bedrosian did for the Braves, Giants, Phillies and Twins. Huston Street will certainly be handed the ball in the ninth inning in 2015 but Bedrosian could be the heir apparent as soon as 2016 and he might receive the odd opportunity in the year ahead.

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Using elite, non-closing relievers was probably the first fantasy specialty I developed. In the good ol’ days, an astute owner could gain a substantial advantage by using Sergio Romo and Mike Adams. The emergence of a thousand elite relievers has put the strategy on the map. Everybody is doing it, and the sheer quantity of substitutes strips away the advantages.

If we want to stay ahead of the competition, we have to take it another step. One of my favorite fantasy tactics is to use relievers in a SP slot. Relievers post better ratios than starters, and their wins per inning are usually comparable to waiver wire starters.

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