2016 End of Season Rankings: First Base

Last week, we kicked off our review of 2016 with the ever-exciting position of catcher. Somehow, we accidentally tagged Roberto Perez with a negative $8.10 price. That was supposed to be a positive $81. At least, that’s the case for your weird postseason fantasy league. Where did you even find a postseason league?

Today, let’s shift over to the cold corner for some real actually interesting players. If you missed the first post in this series, I recommend giving it a quick skim. It has notes on methodological changes between this season and last. You can also go straight into the calculator to tweak values for your league.

For these articles, I’m going to assume a 12 team, 5×5, standard deep roster with a pitching cap of 1475 innings (most leagues are 1450 or 1500, I split the difference). I set the batter split at 65% because that produces what I consider to be the most realistic position adjustments.

Here we go…

If you go into the actual calculator, you’ll notice Kris Bryant is the top rated first baseman at $28.90. Several other first base eligible players were also dropped from the list like Daniel Murphy, Mark Trumbo, Adam Duvall, Todd Frazier, Jonathan Lucroy, Buster Posey, and Javier Baez (to name a few).

I’d like to say I had a specific reason for removing them, but the decision was really made by FanGraphs. The calculator doesn’t list Roto values. Instead, it lists dollars above average for each category. To get the above table, I built a separate positional leaderboard then did some minor Excel gymnastics (i.e. a VLOOKUP). The dropped players simply weren’t included in this first baseman leaderboard.

And now, a few general comments

For leagues with a corner infield slot, replacement level was right between Sean Rodriguez and Mark Reynolds. Remember, several players were dropped from the above list. It doesn’t represent your full array of options. There were actually 36 first base eligible players with a positive dollar value.

If you head into the calculator, you’ll notice first basemen have an aPOS (position adjustment) of $9.50. Interestingly, shortstops eligible players like Brad Miller have a $8.60 position adjustment. The implication is that shortstop is deeper in a relative sense than first base. That jibes with my early look at 2017 positional depth.

Position adjustments are important to keep in mind when using the calculator. For example, Lucroy is the eighth ranked first baseman because his catcher eligibility was worth a $20.70 adjustment. If you’re thinking about drafting Lucroy as a first baseman (why would you do that?), remember to manually adjust his price. In this case, he drops from $22.90 to $11.70.

A few first basemen posted serious positive value in the stolen base category, namely Goldschmidt, Myers, and Hernan Perez (fyi, he was one of the dropped guys). If you manage to land a first baseman with over 25 steals, it’s a lot easier to roster a bat first shortstop like Corey Seager without suffering in the stolen base category. We’ll get into the importance of middle infield steals later in the offseason.

For now, the topic is power. First base is typically the most important source of bulk home runs. In this season when even second basemen nearly all popped 20 or more home runs, secondary skills like RBI, AVG, and those rare steals took on extra importance.

First base produced plenty of surprise performances. Freeman finally found his power stroke after suffering through a deep early-season funk. Myers was finally healthy, and he ran so much more than anyone could have possibly predicted. I wonder if his stolen base total will crater like Rizzo’s did this season. That certainly hurt owners who were counting on a repeat of 2015 on the bases.

Just because a player has a negative value, it doesn’t mean they weren’t useful. The Phillies had the poster children for a successful second half streaming platoon. Howard and Joseph bopped at a 40 homer pace. Howard annihilated righties while Joseph was quite good against lefties. Both were permanently free in most leagues. The right combination of Howard, Joseph, and a first half performer like Pearce could have been glued together for over $10 of production.

Of all the disappointments, my vote for the worst has to be Park. Or maybe it should be Zimmerman. While it still feels like Park has time to adjust to the majors, 2016 felt like a last chance for Zimmerman. The Nationals ran away with the NL East despite their former franchise star. He may be under contract through 2019, but it’s probably time to replace him with a real hitter.