The Detroit Tigers were one of the big surprises last season finishing last in the AL Central. Coming into this week, left field was one of the competitions we were going to write about for the Tigers. Then the Tigers did what the Tigers do and signed a big named free agent to cover that hole in Justin Upton. As you could predict, Tiger’s management made some noise this off-season to fill some of their holes sufficiently, including the Upton signing and also the Jordan Zimmerman signing. They also acquired Cameron Maybin and Jarrod Saltalamacchia, which will impact the playing time for their respective positions.

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We released our composite starting pitcher rankings yesterday. Presently, I’m going to offer my thoughts about the ace-heavy draft pool. If that part doesn’t interest you, skip down to my early mock observations. That part has important strategic implications.

It turns out we all agree on one thing – Clayton Kershaw is the ace of aces. We couldn’t even agree on Mike Trout as the top outfielder. Kershaw’s ranking isn’t a surprise, but it is a testament to his dominance of the field.

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We’ve started our annual Depth Chart Discussions, re-branded as Playing Time Battles for 2016. You can catch up on every team we’ve covered in the Playing Time Battles Summary post or following along using the Depth Chart Discussions tag.

The 2015 Toronto Blue Jays owned baseball’s best offense no matter how you slice it. They outscored the next-highest team by 127 runs, they topped the league in home runs, they set the pace in on-base percentage and slugging percentage, and their weighted runs created-plus of 117 was the league’s high-water mark dating back to the 2007 New York Yankees. The Jays will return their top eight players in terms of plate appearances from a year ago, plus deadline-week acquisition Troy Tulowitzki, so there’s little concern this won’t be an elite offensive outfit once again.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t question marks. The Blue Jays are set at six positions but have playing time at three spots up for grabs, plus a major batting order question to answer.
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• Yesterday, I took requests for injury information and decided to go with Sam Berger’s request.

@jeffwzimmerman This maybe a really stupid idea: pitch type profile (ie frequency pitcher throws certain pitches) and odds of DL a/o TJ.

— CarrotJuice (@TheDudeOfNY) January 20, 2016

There were about 1000 routes I could have taken for the answer, but I went with the following:

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The defending World Series champions expect to have nearly the same team intact for 2016 as they did for 2015. After resigning of Alex Gordon, the only two position battles are for the two black holes from the 2015 season, second bases and right field. Instead of the filling the positions from free agency, the Royals have looked at using unimpressive internal options. In shallow leagues, the names may not be exciting, but in deeper leagues or AL-only, these hitters will be rosterable.

Second Base

The Royals second base job has been a huge void for a few years until the Royals traded for Ben Zobrist to help with the 2015 championship run. Here is a comparison of how unproductive the Royals second basemen have been over the past five seasons. Not counting Zobrist’s 1/3 of a season, the Royals’ second basemen have produced 5.3 WAR from 2011 to 2015. Over the same time frame, Zobrist has almost produced the Royals total each single season with 25 total WAR.

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Let’s throw some hyped names into the equation. After each name, I listed their NESN NFBC Average Draft Position (ADP) as of 1.15.16 followed by where I have them ranked without a position adjustment according to Rotochamp composite projections (1.12.16):

• Luis Severino: 158.50 ADP vs. 391 (-233)
• Raisel Iglesias: 166.72 vs. 148 (+19)
• Joe Ross: 209.61 vs. 358 (-148)
• Lance McCullers: 129.39 vs. 120 (+9)
• Aaron Nola: 233.39 vs. 288 (-55)

Rotochamp and Steamer grounds our expectations. If you adhere to their projections/these rankings, you might not land Severino, Ross or Nola. ADP on the other hand will make you reach at times. Eno provided a KPU-BB leaderboard (K% + Pop-up% – BB%) this past Tuesday. Here is another approach to ranking starters in addition to our Pitch Repertoire Scores.

Look to their peripherals and rank them by skills. Here is one subjective approach. I z-score the following skills and weigh each one by it’s correlation to expected ERA):

• zGB/FB+zIFFB%
• Average z-score between Ct% and SwStr%
• zK-BB%
• Average z-score between Soft% and Hard%

Summing up these four z-scores, we’re left with the following leader board (50 IP Qualifier):

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The Cincinnati Reds got a jump start on their rebuild during the 2015 season by trading away starter Johnny Cueto, and they were not afraid to give their prospects a chance. Cueto was one of 11 Reds starters to reach 20 innings pitched last season. Of the other 10, eight were rookies, and Mike Leake and Jason Marquis, the two non-rookies, are neither still with the team.

If you’re looking for more playing time discussions, check out our summary page.

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Yesterday, I shared my plight as the commissioner of my local league and complained about the difficulty of finding good owners who remain active all season long. I made the decision to charge a preemptive league inactivity fee, whereby owners would add a quarter of their entry fee into the pot as we head into auction weekend. If an owner remains active all season, his money is returned. If he goes inactive, he will not be seeing that money again. This seems like a straightforward idea, but the biggest question is how to define inactive. So I asked you all for help, and help you provided, with 66 comments so far as I type this follow up.

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Guess what, we’re still evaluating playing time battles in preparation for the 2016 fantasy baseball season. You can catch up on every team we’ve covered in this post. I already slogged through the Philadelphia Phillies pitchers, so let’s just hammer out the rest of their roster battles.

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Some of this is being repeated from the Primer piece that went up this morning. 

We’re bringing them to you earlier this year, but that also means that they’re far from set in stone so take that into consideration as you peruse them. There are still strong arms on the free agent market, let alone all the moving and shaking that happens once players start reporting to camp.

• Outfielder (Jan. 18)
• Starting Pitcher (Jan. 20-today)
• Shortstop (Jan. 22)
• First Base (Jan. 25)
• Catcher (Jan. 26)
• Second Base (Jan. 27)
• Third Base (Jan. 28)
• DH (Jan. 29)
• Reliever (Jan. 29 courtesy of the Bullpen Report crew)

We’re using Yahoo! eligibility requirements which is 5 starts or 10 appearances. These rankings assume the standard 5×5 categories and a re-draft league.  If we forgot someone, please let us know in the comments and we’ll make sure he’s added for the updates. If you have questions for a specific ranker on something he did, let us know in the comments.

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