• Josh Harrison discussed how his July 2015 surgery bothered him into 2016.

Harrison had surgery to repair his thumb in July 2015, and he returned at less than 100 percent. The following offseason, his training was designed to avoid putting too much weight on his thumb joint. Even during the first half of ’16, especially in cold weather, Harrison’s thumb became stiff and often stung.

“To be honest, I didn’t really feel it come back until right before I got hurt,” Harrison said.

Examining Harrison batted ball stats, there is a mixed message with his 2016 exit velocity dropping 1 mph while and increase in his launch angle led to more distance (+11 ft). The more I dug, I found very little to support a 2017 rebound. He was not productive before the 2015 injury. He never improved over the 2016 season. I may give him a small bump in value because he may have played through injuries but I think the 29-year-old may have peaked in 2014 and is just headed downhill. With him approaching 30, his one good trait, steals, may also be in jeopardy.

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We’re going position by position this week and next with our initial roll out of rankings. We will update these in March based on Spring Training activity and injuries.

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. We can also be reached via Twitter:

• Paul Sporer
• Jeff Zimmerman
• Mike Podhorzer
• Brad Johnson
• Justin Mason
• Al Melchior

There will be differences, sharp differences, within the rankings. The rankers have different philosophies when it comes to ranking, some of which you’re no doubt familiar with through previous iterations. Of course the idea that we’d all think the same would be silly because then what would be the point of including multiple rankers?! Think someone should be higher or lower? Make a case. Let us know why you think that. The chart is sortable. If a ranker didn’t rank someone that the others did, he was given that ranker’s last rank +1.

Schwarber is C eligible at Yahoo! and has been added to the rankings.

Key:

• AVG– just the average of the seven ranking sets
• AVG– the average minus the high and low rankings
• SPLIT– the difference between the high and low rankings

Previous Editions:

• OF
• SP
• 1B
• SS
• 3B
• 2B

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Over the past few weeks I have been writing about xStats outliers, and to date I have covered Gary Sanchez, Trea Turner, and Jay Bruce. You may think Jay Bruce is the odd man out on that short list, but all three of these guys have big question marks around their power potential for different reasons, and you can read the three pieces for more information.  Today I want to focus on Trevor Story.

Trevor Story became a national sensation after he hit 7 home runs in his first 28 plate appearances, then hit 7 more over the course of the next few weeks.  Two months into his rookie season and the guy had 14 home runs, only nine shortstops hit more than 14 home runs through the whole of the 2015 season, three of whom had 15. His power persisted through the warm mid summer months, where he hit five home runs in June and eight more in July prior to suffering a season ending thumb injury on August 2nd.

Trevor Story hit 27 home runs, slugged .567, had a .272 batting average over the course of 415 plate appearances last season.  His power numbers have him ranked as the seventh best short stop – eighth if you count Trea Turner- and his ADP appears to have stabilized somewhere between 30 and 34.  Of course, you may ask, is this power sustainable? Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last couple of years, I have run the “Steamer and I” series, pitting our hitter wOBA and pitcher ERA projections against each other and discussing the players our forecasts differ the most for. I’m going to do things a little bit differently this year by focusing on individual stat categories, identifying a group of players I’m significantly more bullish on compared to Steamer, and vice versa, in that metric.

We’ll start with home runs. I will be comparing my home run Pod Projections to Steamer, which have been extrapolated to the same number of at-bats I’m forecasting. Today, we’ll look at the hitters I’m most bullish on versus Steamer.

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This is a new series for the fantasy draft season where I’ll be tracking differences in the NFBC average draft that is referenced regularly throughout the community and can be found here. Each Sunday I’ll pull the data, compare it to the previous week, and then deliver my key findings. You will still need to synthesize the data into something applicable for your leagues, especially if you don’t play in the NFBC, but this is the game’s sharpest market so I think it’s worth following.

(This will usually drop on Monday or Tuesday, but with the rankings roll out, it was delayed a day.)

BIGGEST RISER: Neftali Feliz – up 48 spots to pick 327

He signed in Milwaukee over a month ago, but the market is working down an ADP that was essentially non-existent so I wouldn’t even get comfortable with the 327 average. With a Max Pick of 713, his only value was as a late-round draft pick for the Draft Champions leagues (50-round, draft and hold) before joining the Brewers where he is likely to close. His Min Pick of 167 is only down two spots, so I’m sure it’s a lot of slotting in the 167-200 range that is steadily moving his ADP. That range slots him in the early-20s among relievers, which feels right given the resurgent velocity and strikeout rate plus an opportunity.

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It’s that wonderful time of year where preliminary positional rankings starting pouring out for the upcoming season. Because I needed another reason to look like a fool by the end of it. The third base position opens 2017 with plenty of intrigue, with a couple of newish faces to the mix and one notable name departing for a new position. Let’s all pour one out for Matt Carpenter. My goal is to be far more consistent on the rankings side in 2017, which means more opportunity for folks to ponder, “Just what in the world is this guy thinking?”

Let’s get to it with some cleverly named tiers:

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This is not a “sleeper” list. Read the rest of this entry »

While Saves matter little in real baseball, they’re a still a common category in Roto leagues. Owners have taken several draft day approaches to acquiring Saves. Some owners get at least two elite guys. Others scrape the bottom of the barrel. A few ignore them completely on draft day and get Saves off the waiver wire. Or the owners just ignore the category. The reason to ignore Saves on draft day is the highly perceived closer turnover rate. But what is the rate? That is what I want to answer over the next couple weeks as I collect and verify information on previous preseason closer expectations and how the expectations worked out.

The main roadblock from getting the analysis done is good information. At my advanced age, my memory isn’t great, so I will ask for some help from our readers. I have gone through the player updates from RotoWire (available on each of FanGraphs player pages) to see how long each preseason closer last in the role. Can you please check my work to see if I am right, especially where I have question marks?

Once the data has been verified correct, I will go back and crunch the numbers for some historical numbers.

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Earlier this month, we took at a look at starting pitcher replacement levels for 2017. Today, we will continue this process for relief pitchers using the same methodology. Please refer back to that post as a primer on how I put my replacement levels together, though I’ll recap some of the methodology here.

2017 Replacement Levels: SP

There are two ways that replacement levels can be defined. This is either as a specific point per game (P/G) or point per inning total (P/IP) or as the nth player ranked at a position. For example, I could say, replacement level for RP is about 6.67 P/IP, or I could say that replacement level for RP is about the 70th RP.

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The Pod Projections are back! My projections are based on the methodology shared in my eBook Projecting X 2.0, and the process continues to evolve and improve.

A couple of months ago, I received my first Pod Projection request from a commenter, and that request was for Astros starting pitcher Lance McCullers. The 23-year-old made his Houston debut in 2015, as he made 22 starts and posted an impressive 3.22 ERA with excellent underlying skills. Unfortunately, he followed up that freshman effort by finding himself on the disabled list for what amounted to about half the season. He dealt with both shoulder and elbow issues, which limited him to just 14 starts. Although his control deserted him, he still posted strong skills, en route to an identical ERA as 2015. Now, he’s the newest member of my 2017 LABR Mixed Draft squad, so let’s find out what I projected his 2017 results to look like.

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