Let’s continue my picks and pans with a look at the second base and shortstop positions. Like for the corner guys, I’ll only consider Picks to be those in my top 20 and Pans to be those in the consensus top 20.
March Rankings Updates:
Second Base
Shortstop
RotoGraph’s Bold Predictions pieces make for an undoubtedly fun series to be a part of. The challenge is finding that sweet spot between bold and insane which, to my understanding, results in about 3 correct predictions out of 10. Last year, my first, my boldness led me off the deep end as faith in such luminaries as Aaron Hicks, Chris Heston, and Chris Bassit went unrewarded. Hard to believe.
But given that our job at RotoGraphs is to give our readers advice as to how they should manage their fantasy teams, it’s only fair that I put my money where my mouth is and base my predictions, to the extent possible, on players I’ve recently endorsed. So, with that said, let’s get bold!
As promised on Tuesday, I’ve opted to produce two times the Bold Predictions, organized by positive and negative. The positive edition already exists in the etherwebs. Now it’s time to get negative. But first, I forgot to list my boldest positive prediction. Let’s strain to fit it among the negatives.
3/22/17
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Nobody knows whether the great novelist Joseph Conrad played Fantasy baseball. He died in 1924, so perhaps not, but a passage in one of his novels suggests that he envisioned it. In The Secret Agent, a character entertains the “horrible notion that ages of atrocious pain and mental torture could be contained between two successive winks of an eye.” We can now attest to the accuracy of that notion, because we had such an experience in a Fantasy baseball auction last Sunday. We had neglected to stock our catching staff, and, as a result, between those two successive winks we were compelled to place a $7 bid on Francisco Cervelli. “Pain” and “torture” were indeed the centerpieces of our experience in that instant.
We were going to report on the above-referenced auction in this week’s installment, but frankly it’s just too embarrassing. Consistently undervaluing catchers until we were stuck with a $7 Cervelli and a $2 Jason Castro was just the most egregious of our errors. But our loss is your gain, because we decided to write something useful for a change: a review of auction market prices.
It is Bold Prediction season here at Fangraphs and I am ready to improve on my 2.5 correct out of 10 from last year.
This year I decided to do mine a bit different. I have been vacation and busy preparing for my trip to New York for Tout Wars, where I will be crashing/helping out with the festivities and harassing/getting to meet fellow industry colleagues. So, I decided to focus on players and themes that I felt I have not been able to touch on as much on my podcast or here at Rotographs. Read the rest of this entry »
Somehow I weaseled myself out of doing 2016 BOLD predictions. No luck this year. Paul has implemented released his Shocky Monkeys and I am forced to make some sort of fact-based BOLD predictions.
Note: For ADP values, I used NFBC for this season and will use our auction calculator for end-of-season values.
BOLD prediction #1: Trea Turner will perform 20 spots worse than his ADP suggests.
I am not down on Turner one bit but nothing points to him being a top 10 fantasy hitter. Unless a person projects out his 2016 for a full season. I feel comfortable taking him around pick 20 overall but he will likely never last that long. I was going to say never but he has lasted to the 20 pick in at least one NFBC league.
I find the most projection variance with first or second-year players. It takes just one person of the 10 to 20 people in the draft to have an overly optimistic projection to bump up the value. Or they have a fear of missing out on the next big thing. Turner has a range of 1st overall to that 20th ranking. The two hitters going before or after Turner, Manny Machado (4th to 12th) Josh Donaldson (8th to 20th) have a tighter ADP range. Someone else can take the chance and I will grab last year’s 1st round phenom, Carlos Correa, a few picks later.
Below are my bold predictions for the 2017 season. As always, these are ottoneu fangraph points specific. I tried to add enough qualifiers to make each of them “bold” but feel free to ridicule in the comments if you think otherwise. It should be noted that, if I do this right, I should get 3 out of 10. I tried to frame them accordingly. The predictions are in bold (no particular order), followed by a brief synopsis. The synopsis is more important than the prediction itself. Some of these players may not meet my criteria for their specific prediction come year end, but this should give you a grouping of names that I like as we approach opening day.
Carlos Martinez becomes an ottoneu ace ($30+ SP)
When we released our SP rankings, we had 10 SP being worth $30+. Of those ten, seven are clear cut $30 pitchers (Kershaw, Syndergaard, Scherzer, Bumgarner, Sale, Strasburg, and Kluber), with six SP falling into the $28-$31 range (Arrieta, Archer, Lester, Carrasco, Cueto and Darvish). For 2017, I believe Carlos Martinez will vault into the upper tier of fantasy aces, returning $30 of value. For those wondering what $30 of value equates to, consider the upper bound of that second tier. Read the rest of this entry »
It seems there was a major influx of drafts into this week’s ADP data. I imagine the NFBC is administering more drafts on a regular basis, but they might’ve also had a bunch of their draft-and-hold leagues finish up and get into the data.
For the uninitiated: 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. Last week I tried the positional thing, but there isn’t always something to discuss at every position so I’m going back to free form.
PREVIOUS EDITIONS:
BIGGEST RISER: Jeanmar Gomez | +28 spots to pick 333
This is three weeks in a row for Gomez as the biggest riser. That’s what being announced into a closer’s role will do for you. Greg Holland (+15 to 308) already got a huge boost and I think he’ll keep surging and wind up just inside the 250 in these next two weekends if he is in fact officially named as closer.
Yesterday, I shared my picks and pans at the catcher position by comparing my ranks to the consensus ranks after excluding my own. Continuing through the infield, we’ll combine first and third base together so I can finish these before the season begins. These were the March updated first base rankings and here are the third base rankings.
Unlike catchers, I’m going to restrict my picks to those that made my top 20 and my pans to those that made the consensus top 20.