Never before have we seen so many talented young pitchers. And, although I don’t have concrete evidence to support it, it feels like we have never seen so many name-brand starting pitchers struggle.

Everyone slumps. David Price, for example, is slumping. But with an atrocious strand rate (LOB%) and elevated batting average on balls in play (BABIP), it’s the type of slow start that savvy fantasy owners should target as a buy-low opportunity.

Other starters enduring equally slow starts can’t be defended quite as easily. Inversely, still more starters are masking their ugly peripherals with typical production, as expected. You may want to consider selling the names below. All three make me sad because, while not especially old, each of them has stared down his mortality at one point or another this season, as we normal folk do every day when we look in the mirror. All our demises are imminent, a truth made painfully true by the beautiful yet cruel sport we love so.

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Previous rankings:
March/April (Preseason)

* * *

For this post, I had written something entirely different, but I woke up early to change it. All of it. I didn’t dream about it — no, not quite. But I came close. This month has proven to be pretty difficult. Maybe “finicky” is the word.

So many hitters are producing at similar levels with similar peripherals to support them that it’s hard to tease them apart. I tried a full re-rank and I had clustered something like 20 or more guys together twice. I try to limit each particular tier to maybe a dozen hitters, so coming away with only three-or-so tiers was problematic. That’s why I decided to wake up early and do this over. The ranks haven’t changed much, but certain guys have moved a lot, and I will try to identify which guys are most likely to move up or down by the time the June iteration of these rankings roll around.

Also — and this is totally unrelated — I think more readers were infuriated by my omission of Tommy Pham (who has all of one plate appearance this year) than my ranking of A.J. Pollock over Bryce Harper. Y’all crack me up sometimes.

You know the drill: I rank National League outfielders, you yell at me in the comments. Consider all rankings fluid within tiers but not between them (except at the top and bottom of each tier, perhaps). Normally, I would tell you that players should be reserved to their respective tiers, but I think there’s much more opportunity for movement here than ever before (ever before, in the context of me doing this since the beginning of last year). Lastly, if I omit a name, politely let me know in the comments.

Unless it’s Tommy Pham. Then shhhhhhhhhh.

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This kind of post is right in Mike Podhorzer’s wheelhouse. We have a lot of common interests as far as baseball research topics are concerned — namely, xK%, xBB% and xBABIP — but he’s typically the one who periodically updates RotoGraphs with x-leaders and x-laggards.

So, again, this would be the kind of post Pod would tackle: an update on which starting pitchers will likely regress in their strikeout rates (xK%). But instead of using the xK% equation, to which the above paragraph is hyperlinked, I want to focus on a particular metric: zone contact rate, or Z-Contact%.

I’ll be up front about this: I haven’t done much research regarding pitcher zone contact rates and how it sticks from year to year. That’s primarily what this post will entail, and my evidence is largely anecdotal. But it’s important to note that zone contact rate plays a profound role in determining a pitcher’s strikeout rate; the Pearson correlation coefficient between K% and Z-Contact% is -0.72. In other words, K% and Z-Contact% are strongly negatively correlated.

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Humor me for a second. Pretend that you don’t already know this post is about Mark Trumbo. OK, good.

As of Monday morning, through 48 plate appearances, Bryce Harper hit six home runs, stolen three bases and walked twice as often as he struck out. It’s ridiculous to extrapolate, but acknowledge that Harper has basically replicated Barry Bonds‘ historic and infamous 2001 batting line through a small sample size, and it gives you a sense of just how monstrous of a start Harper has had — at just 23 years old.

Now, try to comprehend that Harper, per weighted runs created (wRC+), isn’t even the best hitter in the game right now. There must be luck involved, you think to yourself, and you’re certainly right in one instance: Daniel Murphy and his .500 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) have vaulted Murphy to the top of the leaderboard.

But right below him, sandwiched between him and Harper, mere decimal points of a percentage point of wRC+ better than Harper, is Mark Trumbo. Mark Trumbo, of the career 110 wRC+, is, in a sense, hitting like peak Barry Bonds. They got there in different ways, but numbers are numbers. I guess everyone is due for a good week, Trumbo included, right? Or is there something more to this?

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Last week, Eno Sarris posted what he called a starting pitching omnibus. He chronicled some thoughts on a handful of pitchers with more volatile stocks in the early goings. It covered a couple of the pitchers I’ll discuss today, sort of by coincidence, sort of by not-coincidence because Eno has hyped these guys since who knows when.

The reason why it is, indeed, sort of by coincidence is because two of the pitchers to follow twirled serious gems last week. And, amazingly, the trio of them all pitch in the same seemingly desolate, perceived-to-be-hopeless part of town. And by “part of town,” I mean Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia.

Vincent Velasquez, Aaron Nola and Jerad Eickhoff comprise three-fifths of a pitching staff that leads the MLB in WAR, with 2.7. Sure, there was some sleeper hype in the rotation (that happens to be fronted, in name only, by Jeremy Hellickson, by the way), but to expect it to lead all of baseball in anything at any time would have been asking a lot. Yet, here we are, watching the Phillies’ dividends on rebuilding occur in real time. It warrants a dig deeper.

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I alleged, behind closed doors, that I would cook up something pertaining to batting average on balls in play (BABIP) and the new shift data FanGraphs now hosts on its leaderboards. But, alas, such allegations — that I, uh, made, against myself — were false. There are more pressing matters to which I must attend.

Such as Gregory Polanco. Polanco, of the consensus top-100 prospect rankings in 2013 and 2014 prior to his debut. Polanco, of the pleasantly solid production that still, almost 1,000 plate appearances later, somehow, somewhat inexplicably, disappoints us.

If you don’t own Polanco, you may not know his weighted runs created (wRC+) currently ranks 8th among all National League outfielders. Better, his wRC+ isn’t elevated by an unsustainable BABIP or home runs per fly ball (HR/FB), like the seven hitters who rank ahead of him (except Bryce Harper, who is superhuman bordering on not human at all). One could argue, with nonzero persuasiveness, that Polanco is the (second-) best pure-hitting NL outfielder in the game at this exact moment. It’s a very specific subset of hitters, yes, but if you bestowed that title on me, I’d be pretty jazzed.

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It has been a wacky first week of baseball. One part heartbreaking, two parts breathtaking, eight parts endlessly fascinating, the sport never ceases to amaze. Some storylines (I can’t even avoid that pun if I tried) with serious fantasy implications emerged last week — namely, the historically great start to Trevor Story‘s career and the earth-shattering injury that ended Kyle Schwarber’s season.

I’m here, like everyone else, to discuss the former. I’m sure you’ve read your fair share of takes. This fruit is hanging so low, I almost stepped on it. I hope this doesn’t exhaust you, and I hope this doesn’t bore you. Because Story is more than just a statistically anomalous home run-hitting machine. He has a ceiling, and he has a floor, and I want to find out where — or, perhaps more abstractly, who — exactly they might be.

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Oh, man. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh, man. IT’S BASEBALL SEASON. Woo! We survived the offseason. We made it. Thank you for joining me here today.

Unfortunately, with only one (and a half-ish) day(s) of baseball under our elastic baseball belts, I can only conduct as much analysis as the smallest of small samples will let me. Not unfortunately, fantasy owners freak out during the first couple of weeks of the baseball. I’m no psychologist, but dang, do owners overreact. You don’t see these kinds of overreactions during the season — however many months of baseball has already been played, and changes to players’ stat lines shift much more slowly in August than April.

In other words, April is incredibly noisy. There’s gotta be a signal in there, yeah? I’ll serve up names of National League outfielders who had particularly good first games of 2016, and I’ll tell you over which players with higher ownership rates (using Yahoo! percentages, arbitrarily) I’d rather own them. It could be controversial, but hey.

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Below, you’ll find the RotoGraphs staffs’ picks for the 2016 season. We, here at RotoGraphs — we like to pick things. Make lists. All that.

If you have some heavy-duty drafting to wrap up this weekend, maybe these picks will come in handy. If not, perhaps they can come in handy as guidance for some thrifty, shifty mid-season moves. And if not that, then simply appreciate these for what they are: literally the best preseason picks you’ll see anywhere. Period!

OK, maybe that won’t end up being true. Who knows! None of us are clairvoyant, and that’s a damn shame. But we do our best to pretend like we are. Anyway, enough of this rambling. Here’s what you came here for, split into two tables — 2016 staff picks for hitters, and more for pitchers.

Also, for further clarity, please refer to the category definitions that follow each table.

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You can’t please everyone. Not that being a fantasy baseball analyst is like being the president, but being a fantasy baseball analyst is like being the president. You can never make everyone happy, and Eno Sarris occasionally asks you for foreign policy recommendations. Worse, the people who are happy don’t vocalize their contentment while the people who are pissed are more than happy to let you know. Such is the nature of the beast.

It’s all good, though. This is my second year ranking National League outfielders, and you know what? I’m ready. My skin is a little thicker, my stomach a little rounder. It’s a new year, new me. Put it on a shirt!

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