The perception of age is one of the more interesting facets of player evaluation to me, and I don’t mean that in the Miguel Tejada sense. Highly touted prospects who make their debuts at a particularly young age or who don’t find an extremely high level of success shortly after debuting often lose some of their notoriety, despite being in the part of their career where some failure ought to be expected. Without checking, name the ages of these players: Delmon Young, Justin Upton, Dayan Viciedo, and Dexter Fowler. I’m going to guess that for the people who guessed and got it wrong, overestimating the players’ ages was more uncommon than underestimating. Each of these guys made news a few years ago, but only Upton has made a substantial mark so far, and even he is probably underappreciated relative to his performance.

With the exception of Young, I like these guys for reasons beyond their age, but seeing the 26-year-old Fowler on the cusp of coming into his own is especially gratifying for me. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I have a fantasy addiction to Fowler — I think I’ve owned him in at least one league every year since his first full season in 2009 — and while toolsy players are always on my radar, having him play his home games in Coors made Fowler the player I’m almost always willing to take a flier on. Heading into the 2012 season, however, Fowler finally looks less like a bundle of tools and more like a composed baseball player. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been a long time since the Twins needed a long-term option to close games, and it’s not a position they’re used to having to think about. In the 20 years between 1990 and 2009, the Twins had 17 seasons where a pitcher recorded 20 saves, of those, 13 were attributed to either Rick Aguilera or Joe Nathan. Unfortunately for the Twins, Aguilera retired in 2000 and Nathan hasn’t been a real option since he missed the 2010 season after tearing his UCL in spring training. As much as the Twins have had a few years to prepare for Nathan’s departure, there’s a substantial difference between patching a one-year hole and finding the team’s next stopper for the next 8-10 years.

When Nathan fled the Twin Cities to close where the “coyotes wail along the trail” (Deep in the heart of Texas), I speculated that the Twins would choose to use Glen Perkins at the end of games rather than going after someone on the free agent market. After all, Perkins was not only the Twins’ best relievers in 2011, he had the 11th highest WAR among all relievers, and one of the few members of the Twins’ pen that performed better than expected. Instead of entrusting Perkins with the closer’s job, the Twins chose to bring back one of 2011’s two closers, Matt Capps. Read the rest of this entry »

These aren’t so much predictions as foretellings. I’m not guessing here, I’m cluing you in on what’s to come for the immediate future. Ignore these warnings at your own peril!

1. Josh Johnson will make fewer starts than Johan Santana

There’s a temptation to put Johnson in a category with Adam Wainwright as guys who missed a lot of last season, but shoulder injuries tend to be far more insidious than elbow injuries do. Just ask Chien-Ming Wang. Santana’s on an upward trend, but I fear Johnson won’t be nearly so lucky in 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

The previous two pairs of relievers I profiled this week weren’t handcuffs in the traditional sense, they were more of a master/apprentice relationship where the student is beginning to threaten the master’s claim on that title. The Dodgers, on the other hand, have as traditional a handcuff situation as has ever existed in fantasy baseball. With Javy Guerra and Kenley Jansen ready at the end of games, Don Mattingly has two extremely good options to choose from, and owners who have one or the other may find themselves reaping less than the full benefit of the Dodgers’ save chances. Like the Bronco running backs of old, Guerra and Jansen may limit their other’s value by their very existence. Read the rest of this entry »

At the beginning of the offseason, the White Sox had three men on their roster who had at one time been the team’s closer for an extended period of time. Chris Sale was nearly unhittable at the end of the 2010 season, but he’s moving into the Sox’s rotation. Sergio Santos, in just his third season as a pitcher after converting from shortstop in the minors, saved 30 games in 2011 and got a ticket to Toronto for his troubles. That leaves Matt Thornton, whose turn as a closer early last season can charitably be described as unsuccessful, as the man most likely to get the ball with the team up three or fewer runs in the ninth. Read the rest of this entry »

Blame Mike Shanahan.

Thanks to the former Broncos coach, fantasy football players have had to come to grips with the reality that just because you draft a team’s presumptive starter, it doesn’t mean you’ll get the team’s production. Fantasy baseball players have had to work around platoon situations, but the idea of a handcuff is relatively new to this branch of the fantasy tree. For position players, traditional platoons are still a more likely issue that owners have to navigate, but especially for relievers, it’s time to learn how to use a handcuff and which players are the most likely to need one. Read the rest of this entry »

Elsewhere, I’ve decried both the unfairness and the uselessness of the Mendoza Line. The TL;DR version is this: Mendoza was a bit player for the vast majority of his career, so naming the failure line after him for his one season as a regular –1979 with the Seattle Mariners — isn’t the most sporting of choices. As for its uselessness, it didn’t come up last season, but in 2010, Carlos Pena actually finished below the Mendoza Line with a .196 average. In doing so, however, he still managed a .732 OPS; hitting some 40 points better, but finishing with an OPS of .609 was Jose Lopez. Positional considerations aside, who would you rather have? Read the rest of this entry »

The trouble with writing up any type of offseason primer or plan is that, inevitably, something changes with a player, rendering the writing useless. For example, Edinson Volquez and Yonder Alonso were traded the morning after I’d written up their player caps for FG+. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that mere hours after I wrote a section on David Aardsma as a free agent and possible midseason pick up, he would sign a two-year contract with the Yankees. Oh well, C’est la guerre.

Spring Training is a time for small stories to become huge stories simply because there aren’t really good things to talk about yet. Yes, pitchers and catchers finally reported, but unless PFP is the kind of the thing that really revs your engine, good stories are still few and far between. This is how something minor like Tim Lincecum’s tight back briefly becomes a serious concern. Another of these tempest-in-a-teapot spring stories is Mariano Rivera hinting that 2012 may be his last season. I get that for Yankees fans, it means a storied career coming to an end and there’s always some sadness with that, but the man is headed into his age-42 season. This was going to happen sooner or later with sooner as the early favorite.

It’s with an eye toward the post-Rivera future that Yankees GM Brian Cashman has signed Aardsma to be an option for the possibly vacant 2013 closers role. Unlike Rafael Soriano in 2011, however, Aardsma won’t be spending his 2012 racking up  innings as an uncloser and waiting for his chance. The 30-year-old right-hander is still working his way back from the Tommy John surgery that was performed in late July of last year. That means there’s virtually no way Aardsma comes back before August 1 and while one year is the commonly accepted timeline for return from Tommy John, newer research suggests that the figure is probably just a little longer than that, which would push Aardsma closer to a mid-August return.

This makes him unusable in redraft leagues, and to be frank, I don’t even see him as a waiver option this season. He’ll be facing major league hitters for the first time since the end of 2010 at the end of the fantasy season and beginning of the fantasy playoffs, which introduces an awful lot of risk for a player who may need 3-4 low leverage outings to get his feeling back. I think there’s every reason to believe he’ll be more valuable for the Yankees than he is for fantasy players in 2012.

For keeper and dynasty players, however, the calculus is a little different. Is Aardsma worth stashing in a DL spot for most or all of 2012 to have the potential Yankee closer on your roster for 2013? The short answer is that I doubt it. The way Aardsma’s deal is structured is such that it’s not actually a two-year deal, it’s a one-year deal with a team option for 2013. So, if Aardsma looks good in the minors and pitches well down the stretch, the Yankees will retain his rights and put him in the mix for the closers job next year…if Rivera does retire.

There are four options regarding Aardsma’s 2013 status based on his performance in 2012. If he doesn’t pitch well or doesn’t get healthy, the Yankees won’t retain him and his fantasy value going forward is virtually nil. If he pitches well, there are still three options. First, the Yankees choose not to retain him anyway because they feel confident with their younger bullpen options and let him go back to free agency. Second, the Yankees do retain him, but either Rivera comes back for 2013 or they choose to give the closer’s job to David Robertson, Joba Chamberlain, or some other reliever, who may not even be on the roster at this point. Third, Aardsma pitches well in 2011 and gets the job for 2013. So, that’s three potential negative outcomes compared to just one potential positive outcome, which to me seems too risky, even with the upside of having the Yankee closer stashed away at a low cost. As always, your mileage may vary.

I’ll be interested to see how Aardsma looks after watching Joe Nathan struggle a little bit coming back from Tommy John last year. We know that relievers fatigue differently from starters and, at least according to the Journal of Anecdotal Medicine, seem to be prone to less predictable returns from surgery. If Aardsma does return to pitch well in 2012, he’ll definitely be on my radar for 2013 drafts whether he’s with the Yankees or not, but there’s enough ambiguity in his future that I’ll be watching from afar this year rather than taking him on as risk.

We all know the old saying: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, I’m never drafting that player again. It’s one thing to be disappointed with a player’s performance in a single year, but if a player doesn’t pan out in multiple seasons after having been a previously valuable player, well, it’s hard not to take personally sometimes.

It’s been a few years since A.J. Burnett was a sought after fantasy property — his last truly strong season was 2007, which means the 2008 draft was his last time as a potential top tier pitcher — but was still getting drafted in the 200-215 range on most servers last year. Prior to his move to Pittsburgh, Burnett was getting drafted…sometimes. His ADP isn’t that different from 2011, about 222 according to Mock Draft Central, but he’s being drafted in fewer than 10 percent of mixed 5X5 drafts.

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We can forgive Bryan LaHair if he’s a little confused as to what his status is as the Cubs prepare for Spring Training.

The expectation was that the Cubs would end up with one of the big three first baseman in free agency, but Albert Pujols, Prince Fielder, and Carlos Pena all found their way to the American League rather than to Wrigley Field, so that’s good news for LaHair. The Cubs then turned around and traded for Anthony Rizzo, a younger version of LaHair who clearly has the First Baseman of the Future look about him, so that’s bad. The Cubs gave LaHair some reps in the outfield last year, giving him a wider range of places to play instead of just first base, so that’s good. Unfortunately, the Cubs haven’t traded Alfonso Soriano yet and signed David DeJesus to fill Kosuke Fukudome’s old spot, so that’s bad. Read the rest of this entry »