Author Archive

ADPuzzles: Stephen Strasburg

160

That is by far the most important number related to Stephen Strasburg’s 2012 season. Not 62, his current ADP according to Mock Draft Central, with a range of 35-90 in mixed drafts. Not 9.3, his K/9 according to ZiPS, which is actually on the lower end of most projections that have been published so far. Not 5, the number of both the number of starts he made during the fantasy playoffs last year or his projected WAR according to the fan projections. 160, or the number of innings the Nationals are believed to have capped Strasburg at for the 2012 season before taking the leash off in 2013. Read the rest of this entry »


ADPuzzles: Cory Luebke

Where would you anticipate a pitcher with a 1.07 WHIP, a 3.29 ERA, and a 9.92 K/9 would be getting drafted? To put those numbers in perspective, his WHIP would have been 11th best among starters, his ERA would have been in the top 30, and his K/9 would have been 3rd best in baseball, provided he had qualified for the ERA title, which he did not. While Cory Luebke’s numbers put him as one of the 20 best starters in baseball, his ADP of 138 very clearly does not. According to Mock Draft Central, Luebke is being drafted anywhere from 94th to 216th in mixed leagues, commonly landing between Anibal Sanchez and Tim Hudson. Read the rest of this entry »


The Disappointments of Youth: Matt LaPorta

Trading highly-touted top prospects is a dangerous game for GMs, even if the return is proven player, because the trade seldom ends up being a fair one. Either the prospect pans out and the receiving team now has a star under team control for the better part of the next decade, or the prospect doesn’t pan out and the sending team has managed to sell a player at the pinnacle of his theoretical value, a point he will never reach in reality, and gotten a major league star for as their prize. Read the rest of this entry »


The Disappointments of Youth: Danny Valencia

The scouting reports on Danny Valencia stayed pretty consistent from when he was drafted in 2006 to when he made his major league debut in the middle of the 2010 season: He does most things well enough, but without a standout tool, he’s probably more of an organizational piece than a potential star. When he came up in early June of 2010, he threw aside those labels, played strong defense, and hit pretty much everything that got close, putting up a .311/.351/.448 line with 7 HR in 85 games. He finished third in the Rookie of the Year voting and looked primed for a solid run as the Twins’ third baseman of choice for the foreseeable future. His BABIP was a little on the high side, but it isn’t as though his .345 mark was so inflated that his whole line was a lie. His BABIP did regress in 2011, but it did so as part of a sophomore slump so deep that it nearly exhausts the term, and that’s what has earned him a spot in this series. Read the rest of this entry »


The Disappointments of Youth: Jose Tabata

2011 was supposed to be Jose Tabata’s coming out party, his first full season in the majors, the year that made his production a bigger story than his troubled ex-wife, but it just didn’t happen. Like so many others, his plans of grandeur were derailed by injuries.

He started the season about as well as could be hoped, getting hits in the season’s first 10 games including a pair of home runs, and stealing five bases as part of a .342/.457/.553 start. Over the next 17 games however, his BABIP dropped to .213 and his overall line suffered greatly, as he hit .180/.250/.279, though he did add four more steals. His play in May and June was inconsistent, but he seemed to be getting back into a good groove when he was placed on the DL with some combination of a right hand contusion and a left quad strain. He came back in mid-August, but was back on the shelf with a fractured left hand before September was a week old. All in all, Tabata played just 91 games — fewer than he played in 2010, despite having actually broken camp with the Pirates in 2011 — and his second half was so segmented that it’s hard to make any real concrete judgments about his performance after his return from the DL. Read the rest of this entry »


The Disappointments of Youth: Phil Hughes

Dead arm used to be one of the more common terms heard during spring training. A pitcher would get railed during a March or early April start and the manager would explain it away by saying he just has dead arm — a term which is virtually useless, but which more or less prevents more in-depth questioning. Thanks in no small part to the growth and proliferation of diagnostic tools and techniques, we’re getting more actual diagnoses and fewer euphemisms. While the term still gets some play, just one pitcher actually went on the DL with dead arm — the Yankees called it tired arm, but that’s six of one, half a dozen of the other — and it was actually a pretty apt diagnosis. Read the rest of this entry »


The Disappointments of Youth: Mat Gamel

What’s the smallest number of plate appearances a player can have before he becomes a bust? There’s no handy algorithm for busts, no simple test like 0-for-X where as long as X > 15, the player is a bust. It’s a pretty informal, gut level feeling based on everything from expectations to the level of competition the player has failed against. Mat Gamel hasn’t yet reached 200 PAs in the major leagues, but I’ve seen less support for him than for most prospects-on-the-precipice, even those who have an actual track record of failure, which strikes me as odd.  Read the rest of this entry »


The Disappointments of Youth: Travis Snider

If every team in baseball played their absolute best, if every player played at their ceiling for an entire season, which teams would look the most different? It’s an interesting thought experiment in its own way, but it also shows which teams are stocked with underachievers and could be hiding bargains. Granted, the term “chronic,” which frequently proceeds underachiever is a warning that some players never find that ceiling, but some do and there’s value to be had in that search.

If I had to guess, I’d say the team that would change the most would the Blue Jays. There is so much talent on that team right now in players like J.P. Arencibia, Colby Rasmus, and Brandon Morrow just to name a few — and this is not to say those three are terrible underachievers, they’re just less good than perhaps they ought to be — that if everyone were to hit their strides at once, the Jays would be a force to be reckoned with.

One of the players that would make the biggest differences is Travis Snider. The powerful lefty received just over 200 PAs in 2011 despite breaking camp with the team as their opening day left fielder, hitting only three home runs as part of a rather underwhelming .225/.269/.348 line that included almost as many strikeouts (56) as total bases (65). Snider once again tore up Triple-A, hitting .327/.394/.480 — though he missed time with a concussion as well as with tendinitis in his left wrist while in the minors — but couldn’t seem to translate that success to the majors.

Unlike many other Triple-A heroes who struggle in the pros, Snider’s issues weren’t limited to offspeed pitches. He had the normal trouble with sliders and sinkers, but he also couldn’t seem to catch up with fastballs, fouling off 31 percent of them compared to the 18 percent he put into play. His a long-standing wrist issues might help explain why he was late on so many fastballs — the pitch he should be making hay on — but I also wonder if his slow start made him start second guessing himself at the plate. Hitting .184/.276/.264 with a single home run in a month’s worth of starts is enough to get inside anyone’s head, let alone a player who hasn’t established himself yet.

Even if he turns the corner and hits the way it seems like he ought to, Snider is going to be a free swinger. The strikeouts and chased pitches aren’t going away, but as long as he hits something approaching the way he did in the minors — .901 OPS across six seasons at a variety of levels — then he’ll have enough fantasy value to be rosterable in all but the shallowest mixed leagues. If those extra swings mean that he isn’t getting good pitches to hit, however, then he could be digging his own grave. There are plenty of undiscerning hitters out there who still do good damage, but Delmon Young is out there, too, and I can’t shake the feeling that if Snider doesn’t correct his declining walk rate, Young will become one of his top comps.

In keeper, I still like Snider. He’s young, turning 24 later this week, and his power is legit. I’m not ready to give up on someone who hasn’t gotten a full season of PAs just yet, but that leash is getting shorter and shorter; I might be looking to trade him this year if I felt I could get good value coming back.

In redraft, I have concerns. Howard Bender touched on Snider’s platoon issues earlier this afternoon and he’s right, Snider really struggles against lefties — .212/.260/.314 versus .257/.318/.449 against righties for his career so far — which will ding his playing time. More than that, I’m concerned about a second straight season of wrist issues. He missed more than two months with a right wrist sprain in 2010 and a month at the end of 2011 with left wrist tendinitis. This isn’t a Mark DeRosa situation where I expect these injuries to kill his 2012 numbers, but wrists are important to hitters and Snider’s don’t look particularly durable. Add in the fact that he isn’t guaranteed the starting job, which adds another element of risk to his profile, and I’m making other plans. If you grab him as a late-round flier, I can’t say that’s the wrong play, just have a wire option in mind if Eric Thames beats him out for the starting job.

I want to like Snider more than I do, but I really need to see a healthy year from him in 2012, even if part of it is spent in Triple-A, before I make a final judgment on him. Obviously it would be great to see him have a definitive year in the majors where he either rakes or fails, but I’ll settle for what’s realistic. He’s definitely young enough to put a few more of the pieces together this year, breakout next year, and go on to a long, fruitful fantasy career, and I think most keeper owners would find that a livable result.

For redrafters, taking Snider this year is a gamble, as you’re hoping he reverses almost every trend he showed last year with a better walk rate, strikeout rate, lower groundball rate, and higher line drive rate. Impossible? No, not entirely, but you’re hoping against hope. Roll the dice if you’re feeling lucky, but have fail-safes in place behind him.


The Disappointments of Youth: Brian Matusz

Yesterday, I started this series by looking at one of the most disappointing position players in all of baseball last year — no, not Alex Rios, Pedro Alvarez — so it’s only fair to look at pitchers next.

A player can be disappointing or overrated without actually being bad, it’s really more of a question of the expectations he was facing going into the season. Brian Matusz was disappointing to be sure, but he was also just flat out bad. Like Alvarez, he had shown some promise in 2010 when he went 10-12 with a 4.30 ERA and a 1.34 WHIP and the expectation was that he would build on that in 2011. Instead, he posted the highest ERA since 1901 by a pitcher who made at least 10 starts, 10.69, and added a WHIP of 2.11. Matusz has a host of other associated stats that make him look terrible, but perhaps the most telling is his OPS+ against. Opposing hitters posted an OPS+ of 204 against him; no hitter has posted a full season OPS+ of 200 or greater since Barry Bonds did it in 2004. Matusz turned every opposing hitter into Bonds circa 1993. Read the rest of this entry »


The Disappointments of Youth: Pedro Alvarez

Despite not being a prospect guy like Marc Hulet, I find myself drawn to younger players in fantasy. In keeper, it’s easy to explain away: Sign a couple top talents to cheap contracts when they’re young and you’ve got the foundation for a dynasty — provided of course you can manage the rest of the year-to-year budgeting properly. In redraft, there isn’t the same incentive to capitalize on grabbing a player who isn’t quite in his prime yet. Deep leagues necessitate a little creativity, and so there’s motivation there, but grabbing Mike Trout the instant he was called up last year was probably a mistake for most players. Grabbing a slightly riper Trout this year…that could be another matter entirely.

The flipside of the opportunity presented by prospects in the fantasy context is the chance that they will disappoint and leave you without much in the way of value for your trouble. Sitting for a full year on players like Brian Matusz or Brett Wallace can not only be galling in short term, but can sour owners on players going forward. (For more information on this phenomenon, see Vazquez, Javy.) Sometimes skepticism based on bad experiences is warranted, sometimes it’s sour grapes, and determining which can be the difference between letting a good sleeper pass and just another of many fantasy stories about the one who got away. Read the rest of this entry »