Over the next week or two, I’ll be using my normal Waiver Wire slots to look back at the 2011 fantasy season from beginning to end by looking at how the top 200 drafted players performed over the course of the full season.

There is no one metric that correlates perfectly to fantasy value, in large part because there’s no one definition of fantasy value. WAR is commonly cited, but that’s a better measure of traditional value than fantasy-specific value. Very few leagues count defense and positional considerations are often made apart from generalized value, especially with players like Michael Cuddyer and Michael Young, who accrued most of their production in a corner, but had middle-infield eligibility.

With that in mind, the value calculations I’ve done for this series is simply the batting and base running components of WAR, which I’ll refer to as oRank for short — pitchers, of course, will have their own stat. It should capture at least a sense of what makes players valuable in a majority of leagues, though the individual slot-by-slot rankings will, of course, vary with your league’s idiosyncrasies. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you caught your breath yet?

Days like Wednesday remind us that while baseball is sometimes derided as being slow and boring, it is the progression of games and stories that make the this time of year so incredible. It felt almost indulgent, like a well written requiem, from Stephen Strasburg’s dominant start in the mid-afternoon to the crowd of Rays waiting around home plate just after midnight on the east coast, everything felt orchestrated for maximum emotion. The three minutes that elapsed between Robert Andino’s gut punch to the Red Sox and Evan Longoria’s walk-off was just enough time to catch our collective breaths before the amazing happened again.

It was somewhat apropos that Longoria was the man to cap the Rays’ comeback. This season has been one of the worst offensive seasons of Longoria’s admittedly short career. His wOBA and wRC+ were both at career lows heading into Game 162, and while .243/.353/.483 is certainly a solid line — especially when backed up by top class defensive work — it isn’t an accurate representation of Longoria’s talent. Players have down years, teams have down years; it was ever thus. Fortunately for the Rays, his malaise wasn’t a season-long affliction. Read the rest of this entry »

Not a lot has gone well for the Red Sox in September, that much has been well documented, but someone forgot to tell Jacoby Ellsbury to pack it up. Red Sox hitters are hitting .278/.339/.463 with 32 HR, a quarter of which belong to Ellsbury as part of his .365/.408/.687 line in 125 PAs this month. His line for the season is equally compelling: .322/.377/.554 with 32 HR and 38 SB. Whether he is the AL MVP remains to be seen, but he’s certainly performed like an MVP, keeping the Red Sox afloat despite the pitching staff’s best efforts to the contrary.

There’s not an owner out there ruing having Ellsbury — John Henry included — so It may seem like a no-brainer to keep Ellsbury, especially given his nearly double-digit WAR. But just like his lost 2010 season didn’t do much to influence his 2011 campaign, 2012 isn’t 2011. Having a realistic sense of how much of his value he’ll keep is the key to making a sober keeper decision.

One factor will change this analysis right from the top, and that’s whether your league uses an articulated outfield or whether you just need to fill 3-5 general OF spots. If you need a CF instead of just an OF, Ellsbury enjoys a nice boost to his value, as his competition at that spot is much less compelling than if RF and LF are included.

Looking solely at Ellsbury’s WAR is going to artificially inflate his fantasy value as his 16.8 runs saved on defense is virtually irrelevant in this context; it matters more when evaluating a Red Sox pitcher than it does for Ellsbury himself. Instead, looking at wOBA is going to give us a pretty good sense of how he’s contributing in the offensive categories most leagues care about. He doesn’t suffer much for the switch, as his .403 wOBA means that he remains a top-10 player, but it does position him more accurately as one of best players this season rather than the prohibitive leader.

The two parts of Ellsbury’s game that I see being the least likely to spontaneously regress are his base-stealing and his batting average. At some point, his speed will start to fade, but age-28 seems awfully early. How much he runs will depend a little on how the Red Sox choose to set up their batting order, but I don’t see much chance that he both stays healthy and doesn’t steal 30 bases. His speed is also an asset in terms of batting average, which has been stably high for almost his entire career — injury vacated 2010 notwithstanding.

What determines Ellsbury’s 2012 draft position and what will make a big impact in any keeper decision is whether or not you think his power — or at least some part of it — will stick around for another season.

The player that just keeps coming to mind as a comparison for Ellsbury’s spontaneous display of concentrated aggression is Joe Mauer. Mauer’s 28 home runs in 2009 seemed to indicate that the power you’d expect from a player of his size was finally showing up and it certainly influenced not only his fantasy values, but also his massive new contract. Two years later, Mauer has hit less than half of that 2009 total with just 12 home runs total since the start of the 2010 season. I’m not necessarily suggesting that Ellsbury is going to lose most of next season to bilateral leg weakness, but the sense that we’ve probably seen his peak value this season is right.

Like Mauer, Ellsbury saw his HR/FB take a huge leap this season, though his rose about 7 percent, where Mauer’s jumped over 10 percent from his career norm. Just because it’s a comparatively smaller leap doesn’t make Ellsbury’s any more sustainable per se, but it means that if he regresses to his career norms again next year, the drop won’t be quite so drastic.

30 HR power has never been part of the scouting report on Ellsbury, and while scouting reports aren’t gospel, there aren’t many guys who make the leap from “average to good gap power” to “potential cleanup hitter” and can make the change stick. If he hits 15 home runs next year, it would still be his second best season ever and yet less than half his total from this year. The question you need to ask yourself as an owner is whether that potential drop of 15-20 HR is a deal-breaker for you.

To me, unless you’re burdened with an outfield of Ellsbury, Matt Kemp, and Jose Bautista with just three spots to fill and no UTL, Ellsbury is going to bring enough to the table to be worth keeping. He’s going to give you solid SB and AVG numbers, and will be driven in a fair amount by the rest of the Red Sox’s order, which gives him at least three categories where he’s a huge asset. Just don’t let this year’s outburst prevent you from either keeping or drafting a more consistent power threat to pair with him. Let whatever power remains next year be a bonus, not a driving force behind the decision to keep him.

Doug Fister

Back in the halcyon days of 2009, the Detroit Tigers — endeavoring to protect their narrow lead in the AL Central — made a deadline deal for one of the Seattle Mariners’ top performing players, and so began the ill-fated Jarrod Washburn era in Motown.

Washburn’s performance after the move was Hobbesian: Nasty, brutish, and short. In his eight starts after the trade, everything went in the wrong direction: his BB/9, H/9, and HR/9 all rose sharply, while his K/9 dropped like a counterweight. While Washburn isn’t solely to blame for the Tigers’ poor finish, he didn’t help matters much.

Snap back to reality.

The Tigers’ lead was a bit larger when they added Doug Fister from Seattle this July, but the impetus was the same, and fortunately for Detroit, the result was the polar opposite. Fister’s work for the Mariners had been solid: 3.33 ERA, 1.17 WHIP, and a 2.78 K/BB ratio, but he has been downright unhittable since the move. His 0.91 WHIP since the All-Star break is the third lowest in baseball (min 50 IP) with the biggest difference coming in his walk rate.

His BB/9 of 2 with the Mariners was hardly bloated, but he’s been exceedingly stingy with the free passes since coming to the Tigers, having allowed just five walks in his 70.1 innings of work. His HR rate did tick upwards, but when he allows so few runners to reach base, they haven’t been particularly damaging. In fact, the four home runs he’s allowed with the Tigers have produced just five runs; of the 11 he’s allowed all year, nine have been solo home runs and the other two were just two-run home runs.

Just like Washburn wasn’t to blame for the ‘09 failure, Fister can’t take too much of the credit for the current team’s success — that credit lies as much with the rest of an atrocious AL Central as it does with the Tigers themselves — but there is certainly a correlation between Fister’s success and the team’s.

Justin Verlander will deservedly take the ball in Game One of the ALDS, matching up against CC Sabathia if current standings hold, which is a tough ask, even for the presumptive AL Cy Young award winner. Fister will get a much more favorable mound opponent, likely Ivan Nova, though it’s possible that Joe Girardi will give the ball to a veteran instead. In reality, it affects Fister very little, since he’ll be a better option than Nova, Bartolo Colon, A.J. Burnett, Freddy Garcia, or anyone else Girardi has at his disposal.

For those in playoff leagues, Fister could be an excellent sleeper option in the middle or late rounds. The NL still boasts the best SP2 options in Cliff Lee and either Yovani Gallardo or Zack Greinke, but if the Phillies and Brewers end up paired in the NLDS, Fister may be a more reliable option to sneak out a win. The biggest weakness in Fister’s game is a relatively low strikeout rate, just 6.1 per nine this season. Objectively, it isn’t terribly low, but when the talent level is as high as it is in these playoffs, fine distinctions must be made.

While I’d still rather have a top starter like Verlander, Sabathia, or Halladay, targeting Fister as a secondary option could set up a great playoff draft.

Brent Morel (Yahoo:  7 percent owned, ESPN: 12 percent owned)

Brett Lawrie’s season is done after breaking a finger on Wednesday, which isn’t a terrible loss for the Blue Jays, who are simply playing out the string, and close the season with six games away from Rogers Centre. Lawrie’s injury may, however, leave a few AL-only and mixed owners in the lurch. Morel may not be the most exciting replacement option, but he’s widely available and playing well of late. Read the rest of this entry »

Cory Luebke

I’m surprised not only that Luebke is owned in fewer than 50 percent of leagues, but also that his rate of ownership is dropping. I expressed some concerns previous about how fatigue would affect Luebke, who certainly shut me up by cruising through his next three outings, allowing just six runs and striking out 26 over 18.2 innings. All three games were away from the ample spaces of PetCo Park, so his success isn’t a park-induced mirage. Apparently owners were expecting more from the lefty?

Luebke gets the Padres’ last Sunday start of the season, at home no less, against the Dodgers. It’s a less than ideal match up, as the Dodgers have started to click offensively this month, boasting the NL’s fifth highest OPS, third highest number of runs scored, and fourth fewest strikeouts. To complicate matters further, Luebke’s mound opponent on Sunday is serious Cy Young contender Clayton Kershaw, who will be looking to pad his resume with one more strong start. Even if Luebke pitches well for his fourth consecutive start, he’ll need help from the Padres’ sputtering offense to snag a win. Tim Lincecum was able to shut the Dodgers’ offense down pretty well on Tuesday and was still saddled with the loss as his teammates couldn’t solve Kershaw.

It’s just not a great matchup for Luebke, but I still expect him to pitch well. If you need help in ERA, WHIP, or Ks, he’s likely to be as good an option as is still on the wire, but if you’re hunting for wins, it’s probably better to gamble elsewhere.

From a good pitcher with a bad match up to lesser pitchers who have a much easier road ahead of them.

Alex White

White’s transition to the National League has been, in a word, rocky. He’s struggling with the long ball, having given up at least one home run in every start since coming over to Colorado in the Ubaldo Jimenez trade. It’s hard to be overly critical of a young pitcher who is struggling to figure out how to pitch in Coors Field, and I firmly believe that White will figure it out sooner or later, but the issue is what to do with him at this moment.

As noted above, the best thing White has going for him this week is his match up. The Astros have the second lowest OPS this month at .622, better only than the Twins’ rather wretched .597. Not only does White get the benefit of facing the team with just one more home run this month than Ian Kinsler has hit on his own, he also gets the benefit of escaping Coors Field. While he hasn’t exactly been great on the road, he’s given up seven fewer home runs on the road in one less start.

Teammates Drew Pomeranz, Esmil Rogers, and Kevin Millwood round out the starters in the four game series. Pomeranz has been better than White, but with no major league track record to speak of, he’s a bigger question mark as well. Rogers has the best K-rate of those that will face the Houston, but he’s given up fewer than four runs just once in his last seven outings. Millwood has been alternating between good and bad starts, though the good starts aren’t great and the bad starts aren’t disastrous. He’s the human middle path.

If you’re determined to take advantage of the Astros’ light-hitting ways, I’d roll the dice with Pomeranz, followed by Millwood, White, and Rogers. If you’re dying for strikeouts, Rogers is still the safest bet, but you’d better feel comfortable with your lead in most of the rate categories.

Welcome to the pressure test.

If you still care about waiver wire pickups, chances are good that you’re in a title game. There’s a temptation to move away from your regulars for the hot hand, especially those of you in head-to-head leagues, and that’s a call you have to make for yourself. My personal bias is to dance with the team that brought you, but I can’t blame Andrew McCutchen owners for getting a little jittery.

Here’s the caveat: Over the course of a week, anything can happen. Guys post crazy high BABIPs over a week; pitchers you’ve depended on all year don’t have their good stuff, it’s all in play. That’s why, while I recommend staying with players you know rather than rolling the dice, there’s no such thing as a sure thing when the sample size is this small.

Nolan Reimold (Yahoo: 5 percent owned, ESPN: percent owned)

In the month of September, only two players have at least 3 HR and 5 SB. They are: Matt Kemp and Nolan Reimold — if you happen to be in the 1 percent of leagues where Kemp is available, go ahead and grab him right now. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. For the other 95 percent of you, Reimold is a somewhat risky play, but the upside is real. His average is surprisingly low, just .256 for the month, but the back end of his slash line — .404/.558 — is worth the risk if your league counts those categories.

Of the hot hands out there, Reimold is among those I like best. You can hope that his .241 BABIP this month will rise, and he’s already notched three more hits and a home run this week, so the floor hasn’t dropped from beneath him yet — though he isn’t going to see too many more pitchers of the quality of Kyle Weiland and John Lackey in the coming games.

If you’re in a traditional 5X5, his average is somewhat worrisome. If you’re in an OBP or OPS league, Reimold seems like a good gamble, especially if you’re unwilling to wait on the health of someone like Carlos Gonzalez.

Rafael Furcal (Yahoo: 38 percent owned, ESPN: percent owned)

A few weeks ago, I wrote that I felt like Javier Vazquez had so thoroughly burned bridges with some owners with his terrible first half that people who needed his skills were still avoiding him; the very same thing could be said of Furcal. His year with the Dodgers was the stuff of nightmares, totally unplayable in a fantasy sense, as he alternated between injury and ineffectiveness, compiling a pitiful .197/.272/.248 with a home run and 5 SB in just 37 games over the season’s first four months.

Since moving to St. Louis at the trade deadline, Furcal has reversed fortune, hitting .262/.326/.424 with 6 HR and 4 SB in the 43 games he’s played in nearly seven weeks. His September numbers are even better, as all four of his steals and half of his home runs have come in the last 17 games and his overall line for the month is a much more impressive .299/.382/.507.

He’s still not putting up the kind of numbers he did in 2008, but he has been a boon for the Cardinals and could be a stopgap for Troy Tulowitzki owners. Tulo is likely to come back later this week, but stashing Furcal just in case something goes awry in the next day or two is a prudent stratagem.

Marco Scutaro (Yahoo: 29 percent owned, ESPN: 19 percent owned)

While the Red Sox seem to be wilting a bit in the season’s final days, Marco Scutaro is trending in the opposite direction. After missing a week of action in mid-August due to a stiff back, Scutaro has been consistently in the lineup and has been hitting well ever since. His .325/.383/.482 line since his return actually undersells how good he’s been lately, as he has hit .436/.489/.641 in the 10 games he has started since September 1.

His recent run of great form is, as many runs of great form are, built on an inflated BABIP — .425 over the last 12 games — but there’s more to Scutaro’s success than simply getting luckier of late. His strikeouts have decreased steadily in the second half of the season, which means he’s putting the ball into play more often, which, in turn, made his spike in BABIP even better for owners.

While Scutaro won’t bat .425 on balls in play forever, his first half BABIP of .267 was due to rise, and he is racking up line drives at a better than average rate. It would not surprise me to see his September BABIP above .300 at month’s end, provided his line-drive rate doesn’t suddenly plummet. As long as that doesn’t happen, his BA will be an asset to anyone in need of a MI, but he should also contribute in both R and a few RBI.

Allen Craig (Yahoo: 3 percent owned, ESPN: 2 percent owned)

We have now reached the point of the season where any injury, no matter how trifling it may seem, could be a season-ending injury. So it is with the hand injury Matt Holliday suffered late in Tuesday night’s game. If this were June or July, Holliday would take a few days off to let the swelling subside, then the team would reevaluate to see if he needed a stay on the disabled list, but considering that the time it’s going to take for the swelling to go down equals about half the remaining games, the Cards may well choose to shut Holliday down for the year.

The beneficiary of St. Louis’ left field vacancy is likely to be Allen Craig, another of the Cardinals young players whose season has been something of a jumble due to injuries. Craig missed 15 days early in the season with a strained groin, then a subsequent 63 days in the summer with a knee contusion. In his one full, healthy month, Craig started 17 games and hit .350/.420/.550. Obviously we can’t simply extrapolate that month out and say what a full season would look like, but the fact remains that when Craig has been healthy and in the lineup, he has been productive for the Cards.

Craig hit fifth on Wednesday, behind Pujols and Berkman in the heart of the Cardinals’ order. If Tony LaRussa continues to put him in that spot, it bodes well for his RBI chances as pitchers could certainly pitch around one or both of the other two — depending on the situation — to face Craig. If he can take advantage of those opportunities, his numbers will be strong heading into the end of the season. He also offers lineup versatility as he appeared in eight games at second base earlier in the year.

There is one caveat with Craig. The Cardinals are 4.5 games behind the Braves in the wild card race and just 5.5 behind the Brewers in the divisional race. Holliday is almost certain to miss the entire series against the Phillies, but if the team can gain ground on either opponent, setting up a real race over the last 12 games of the season, there will be a real incentive to get Holliday back. The extent of Holliday’s injury is definitely a factor here as well, but if the Cardinals are within 2-3 games of the Braves with a week to play and Holliday is anything resembling healthy, it may be hard to keep him off the field. In that case, Craig’s playing time becomes spotty once again. I don’t find this scenario particularly likely, but it’s worth watching if you choose to pick up Craig.

Randy Wells

Not a lot has gone to plan for the Cubs this season. By the All-Star break, they were out of contact with the division leaders and nearly 20 games below .500 having failed to finish any of the season’s first three months at or better than even keeled.

Their mess started early when Andrew Cashner and Randy Wells hit the disabled list on back-to-back days in early April, but Wells’ return 53 days later didn’t help matters much at all. In his 11 starts from his return on May 28 to the end of July, Wells gave the Cubs just two quality starts and the team went just 3-8 when he was on the mound. Opponents hit .311/.370/.481 for an OPS of .851, or roughly the same OPS as Adrian Beltre or Todd Helton.

Since Aug. 1, Wells has looked for all the world like a completely different pitcher. The Cubs have gone 7-1 in his starts, and opponents are hitting just .213/.257/.366 for an OPS of .623, or somewhere between the OPS of Jason Bartlett and Alex Gonzalez. It’s clear that the Cubs prefer this version of Wells, and owners do as well, but is Dr. Jekyll here to stay or is Mr. Hyde waiting in the wings?

Hyde, you’re on in 5.

Wells’ WHIP in August was 0.91 because one of the lowest BABIPs I’ve seen in a while: .181, which is so obviously unsustainable, it hardly bears mentioning. He induced a large amount of infield flies — a season-best 13.2 percent — a 13.2 percent increase from his July rate. Wells is a groundball pitcher at heart and that’s not going to change in the season’s last month. As he gets back to inducing grounders and his BABIP returns to non-ridiculous levels, his results should normalize as well. He isn’t as bad as he looked in July or as good as he looked in August, but somewhere pleasantly between.

Mike Minor

The Braves like Mike Minor, with good reason, and they absolutely had designs on a playoff run this season, but it seems fair to guess that they didn’t think Minor would be contributing to that goal quite to this level. Injuries are the great equalizer and the Braves are quite fortunate that they had Minor and Brandon Beachy waiting in the wings to pick up the slack for Tommy Hanson and Jair Jurrjens.

In a purely baseball sense, Minor may not be the Braves’ first choice for the playoff roster, but he’s a totally usable piece. He can either start a non-elimination game in the latter part of a series or he can be plugged in, in long relief if a starter clearly doesn’t have it early in a game. He’s succeeded in giving the Braves winnable games nearly ever time he takes the mound; they’re 5-1 in his starts since he rejoined the rotation on Aug. 3. For a supplementary starter, that’s as good as anyone can reasonably expect.

From a fantasy perspective, Minor’s biggest weakness right now isn’t category specific. He’s not giving up a ton of runs, he’s not allowing a ton of base-runners, and he is notching a reasonable number of strikeouts, but he’s just not going deep into games. Minor hasn’t seen the seventh inning since his recall, which means the 3-4 runs he’s giving up in nearly every outing are hitting his ERA harder than they ought to be.

In NL-Only and even in deep mixed, I like Minor as a back-end starter, but I’m getting the sense that his ability to deliver quality outings and the Braves’ performance in those starts is artificially inflating his value. Right now, he is absolutely more valuable to the Braves than he is to your fantasy team.

Matt Moore (Yahoo: 6 percent owned, ESPN: 2 percent owned)

The Rays called up Matt Moore earlier this week, means the team’s top four prospects according to Baseball America have all been called up this season. While Rookie of the Year candidate Jeremy Hellickson was ranked more highly than Moore going into the season, BA chose Moore’s fastball and curveball as the best in the system. It’s obvious that Moore is a hugely talented prospect, and he’ll almost surely be fantasy relevant next season, but is he fantasy relevant now?

The majors will be Moore’s third level of the season, and he has already thrown a career high 155 innings. The good news is that while it is more innings than he’s ever thrown before, it’s neither an objectively huge amount of innings nor a large increase from his previous high of 144.2 IP. His minuscule WHIP (0.95) and tremendous K-rate (12.2 K/9) between Double- and Triple-A make him an appealing option, but his viability will depend largely on how much the Rays actually let him see the field.

Joe Maddon tweeted a window into how they were going to use Moore, saying they hoped to use him in the same way they used David Price in 2008. Unfortunately for owners looking to capitalize on Moore’s call up, Price’s 2008 usage can best be described as “at-will”: He made one start, then pitched in long relief once and three times in short relief for a total of 17 innings. If Moore follows a similar plan, he’s likely to give you strikeouts when he pitches, but how often that happens is going to be a factor of his effectiveness as well as whether the Rays keep in contact with the Red Sox in the wild card race.

If you’re streaming starters in AL-Only, he’s likely to get a start next week during the Rays’ doubleheader against the Yankees, but that’s obviously an unfavorable matchup. Ultimately, I’m really excited to see him pitch, but because of uncertain usage, I just don’t see him being a worthwhile risk in the fantasy playoffs.

Ryan Doumit (Yahoo: 11 percent owned, ESPN: 2 percent owned)

124. If it’s a career best RBI total, that’s a great year. Unfortunately for Doumit, that’s his career high in games played, which is…ungood. When he’s healthy, Doumit provides solid production as far as catchers are concerned with a career line of .271/.334/.442 for a .776 OPS. Unfortunately, health has been hard to come by for Doumit, which makes it hard for owners to draft or apparently even roster him. While he’s had at least one DL stint every season since 2006, Doumit has only been placed on the DL more than once in the same season twice and never since 2007.

Since returning from his most recent extended stay on the disabled list — 65 days lost due to a broken ankle — on August 3, Doumit has hit .330/.369/.515 with 4 HR. His .884 OPS since the All-Star Break is fifth best among catchers with at least 50 PAs, but he’s still rostered in fewer leagues than Jorge Posada or John Buck.

Doumit is getting the vast majority of the starts for the Pirates as the year draws to a close, and is likely to continue to do so as the team tries to evaluate whether or not to pick up his options for 2012 and 2013. With his yearly major injury behind him, Doumit is a safe pickup going forward and, unless you’re riding Alex Avila, Mike Napoli, or another of the top catchers, there’s a good chance Doumit will be an upgrade for you.