The first lesson I learned from this draft is one I want to share with you even before the table of players and prices; it’s just that important. Do not try to do an auction draft on a phone. Snake drafts are unpleasant but doable; auctions are a recipe for disaster.

Lesson learned? Good! Here are the National League starting pitchers who were drafted in the recent Rotographs and friends mock auction. Read the rest of this entry »

The ridiculously long Rotographs staff mock draft has finally concluded. As usual, the first mock of the season featured some interesting choices, some great values, and plenty of lessons. Here’s the last set of National League starting pitchers – the first two break downs can be found here: rounds 1-10 and rounds 11-15 – complete with a lot of players who will be on sleeper lists in the coming weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

Last time around, I recapped all the National League starting pitchers that had been taken so far in our Rotographs staff mock draft. The biggest names, Clayton Kershaw, Stephen Strasburg, Zack Greinke, Gio Gonzalez, et c. are all unsurprisingly already off the board, but the names that come in this set and next week’s are perhaps a bit more interesting. At the very least, this is surely a more volatile group! Read the rest of this entry »

The holidays lead to some dereliction of duty on my part, which is why instead of focusing on the National League starters taken in rounds six through ten, this is really more of a catch-up piece. Without further ado, here are the starting pitchers who have come off the board already, the order in which they were taken, and the round and pick at which they were taken.

A few things stand out from the top of the list. First, half of the pitchers taken before Round Seven came from two teams: the Dodgers (Kershaw and Greinke) and the Nationals (Strasburg, Gonzalez, and Zimmermann). In the first ten rounds, the Phillies also contributed three pitchers and the Braves put in a pair; while this isn’t fundamentally different from years past, the fact that nine of the first 19 pitchers taken come from the NL East does not bode well at all for the hitters in that division.

A reminder so that no one asks in the comments: R.A. Dickey is in the AL East now; he went toward the end of the third round.

As someone noted in the comments on Eno’s piece from Monday, Halladay’s fall to the middle of the ninth round might be the steal of the draft. We’ll know more in a few weeks when more mocks are done, but I’m inclined to believe that will end up being more of an artifact of this draft than a consistent feature of 2013 drafts in general. Halladay still has strong name recognition, didn’t suffer a major injury, and still put up workable numbers even in the midst of a down season. The headier the draft room, the more likely Halladay is to slip on lingering concerns about his shoulder health as well as his age, but I strongly suspect he won’t last deep into the ninth round in the average ESPN or Yahoo! public league.

One of the players who is likely to see a wide spread of draft positions — in much the same way that Yoenis Cespedes did last year — is Chapman. The nice thing about Chapman is that, barring injury, his worst case scenario is that he moves back to being an elite closer for a team that looks poised to generate a ton of save opportunities. That’s hardly a bad thing. Yes, if we knew he’d end up in that role, he probably would have been drafted lower than he was, but Craig Kimbrel had already come off the board and Jason Motte went one pick after Chapman, so it isn’t as though he’d be grossly out of phase for being drafted in the first ten rounds if he ends up as a full-time closer rather than a starter. This is just one data point in the vast space of mock drafts, but I suspect Chapman will rise and fall substantially based on his performance as a starter in camp.

Cain’s ascendency to the top of the Giants’ rotation appears to be complete. He was fantastic in 2012 and Tim Lincecum — conspicuously absent from this set of names — is now a far, far riskier pick than either Cain or Bumgarner. This does make Lincecum a candidate to provide unexpected value in a way the others have limited ability to do, but those looking to target the Giants’ top pitcher this year will be looking at Cain and settling for Bumgarner rather than Lincecum for the first time since the drafts prior to the 2008 season.

I can’t decide whether I like grabbing Haren at the end of the seventh round. I like his move to the National League, I think he’ll be better than he was last year, and yet I think I’d rather have Latos or Gallardo, both of whom went shortly after he did. In abstract terms, I feel like the seventh round is good value for Haren, but the depth of pitching this year may mean that he’ll have to fall a round or two further to actually be considered a value pick.

Strikeouts. Max Scherzer has never wanted for strikeouts. 2011 was his worst season as a professional in that regard, and he still struck out about 21 percent of the hitters who faced him. He doesn’t get enough groundballs and he doesn’t throw a lot of complete games, but at the end of the day, Scherzer sends a staggeringly high number of opposing hitters shuffling back to their dugout in shame.

Scherzer’s downsides – an ERA over 4.00 and a WHIP north of 1.30 for his career – were never enough to prevent owners from deriving value from Scherzer, but they absolutely pushed him down draft boards and suppressed his trade value. After his move to Detroit, Scherzer added double-digit wins to his profile, which helped his value in theory, but since most owners know how fickle wins can be, it didn’t do much for his long-term value or perception. Read the rest of this entry »

Plenty of pitchers go through an early season manic phase before crashing back to earth in the second half, but few who pitched as well as Lance Lynn did after being thrust into the rotation find their jobs as unsecure the next season as he does going into 2013.

Lynn was given his shot at starting late in camp last year, less than a month before his regular season debut, and only because it appeared as though Chris Carpenter wouldn’t be healthy in time to break camp with the team. Lynn adapted to the role well and went 8-1 in his first 10 starts with a 2.54 ERA and a 1.07 WHIP. His next 10 starts were less encouraging as he went 5-3 with a 4.40 ERA and a 1.43 WHIP.Still, even after he made the start that finally pushed him out of the rotation on August 24, Lynn’s overall line wasn’t horrific by any stretch of the imagination. A 13-5 record with a 3.93 ERA, a 1.34 WHIP, and 9.0 K/9 is certainly workable, even if he was in the midst of something of a swoon at the time. Read the rest of this entry »

This time last year, as the baseball world converged on Dallas, the Twins were looking hard at re-signing Michael Cuddyer to be their right fielder in perpetuity. While it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to see Cuddyer back with the organization as a coach someday, the Twins lost out to the Rockies in the bid for Cuddyer’s services for the next few seasons, which left them with a hole in right field for the first time since Target Field opened. He didn’t replace Cuddyer defensively, but Josh Willingham was brought in to replace him in the order at a fraction of the price, which he did with production to spare.

Cuddyer cost the Rockies $10.5 million last year and hit just .260/.317/.489 with 16 home runs in the majors’ most hitter-friendly park. It was his worst season offensively since 2008. Willingham, on the other hand, made just $7 million for his .260/.366/.524 season that included 35 home runs in a park that tends to suppress them. It was Willingham’s best season both offensively and holistically. Willingham was worth nearly $18 million last year, meaning he’ll need to give the Twins just a hair more than one win over the remaining two years on his deal to have overproduced what he’s being paid. Read the rest of this entry »

Some trades are firecrackers, started and finished in what seems like an afternoon. Some are slow burns that start as an idle comment and weeks later turn into a swap. And then there are deals like the one that finally landed Denard Span in Washington D.C. that happen so gradually, watching the whole process unfold would take so long, it would be best seen as a montage rather than an actual portrayal. Span nearly ended up in the District at the trading deadline, the 2011 trading deadline that is, in a deal for Drew Storen that was sundered by whether or not Steve Lombardozzi would be included in the deal. There were likely discussions on and off about moving Span to DC between July, 2011 and November, 2012, but that’s how long it took for the Nationals to finally offer the Twins enough to get their man.  Read the rest of this entry »

It was just a year ago at this time that Ryan Braun’s name was starting to be whispered in connection to a failed PED test sometime at the end of the 2011 season. We all know how it shook out. Braun was indeed accused of violating Major League Baseball’s Joint Drug Agreement, appealed, and, in a rather substantial upset, was exonerated in all but the court of public opinion.

Plenty of people believed then — and continue to believe — that Braun gamed the system and should have been suspended for 50 games, 42 more than he actually missed in 2012. I have strong opinions on the JDA and PEDs in general, but this isn’t so much the space for them. The important thing for fantasy players is that, whether you believe Braun was using a PED or not in 2011, don’t bother waiting for the other shoe to drop. It will never come. I studied it for Sports Illustrated, Nate Silver did it for Baseball Between the Numbers, Justin Wolfers and a team of Penn economists did it for a peer-review journal (this was then republished in the New York Times), and pair of stats professors did it for the New York Times, and all four studies came to the same conclusion: There is no statistical evidence to support the idea that PEDs produce abnormal offensive seasons.

There’s no way to know for sure how many people resisted drafting Braun because they were worried he’d suddenly turn to sand, but he surely didn’t. As previously noted, he played all but eight games this season and gave owners very similar production compared to what he gave them last year. While his 2011 campaign featured a higher batting average and a slightly better slash line across the board — .332/.397/.597 in 2011 compared to .319/.391/.595 in 2012 — he hit eight more home runs to help make up the difference. His run and RBI totals were even more remarkably similar: 109/111 respectively in 2011 and 108/112 in 2012.

If it’s possible for a top-10 pick to be undervalued, Braun might be the type who is. He’s a phenomenal hitter, there isn’t a soul who doesn’t know that, but he also stole 30 bases, tying him for 17th in baseball and ninth in the National League. He’s highly efficient in his base-stealing, stealing 30 bases in 37 attempts in 2012 and 33 out of 39 attempts in 2011, so while he doesn’t get an abnormally high number of chances, he should constantly be an asset in that category in a way other 35-40 HR threats typically aren’t.

Notable to OBP players will be the sharp uptick Braun saw in intentional walks after the departure of Prince Fielder. In his five seasons prior to 2012, Braun was intentionally walked just nine times and never more than four times in a year, but in 2012 alone he was given then standing four count 15 times. Aramis Ramirez had his best seasons ever by wRC+, but was still unable to keep Braun from getting passed. If this trend continues next season, and there’s little reason to believe it won’t, Braun’s OBP will get a nice bump, though it will come at the expense of a few RBI chances. He wasn’t much worse for the wear last year, however, so even if he were to reach 20 intentional walks, it’s unlikely to make a noticeable difference in his counting stats.

Positional scarcity certainly help to explain why Braun isn’t fighting for the first overall pick — and why Mike Trout may not go first overall either — but over the last two seasons only Miguel Cabrera has had a higher wOBA or wRC+ than Braun. Over the same time period, Bruan is third in batting average, second in HR, fifth in RBI, fourth in runs scored, 10th in stolen bases, the only player to appear in the top 10 of all major offensive categories. You can’t, as the saying goes, win a draft in the first round, but you can lose one; Braun is exactly the type of player who will provide a high peak without a lot of associated risk and that’s exactly what a high first-rounder should do.

Despite apparent mutual interest in a return engagement at Target Field, Scott Baker has parted company with the Twins and will head six hours southeast on I-90/94 through the vast, untrodden wilds of Wisconsin to Wrigley Field after signing a one-year deal with the Cubs. The one-year part of the deal makes complete sense as Baker missed his last chance at a huge free agent deal because of Tommy John surgery in March of last year, but is Wrigley really the best place for him to recover his value? Additionally, is one year enough for Baker to get back to the pay scale he’s looking for?

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