About a month ago my Rotographs colleague, the excellent Mike Podhorzer, wrote a piece that wondered if Scott Baker was having the second breakout season of his career. Mike sang Baker’s praises…and apparently not many people listened.

At the time of that publication Baker had 4.12 ERA and 1.32 WHIP. Typical for him. As I type this Baker has improved on those numbers tremendously, now sporting a 3.24 ERA and 1.17 WHIP. Over his last five starts he’s allowed a total of eight runs and only four walks. The last two starts have been masterful. Baker spun a complete game, one run gem on June 11th and followed that up with a 10K, eight inning performance June 18th. Despite that run of success – he’s actually won three starts in a row to push his record past .500 – Baker is owned in just 57% of leagues. Here is a list of starters who have a higher ownership percentage:

Gavin Floyd
Carlos Zambrano
Colby Lewis
Ted Lilly
Brandon Morrow
Francisco Liriano

Yes, Liriano, he of the 4.59 ERA and 1.30 WHIP is owned in 30% more leagues than his superior teammate. Personally, I think Baker gets overlooked by most every season because he’s boring. That’s not a knock against him. He just doesn’t do anything flashy. He doesn’t have a cool name. He doesn’t have memorable facial hair. He doesn’t pump his fist or smash Gatorade coolers in the dugout in frustration. He’s just Scott Baker, and he’s trying his best to make you notice this season.

As Mike pointed out, his K/9 is at a career high. It was a bit higher when Mike penned his piece, but at 8.64 it still ranks fourth in the American League. I don’t have the Pitch f/x wizardry to tell you if he’s spotting his pitches better this season, but his fastball does have more movement this season according to texasleaguers.com. That could account for the higher rate of strikeouts despite Baker throwing his 91mph fastball more often than last season. His success this season hasn’t been lucky either, as his FIP and xFIP are each under 4.00 to go along with the 3.24 ERA.

To me Baker has always been very similar to James Shields. Both were above average, but not great pitchers the past 3-4 seasons but seem to have taken a leap this year. Every team can’t have aces in every starting pitching position. Guys like Scott Baker provide real value to your team. Add him, won’t you?

It’s a rare thing these days when success by a shortstop goes under-reported. I’ve beaten you all over the head with the fact that the position is the weakest it’s been in some time. Asdrubal Cabrera came out of nowhere to surprise people this season and has gotten a lot of burn in the fantasy world because of it.

Another American League Central shortstop is having a very nice season after spending the past two living in fantasy irrelevance. Without much fanfare Jhonny Peralta is having the best season of his career.

Aside from his 2005 season with Cleveland in which he hit 24 home runs and put up a .376 wOBA, Peralta has had a pretty up and down career. His fantasy value outweighed his real life value, especially if you don’t play in an OBP league (though I think everyone should). The 2006 campaign was a disaster. Peralta hit .257, even though he had a .327 BABIP, with just 13 home runs and 68 RBI. He looked to have bounced back in 2007 and 2008, averaging 22 home runs, 80 RBI, and a .273/.336/.451 triple slash line. Things were looking up. Then the past two seasons happened.

Peralta still put up good RBI numbers, 83 and 81 respectively, but his hits, runs, home runs were all significantly down, as were his batting average, on base percentage and slugging percentages. His ISO, a better indication of a hitter’s pure power, which was .228 in 2005 and .197 in 2008 dropped to .120 and .143 in 2009 and 2010. He hit 26 total home runs in those two seasons after averaging 22 in the two seasons prior. It’s tough to pinpoint exactly what Peralta was doing wrong without taking a few liberties.

His BABIP fell every year from 2005-2010, but only dipped below .300 in the 2010 season. Wild fluctuations in his 2009-2010 batted ball data surely doesn’t help. It’s hard to know what you’re going to get when your data looks like this

This season, however, Peralta seems to have found it again. His BABIP is up to .321, he’s hitting nearly .300 and already has 11 home runs. He’s hitting far more fly balls than he ever has. Last season’s FB% of 43.4% was the highest of his career by 7%, and he’s at 48.2% this year. It’s hard to look at any specific set of data and determine why that change has occurred. That’s usually the outcome of a change in a player’s swing, but I couldn’t find anything when Googling. I don’t put too much importance on these numbers yet, but he’s swinging at fewer pitches in the zone (68.5%) than he has in the past four seasons. He’s also making contact with more pitches overall (81.2%) and more pitches in the zone than he ever has (90.6%). His O-Swing% hasn’t changed drastically, which is why I caution you in putting a ton of faith in those numbers going forward.

Last season Peralta finished ranked 297th overall. To this point he’s sitting at 93rd. A stark improvement. You likely got him fairly cheaply in your leagues, and the man with the funny name is paying dividends thus far.

This is part of an ongoing pro/con series on RotoGraphs over the next couple of weeks. Today we’ll look at the positive/negative side of Matt Joyce. Expect the opposite side shortly.

As a Rays fan I’m obviously going to have a predisposed affinity for Matt Joyce. He was born and raised in Tampa. He was the return in the trade that sent Edwin Jackson packing to Detroit. Jackson was loved by fans, but not necessarily sabermetricians, so any success for Joyce tastes that much sweeter.

He’s had a great first half — transforming from sleeper to .399 wOBA hitter — but there’s reason to believe that trend will not continue.

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Earlier this season I wrote about the crop of shortstops that came off the board after Hanley Ramirez and Troy Tulowitzki in every draft and how bereft of talent it was. With over a third of the season completed, have things changed very much? Let’s take a look.

To begin the season only the catcher position had fewer players ranked in the Yahoo! top 100 than our lovable shortstops. Here are those players with their preseason and up to date rankings

The most notable drop off is Hanley. Dave excellently detailed his struggles in a piece last month, and the problem hasn’t changed; Hanley is still hitting far too many ground balls which is killing is power. I’m never going to turn my back on Hanley,and if he has a huge second half those of you who do will regret it. But, up to this point he’s been nearly unplayable.

The drop off for Derek Jeter and Jimmy Rollins could, and probably should, have been expected. Both are aging and coming off sub-par seasons. Jeter had a great 2009 season, but that seems to have been a mirage, while Rollins hasn’t had a good season since 2008. Yes he hit 21 homers and scored 100 runs in 2009 but he also had an OBP of .296. Rollins will still steal you 30+ bases but the 20 home run power is out the window. The most pleasant surprise is the resurgence of Jose Reyes. Coming off two ineffective and injury pleagued seasons, he seems to be back to his old ways. He’s hitting .342, albeit with a .365 BABIP, and is on pace to steal 50+ bases for the fourth time in his career. There’s almost no way he keeps this up, but he’s also on pace for over 20 triples. We talk about players having 20-20 potential, but never in that regard.

The rest of the players on that list have produced about as well as you would have expected, though I don’t think anyone pegged Andrus for three homers thus far. Tulowitzki is suffering from some awful luck – his BABIP is .252. His plate discipline and batted ball data aren’t drastically out of line from last season so I’d expect his batting average (.270) to rebound.

Here is the current Yahoo! list of top 100 shortstops:

The group went from 8 players to 6, with the only new name being Asdrubal Cabrera. I extolled his virtues two weeks ago so we won’t go into them again. Suffice it to say he’s been excellent.

Twenty three shortstops began the season ranked in the top 300. That number currently sits at ninteen. What we expected to be a weak class of shortstops has only gotten weaker.

It’s amazing that Johnny Damon has been around for 15+ seasons. It’s also amazing that he’s had that amount of success over his career with a swing that ugly. After a very slow start with the Rays, Damon has really heated up over the past month. Yet, he’s still owned in roughly 50% of Yahoo leagues.

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If there’s one player I never thought I’d be writing a waiver wire post about, it’s Brent Lillibridge. When you have a .194/.253/.298 triple slash line in 298 PA’s coming into this season there’s little reason to. Even his Triple-A numbers aren’t very good. Yet, somehow, here we are.

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I’m ready.

It took me ~230 plate appearances, but I’m ready. Like most of you I was skeptical in the beginning. That’s evident in the lack of articles written about Cabrera’s amazing start. There’s only been one and it was written 12 days into the season, and it wasn’t on RotoGraphs. That’s my fault. I cover shortstops for this site, but up until now I wasn’t sure how to properly address the situation.

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In today’s Waiver Wire we discuss two players who have shown great production of late. Thanks to reputations — one the player’s and the other the manager’s — they are owned in fewer than 10% of leagues.

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Allow me to make an assumption. If you’re reading the roto-blog at FanGraphs you’re likely smarter than your league mates. We tend to attract a different kind of cat over here. You’re more rational. You have a deeper understanding of what makes baseball tick, and you use that information to outwit your lesser prepared league mates. That being said, you’re all aware of how fickle saves can be. If a closer has a few rough outings in a row, or a less than stellar ERA, people tend to freak out. Again, not you guys, those other people. Paying for saves on draft day tends to be a fruitless endeavor, but there’s no reason you can’t hoodwink an owner in May whose panicking over small sample sizes.

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I’m going to try something new here, so bear with me. Have you ever looked at two players who were having very similar seasons, but had vastly difference ownership percentages? I’m not talking about after one week when small sample sizes rule the day and someone like Chris Shelton is putting up numbers similar to Albert Pujols. We all knew Shelton was a bum and Pujols a star. 

I mean players more evenly matched in the skill set department. Two such pitchers, Josh Tomlin and Phil Humber, caught my eye this week.

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