With two months under our collective belts in the fantasy baseball season, guys are really starting to move in the rankings. Some slow beginnings have lingered longer than expected, and some scorching starts have surprisingly possessed staying power. As with most rankings lists, there will be some (read: a lot) of disagreement, so without any further ado, here are the tiers:
Coming into the season, right-hander Chris Archer was widely considered the Tampa Bay Rays’ best pitching prospect. Our own Marc Hulet ranked him the Rays’ second-best prospect overall. So when the Rays announced he was getting promoted and would start against the Cleveland Indians on Saturday, many fantasy owners jumped on the waiver wire and submitted claims for Archer.
The excitement makes sense. The 24-year-old features a dynamite fastball-slider combination on the mound and has struck out at least a batter per inning in the last two seasons. In fact, Archer appeared in six big-league games a year ago and compiled an 11.05 K/9 strikeout rate in 29.1 innings, so he’s already shown that he’s capable of missing bats in the majors.
By this point in his career, it’s been pretty well-established that Doug Fister is an above-average starting pitcher in Major League Baseball. He’s compiled a 3.16 ERA (129 ERA+) over 432.2 innings the past three seasons, and since his trade to Detroit, he has proven his sudden transformation in early 2011 was not just a outgrowth of pitching in cavernous Safeco Field.
Fister is valuable in all fantasy formats because he provides above-average rate statistics (ERA and WHIP) and pitches for one of the best offenses in all of baseball, which should allow him to accumulate plenty of wins. And although his strikeout rate is below-average, it’s not so far below-average that owners are sacrificing one category for the benefit elsewhere.
With that said, owners seeking to upgrade a beleaguered fantasy rotation would be wise to target the 29-year-old right-hander in coming weeks. He already has solid numbers this season, as evidenced by his 3.62 ERA and 4.78 strikeout-to-walk ratio. His fantasy numbers, however, are lagging behind his actual performance. Fantasy owners can realistically expect improved performance from Fister throughout the rest of the season, which means he could be a legitimate value-buy right now.
Earlier this month, I updated the second base tiered rankings and opined that Tier One consisted of Robinson Cano, Dustin Pedroia and Ian Kinsler. That’s not really a controversial grouping, especially given the three currently lead qualified second basemen across the league in wOBA. They’re three ducks in a row atop the stat sheets.
And fourth in wOBA is … Matt Carpenter?
Among qualified starters, right-hander Anibal Sanchez has arguably been the best pitcher in all of baseball. His 1.45 FIP leads Major League Baseball, and if you’re one who favors SIERA over FIP, his 2.50 SIERA still ranks third. It’s the type of pitcher the Tigers hoped he could become when they inked him to a five-year, $88M contract over the winter.
Sanchez’s rate statistics have been beautiful this season, but perhaps the biggest story for fantasy owners is the significant uptick in strikeouts. His 31.3% strikeout percentage is by far the best of his career. Prior to 2013, his career-high K% was 24.3% in 2011. The massive jump has left many owners wondering if it’s sustainable.
In professional golf, Saturday is dubbed “Moving Day” because players must go low to give themselves a chance on the final day. Without positioning themselves near the top of the leaderboard with a good round on Saturday, it becomes very difficult to challenge for a championship.
We’re roughly one month into the season, which means it’s time to update the tiered rankings for each position. Though I wanted to be conservative and not alter too many rankings based on data from only one month, some changes seemed warranted.
Here are the tiers:
Daniel Murphy has started to command more attention from fantasy owners. He amassed 600 plate appearances for the first time last year and has really locked down the everyday role at second base. And over the last three seasons, he has hit .302/.344/.425 for the New York Mets — only Robinson Cano has a higher batting average among qualified second basemen over that time frame.
Despite that fact, according to Zach Sanders’ End of Season Rankings, Murphy was only the 18th-ranked second baseman in standard fantasy leagues last season. This is largely due to his lack of power and (somewhat) stolen bases. To put his lack of power into context, he only hit six home runs in both 2011 and 2012. Last season, he ranked 20th among qualified second basemen. Only Jemile Weeks and Jamey Carroll hit fewer home runs.
Murphy hasn’t always lacked power, though. He had double-digit home run totals in 2007 and 2008 in the minors, and he also launched 12 home runs during his first full season in the majors in 2009. The potential for double-digit homers seems to be present.
Could this be the season in which everything comes together and he hits for both power and average? After all, Mets’ manager Terry Collins believes Murphy is “capable of hitting .300 with 15 homers a year” and his .167 ISO through his first 23 games is the highest of his career.
In the couple weeks before Opening Day, hundreds of season prediction articles littered the baseball blogosphere. Naturally opinions varied, but almost nobody disagreed on one point: the Miami Marlins were expected to be terrible across the board and finish last in the NL East.
Well, more accurately, everything about the Marlins was expected to be putrid except Giancarlo Stanton.
As of Friday morning, Matt Kemp is hitting .182/.217/.255 with zero home runs and zero stolen bases. His .207 wOBA ranks third-worst amongst qualified outfielders in all of baseball — ahead of only Aaron Hicks and David Murphy — and he currently owns a 28 wRC+ and a -0.6 WAR.
In short, he’s been dreadful, and many fantasy owners who drafted him in the first round have been limping through the month of April, waiting for Kemp to rebound and become the .362 wOBA hitter he’s been throughout his career.
Lots of speculation exists that this slump is either related to his offseason shoulder surgery or the result of a mechanical compensation from his injury last season. While Kemp has repeatedly told reporters he’s physically fine this week, the numbers indicate something has negatively changed at the plate.