Matt Lindstrom can throw a baseball 100 miles per hour. And if that was not good enough, the Marlins traded Kevin Gregg in the off-season, clearing the closer’s job for Lindstrom. With Logan Kensing and Scott Proctor as his main competition, it appears Lindstrom should be the team’s closer on Opening Day. So, why isn’t there more excitement surround Lindstrom? He does not crack the top 200 in early ADP reports.

Last year, Lindstrom’s walk rate was less than good. He suffered through a minor back injury and spent some time in the minors. But when he was with the Marlins, he posted a 4.08 BB/9 which led to a 1.45 WHIP. His previous track record with walks is spotty. Lindstrom was very good with the Marlins in 2007, with a 2.82 BB/9, but his minor league record shows seasons in line with 2008.

Gregg notched 61 saves for the Marlins over the past two seasons with a walk rate similar to Lindstrom’s mark last season. But let’s not get bogged down with his walks. In addition to his velocity, Lindstrom is also a groundball pitcher. His GB/FB ratio last year was 1.54, which led to a microscopic 0.16 HR/9, the fourth-lowest total among relievers. Some might think that he’s in for a major regression but in 2007 his HR/9 checked in at 0.27 for the year.

The combination of a top-notch fastball, lots of ground balls and very few home runs allowed is an attractive one for a potential closer. One thing to be wary of is that Lindstrom has agreed to pitch for the U.S. in the WBC. Instead of spending Spring Training refining his slider and firmly establishing himself as the team’s closer, Lindstrom will be setting up Joe Nathan, Brian Fuentes, Jonathan Broxton and others.

While that is a concern, it should not override a guy with an excellent shot of posting 30+ saves with solid strikeout numbers. In his two years in the majors, Lindstrom has a 7.60 K/9 rate. That’s a nice combo for a guy going in the lower 20 percent of mock drafts currently.

Will the real Jered Weaver please stand up? Is he the consensus top talent available in the 2004 draft and the one who went a combined 17-3 between Triple-A and the majors in 2006, with 11 of those wins coming for the Angels? Or is he the slightly above league average pitcher he’s been the past two seasons, someone who can give you a decent ERA but not the innings you hope for from one of your top pitchers?

Weaver went 11-2 with a 2.56 ERA for the Angels in 2006. But he had three numbers that suggested he was not nearly that good. First, his BABIP that year was .246, which would have been the second lowest mark in the majors if he had enough innings to qualify. And second, his LOB% was 86.2 percent, which would have led the majors by a significant amount. Chris Young was the actual leader with an 80.7 percent strand rate. Finally, his FIP of 3.90 was 1.34 above his actual ERA.

And if that wasn’t enough, Weaver struggled with biceps and shoulder injuries in 2007. He did well to put up a 13-win, 3.91 ERA season. That gave hope that in 2008, with a full Spring Training under his belt, he could evolve into one of the top young starting pitchers in the game.

Instead, Weaver put up a disappointing season. But while his 2006 peripherals all pointed the wrong way, now Weaver has some markings which indicate he could be an undervalued commodity on Draft Day this year.

That LOB%, which was so out of the norm in 2006, has done a near 180-degree turn. Last year Weaver had a 70.7 strand rate, which was the 22nd-lowest mark in the majors. And his FIP was lower than his ERA by 0.43, which was the 14th-biggest discrepancy in MLB.

Weaver also regained strikeouts last year, as he averaged a K/9 of 7.74, up 1.31 from the previous year. His control is not as pinpoint as it was in 2006, but his K/BB ratio slotted him between Brandon Webb and Jake Peavy on the leaderboard, plenty good enough to be a number-two type starting pitcher.

One of the big problems with Weaver is that he is an extreme fly ball pitcher. His 0.71 GB/FB ratio was the second-lowest mark in the majors in 2008. He compensates for that somewhat by inducing a lot of infield pop-ups, which helps keep his home runs allowed at a reasonable rate.

According to the RotoTimes Player Rater, Weaver earned $3.99 last year. That should be the lower end of his fantasy range in 2009. Mock Draft Central’s current ADP report does not show Weaver as one of the top 200 players, indicating there is not a lot of current demand for him. The combination of his skill set and room for improvement in luck makes Weaver an attractive late-game option.

It was a rough couple of years in 2006 and 2007 for Aubrey Huff. In ’06, he continued his downward trend from his 30-HR, 100-RBI peak and ended up with just 21 HR and 66 RBIs while splitting time with Tampa Bay and Houston. Then he signed a three-year deal with the Orioles and saw his HR output drop to 15. Perhaps rock bottom occurred when following the 2007 season he appeared on the Bubba the Love Sponge radio show and trashed the city of Baltimore.

But then everything went right for Huff in 2008. A notoriously slow starter, he didn’t bury himself early and then went on a hot streak that lasted from the end of May through mid-September. Overall he finished with a .304-32-108-96-4 line, which made him a top-25 fantasy hitter.

So, how did he do it? Huff’s BB% and K% were right around career averages and his BABIP of .314 was not out of line with previous efforts (it was .310 the year before). He traded some ground balls for fly balls and line drives and established a career-best 41.7 percent fly ball rate. His HR/FB rate rebounded to 14.9 percent, up over six points from 2007 but just 0.6 percent above his lifetime average.

This means we have a once-solid hitter returning to previous levels. Huff seems like he has been around forever, but he turned 32 in the off-season. Is it reasonable to expect him to repeat his 2008 performance? How do others see him so far this year?

In the January 5th ADP report from Mock Draft Central, Huff checks in at number 83, considerably below his 2008 final rankings. He is behind Carlos Pena (67) and Derrek Lee (50) among others.

The nice thing about Huff is that he gives you flexibility, having played enough to qualify at both 1B (24) and 3B (33) in most leagues. That makes him more valuable than either Pena or Lee if they put up similar numbers.

Every major mark that Huff put up last year was in line with previous production, other than his FB%. And even if that regresses completely back to his career average, it still leaves him as a 28-HR player if he repeats the rest of his 2008 numbers. That would still leave him as a top-50 fantasy hitter.

Right now it appears that Huff is being undervalued in fantasy drafts.

Fans and athletes alike enjoy playing the “no one believed” card. Most of the time it’s garbage but in the case of Dustin Pedroia perhaps there’s something there. Fans and analysts have been looking for reasons to doubt him for years and Pedroia just keeps exceeding all expectations.

In 2005, Pedroia tore up Double-A (.324/.409/.508) but struggled when he was promoted to Triple-A. Rather than recognize that he played the end of the season with a wrist injury, people doubted. In 2006, Pedroia played well in Triple-A (.305/.384/.426) but hit under .200 in 81 at-bats for Boston. So the doubts lingered.

So, in 2007 Pedroia puts up a .317/.380/.442 line in the majors and wins the Rookie of the Year. Then for an encore, he goes out and puts up a .326/.376/.493 line and wins the AL MVP. Surely now, everyone must be convinced that this is a player who makes adjustments and adapts to the level of his competition, right?

Our own Matthew Carruth wrote about Pedroia, “Even with the regression that should come on his bat next year…”

Now, Matthew is a lot smarter than me. And if someone as accomplished as he thinks that Pedroia will regress noticeably in 2009, that is a pretty good indication of where smart money is on this subject.

To buttress Matthew’s position, according to the RotoTimes Player Rater, Pedroia was the 12th-best fantasy hitter last year, putting up a dollar value of $31.68 in 2008. In other words, there’s not much room for continued improvement.

But none of Pedroia’s peripherals seem to be outrageous. Yes, he made a 42-point jump in his isolated slugging but his .167 mark ranked 85th in the majors. Yes, he more than doubled his HR output but neither his FB% (36 percent) nor his HR/FB (7.8 percent) are anywhere close to putting him on the first page of the FanGraph’s Leaderboards. Yes, Pedroia had a .336 BABIP last year but he had a .334 mark in the category the year before.

We make snap judgments about people all of the time. It’s one of the ways we make sense of the world. Pedroia is listed here as 5-foot-9 and he appears even smaller in person. He plays hard. We see small, white and scrappy and our snap judgment is that Pedroia should be like David Eckstein, he of the lifetime .361 slugging percentage.

Because few complained or predicted regression when 6-foot-1 Chase Utley upped his ISO 47 points from .202 to .249, did they? Utley’s a big guy and no one is surprised when a big guy displays power. Plus Utley did this going from age 25 to 26, when improvement is a reasonable thing to expect.

Pedroia had his ISO leap from age 23 to 24.

Anyway, a lot of things went right for Pedroia last year and it would not be a surprise to see a drop in last year’s numbers. At the very least, he could pull an Ian Kinsler and come down with an injury and miss 35 games. But what player who has only been in the majors for two seasons could we not say that about?

This could be the last year to get Pedroia at a bargain. That is because if he puts up a season like 2008 again, everyone will see it as a trend and not a fluke and act accordingly in the future. The bottom line is Pedroia is a great baseball player and someone you want on your fantasy team.

One of the great unknowns heading into the 2009 season is how fantasy players will treat reigning Cy Young Award winner Tim Lincecum. On the one hand, we have the top fantasy hurler in the National League, one who led the league in strikeouts, finished second in wins and ERA and eighth in WHIP. On the other hand, Lincecum led the majors in Baseball Prospectus’ Pitcher Abuse Points and he topped Tom Verducci’s magical line of an increase of 30 IP for a starter under 25.

There is enough of a backlash against strict adherence to pitch counts from all corners of baseball that Lincecum’s value would probably not be hurt by that alone. But when combined with his innings pitched increase of 49.2 from his combined majors + minors total in 2007, there are going to be more than a handful of people wary of investing too much in the Giants’ ace.

The Bill James projection system has Lincecum with another outstanding year in 2009, nearly matching his wins and WHIP from a year ago, showing a slight increase in strikeouts but a 0.40 drop in ERA. James even predicts 13 more innings pitched from Lincecum in 2009. But James is one of the critics of the Pitcher Abuse Points system.

The Marcel projection for Lincecum does not show him coming anywhere close to his 2008 numbers. But the Marcel projections are not particularly reliable for players with his experience in the majors.

Ultimately, each fantasy player will have to decide how much to weigh Lincecum’s obvious talents versus the systems that predict bad things for him based on how comparable pitchers have fared under his work load in the past.

However, it’s always nice to get an ace starter at a reduced cost.

In the first half of 2008, Ian Kinsler was in the discussion for the most valuable fantasy player, as he posted a .337-14-58-84-23 line. But in the second half of the season, two things happened to Kinsler that seem to happen pretty often. His production took a nosedive and he got hurt.

In 131 plate appearances after the break, Kinsler had a .258/.300/.417 line, which was 228 points of OPS lower than his total from the first half. In his three-year career in the majors, Kinsler has an .891 OPS before the All-Star break and a .755 mark afterwards. Many analysts dismiss splits, especially those involving pre and post All-Star break. But given that Kinsler has shown this for three straight years, perhaps it should be given some extra weight. The heat in Texas can do strange things to ballplayers.

That brings us to injuries. Kinsler’s 2008 season ended when he suffered a sports hernia. In 2007 he missed significant time due to a foot injury. And his rookie season was cut short thanks to a thumb injury. He has yet to play more than 130 games in a season.

Kinsler is in the discussion for top fantasy second baseman due to his power-speed combo. With the uncertainty surrounding Chase Utley, he might even be the first player from the position drafted. Kinsler reported no lingering issues from the surgery and is expected healthy for the start of Spring Training.

But before you spend a high pick on Kinsler, remember that injury history. Some fantasy players will take Kinsler’s 2008 stats and pro-rate them over a full season. That’s a dangerous thing to do given his history. Even with the injury, Kinsler was a top 20 fantasy hitter last year. Expecting him to improve significantly on that seems extra risky, especially once you factor in last year’s .339 BABIP, which was 27 points above his career average.

Due to a combination of a tremendous strikeout mark, a solid ERA and a nice WHIP, Carlos Marmol had a fantasy value of roughly $6 in a 12-team mixed league last year. That figures to go up substantially in 2009 as he takes over the closer’s role for the Cubs with the departure of Kerry Wood.

Some owners will be wary of Marmol, due to the fact that he hasn’t been a closer for a full season previously. Others will point to his high walk rate, while some will be scared off by his FIP, which was nearly a run higher than his actual ERA. There are also questions about his stamina, as a rough patch in June was attributed to fatigue.

Smart fantasy owners will use all of these fears to acquire Marmol cheaper than he should go in an auction or later than he should go in a draft.

While Marmol has not closed previously, he converted seven of eight save chances last year (one of his two blown saves came in the seventh inning). The walk rate is definitely a concern, but as Francisco Rodriguez has shown the last few years, a high strikeout rate can offset a poor walk rate. Most of Marmol’s poor outings came between May 31 and July 2. But whatever was bothering him then was quickly rectified. After the break he had a 1.29 ERA with 16 BB and 44 K in 35 IP.

The Cubs also have former Marlins closer Kevin Gregg and former college football star Jeff Samardzija in the bullpen. They may siphon off some saves during the year, but in 2008 Wood had 34 of the team’s 44 saves. Since the Norm Charlton–Heathcliff Slocumb fiasco in 1997, manager Lou Piniella has displayed a strong preference for one closer in his next 10 seasons at the helm. Not once in those 10 years have two relievers on a Piniella-managed team reached double digits in saves.

Wood had a $19 season in 2008 and was a top-25 pitcher overall as the Cubs closer. I might be a tad more conservative than that for Marmol, but I would expect that to be a ballpark figure of his worth in 2009.

A supplemental first-round pick out of Stanford in 2005, Jed Lowrie had a disappointing season in the Hi-A Carolina League in 2006 and fell off the radar for most people. Even after a 2007 season in which he hit for average and power split between Double-A and Triple-A, he was not considered an impact player. Baseball America rated him as only the 73rd-best prospect coming into 2008.

But injuries at the major league level gave Lowrie a shot at regular playing time in Boston last year and he held his own in his first exposure to the big leagues. In late August, Lowrie had a .296/.366/.469 line after his first 52 games and 188 plate appearances. But a September swoon, perhaps as teams adjusted their scouting reports, dragged down his final numbers.

Lowrie was a shortstop in college and the minors but found himself switching between there and third base for the Red Sox in 2008, depending upon who was hurt at that time. As a shortstop, he batted .272/.360/.424 in 187 PA while as a 3B he posted a .239/.318/.359 line in 108 PA.

Now, those numbers are too small of a sample to draw any big conclusions from, but it should not surprise anyone that he hit better while playing at his natural position.

The Red Sox have Julio Lugo as their incumbent shortstop and the veteran is owed $18 million over the next two years. However, Lowrie in his brief stint showed strong signs of handling the position defensively, with a UZR/150 of 21 compared to -1.6 for Lugo.

Lowrie showed excellent patience at the plate and drew walks at an 11.9 percent rate. But his strikeout rate was unacceptable at 26.2 percent. Lowrie smacked a lot of line drives, which helped him to a .342 BABIP. He also piled up the line drives and high BABIP in the minors. It’s a nice package if Lowrie can get his strikeout rate down to 20 percent or lower.

Lowrie’s fantasy value is dependent on Boston trading Lugo elsewhere. He showed enough in 2008 for the club to consider the possibility but probably not enough to make it a priority.

Unless the Red Sox trade Lugo prior to the start of the season, Lowrie is not worth drafting in mixed leagues and is at best a late-round lottery ticket in AL-only leagues. But there is enough talent there that he merits following and he is someone who could provide solid production at a weak position if given a shot at the full-time job.

Bobby Abreu has long been a fantasy favorite due to his ability to provide help in all five categories. Who can’t use 22 SB from a guy posting a .296-20-100-100 line, like Abreu did last year?

But it’s a trying time for Abreu in real life, as he finds himself a free agent with very limited options. He is competing for a roster spot with better and/or younger players in Manny Ramirez, Adam Dunn and Pat Burrell. Garret Anderson and Ken Griffey are also on the market.

Abreu will sign somewhere eventually but fantasy owners still need to be a bit wary that he will remain an impact player. The reason for caution is that the past two seasons, Abreu has been a great hitter in Yankee Stadium and just a run-of-the-mill hitter in away parks.

H – .318-24-111-122-25
R – .260-12-90-101-22

It’s very common for players to hit better in their home parks but 58 points of AVG and twice as many HRs is enjoying home cooking more than most. Is that something Abreu can carry to his next home park?

There’s nothing particularly troubling in Abreu’s batting profile. He doesn’t walk as much as he used to but neither does he fan at similar rates that he did in the past. Abreu is still a line drive machine and he regularly features a robust BABIP. Last year’s mark of .333 was actually beneath his career .352 in the category.

Abreu will turn 35 before the start of the season and is at the age where players can fall off a cliff at any time. He should still be a productive fantasy hitter in 2009, but likely at a rate noticeably below what he’s done the past few years in the Bronx.

Brian Roberts is a three-category fantasy star at a tough defensive position. While he does not have the cachet of playing for the World Series winner, like Chase Utley, or as his league’s reigning MVP, like Dustin Pedroia, Roberts is one of the elite 2B available. A top-notch contributor at AVG, R and SB, Roberts has turned in five straight seasons in which he’s made fantasy players happy.

The only warning sign around Roberts is his age. He turned 31 in October, which is not generally old for baseball players but is for 2B. For every player like Jeff Kent, who retained excellent production past 35, one could name several elite players at the position who lost fantasy relevance at an early age. Roberto Alomar had his last big season at age 33. Carlos Baerga peaked at 26. Steve Sax was done at 31. And just in case you want more examples, how about Edgardo Alfonzo, Glenn Beckert, Dave Cash, Delino DeShields, Marcus Giles, Tom Herr, Chuck Knoblauch, Harold Reynolds, Juan Samuel and Robby Thompson – all former All Stars who lost effectiveness early.

On the plus side, Roberts posted his highest AVG/OB/SLG marks since his standout 2005 season. Additionally, his BB% remains strong at 11.8 percent. On the flip side Roberts’ K% of 17 percent in 2008 was the highest of his career. Roberts hit 18 HR in 2005 but fell to single digits last year. And with a HR/FB% of 4.9 percent, owners should not expect a big rebound in that category.

Roberts has always been a strong performer in BABIP (lifetime mark of .320) but his .345 was tied for 14th-best in the majors last year.

In 2008, Roberts was a Top 30 fantasy hitter. While I don’t expect a collapse, I think it is wise to knock him down a bit due to last year’s high BABIP and his advancing age at a position at which players generally do not age gracefully.