I have a bit of an undesirable task of trying to make some kind of sense out of the third base mess from the past season. On the one hand, we have guys like Ryan Zimmerman and David Wright who are typically top shelf third basemen heading into the season. However, if you’ve looked over the FVARz database, you’ll notice their actual fantasy value relative to on-field performance was keeping company with Danny Valencia and Daniel Murphy. So what a top tier at third base for keeper value looks like is probably open to a great deal of debate.

Fortunately, what’s not debatable is who leads off the first tier, and that’s quite obviously Jose Bautista – who ranks a country mile (or should I say country click to honor our friends to the North) ahead of the rest of the pack. The big question after Bautista’s breakout 2010 is what he would provide as an encore, and to my surprise, he was every bit as good in 2011 (in fact, he was better if you count WAR at night to put you to sleep like I do). Bautista improved his batting average, his walk rate, and lowered his strikeout rate and while he was a little dinged up, he still managed to be the only player to hit better than .300, record 40 or more home runs and drive in and score more than 100 runs. He is one of the no-doubters in terms of keepers, certainly considering the dearth of talent at third base.

And now it gets interesting.

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I have to admit that I’ve been highly suspicious of Ryan Roberts all season long. Maybe it’s his spotty performance history, perhaps it’s my aversion to one-hit-wonders (I’m looking at you, Fernando Tatis), perhaps it’s the neck tattoos (sarcasm). Whatever the case, Roberts was unintentionally shoved under my radar for much of the season relative to his actual value. I concede that I prefer a larger sample size before I start to recommend a player, and perhaps that’s a shortcoming I need to think about.

Whatever the reason, Ryan Roberts was hard for me to like this season. It wasn’t until I started to come around about June that he made the third tier for my third base rankings and I defended his late season struggles as recent as September. But I concede that I kept waiting for him to turn into a pumpkin, and he just refused to do so, to his credit.

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Roy Oswalt heads into the off-season with about as much uncertainty as he’s ever had as a major league pitcher. After suffering through some back injury and flirtations with retirement, Oswalt, 34, will be a free agent unless the Philadelphia Phillies exercise his $16 million dollar option. Rather nebulous on an epic scale, GM Ruben Amaro has mentioned they’re having “internal discussions” about whether or not to pick up that option. Now, internal discussions could be serious consideration or it could be smoking cigars and playing Donkey Kong — we’re merely left to speculate.

Smart money says they aren’t likely to pick up the option, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want him back on more team-friendly terms. Obviously, where he ultimately lands will have implications for his fantasy value, but before we can make any determinations about park factors and defense, it’s worth looking at how Oswalt has evolved over the past couple of seasons and investigate what kind of performance we can anticipate going forward.

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It’s not news to say that Clayton Kershaw had a fantastic 2011, and we’ll know on November 17th if it was good enough for the Baseball Writers Association to hand him any hardware because of his efforts. What’s been so interesting to research is how Kershaw has evolved over the last four years from a very good 4-win player to an elite 7-win player.

Kershaw has been good pretty much from the moment he arrived Los Angeles, but even throughout very successful 2009 and 2010 campaigns, he had his limitations. His walks were out of control, he struggled against right handed batters, and because he pitched like he was trying to strike out every batter, his pitch counts kept him from going deep into games. It’s almost as if Kershaw systematically addressed every single one of his shortcomings in the off-season to become something of a superhero version of himself.

What follows is a graphical homage to his ability to adapt, and to just be freakishly good.

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Erik Hahmann pointed out a couple of gems in Ottoneu playoff pick six for Tuesday and I’d like to grab the baton and run with a few more, because looking over the names available, there are some real interesting opportunities today.

Jorge Posada ($1.00)

The ragged old backstop has been pretty much guaranteed to appear as DH throughout the Division Series and tonight he’ll face Rick Porcello. Posada has eleven at bats against Porcello and he’s 3-9 with a double and two walks. That’s not much of a sample size, but on the season, Posada was really quite solid against right handed pitching, posting a .269/.348/.466 triple slash and managed to hit 14 home runs in 279 at bats.

Porcello struggles versus lefties, giving up 14 home runs in just a little over 100 innings pitched this season. Against lefties, his FIP is 4.51 and his xFIP is 4.16, in part due to a HR/FB of 12.1% and BABIP of .347 vs. lefties, but he’s pretty well earned most of it as his xBABIP sits at about .320. Fully 13 of the 18 home runs he’s given up this season have either had plenty of distance or classified as no doubters by ESPN Home Run Tracker, so it’s not like he’s giving up cheapies either. I look for Posada to square the ball up pretty well this evening.

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Third base has been rather unspectacular in 2011, in both fantasy baseball and spikes-on-the-ground baseball. With the playoffs just a few days away, I remarked to a colleague just how terrible third base looks for two of the six teams that we know will be in the post-season and how it’s a testament to the talent that surrounds them. Those two teams are the Milwaukee Brewers and the Detroit Tigers, but their third base situations aren’t quite the same.

Just how bad are their respective third basemen? What follows is a quick history of ineptitude at the hot corner for playoff-bound teams and a brief fantasy analysis for 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

I torture myself every year by looking back at what could have been.

I have a league that has been going on for the better part of two decades – it used to be housed on the old “Sandbox” but migrated to Yahoo many years ago and it has had anywhere from ten to twelve owners year to year. It’s your proverbial bragging rights league, although as we’ve gotten older, more money has been wagered but I’m convinced we’d play for a thimble just to say we beat the next guy. This season, it was set up as a pretty simple standard, ten team non-keeper points league with a snake draft.

With the draft well behind in the rear view mirror and the next one six long months away, I decided to take a look at the results just to see if there was anything to take away from it.

In doing so, I marveled at the bargains that people pulled during the draft, and it rather got me salivating thinking about what hidden gems there will be in 2012. What follows are the highlights from this past March, and a cool reminder that I ought not over-imbibe on draft day until at least the 20th round.

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I really don’t care for the characterization that a player is “injury prone” but for the love of all things great and small, what did Kevin Youkilis do as a kid to be this delicate of an athlete? In the last three seasons, he has played in 136 games, 102 games, and will likely top out around 130 this season. Always incredibly valuable, both in real baseball and fantasy baseball, but even when he’s on the field, he’s typically playing through some kind of pain. This year, it has been a litany of bumps and bruises and presently he’s dealing with a hip issue that’s going to require off-season surgery, but he’s chosen to power through. And yet, it’s killing his production.

Since returning from the disabled list, he’s appeared in 10 games and notched six hits — four singles (one of them an infield hit) and two doubles with 30% K rate and two RBI. Prior to that, he managed a .206/.306/.442 line in August, still drawing walks at a healthy clip but doing very little for run production. He’s a tough guy to manage right now because he’s constantly a game-time decision and even when he does start, he might only get a few at-bats, being lifted for a pinch runner, or simply removed later in the game.

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The Kansas City Royals, as you well know by now, are chock-full of talented youngsters. It wasn’t more than a couple seasons ago that one of those talented youngsters was Luke Hochevar, their first round pick in 2006. And while many predicted big things for the lanky kid out of the University of Tennessee, he has quickly become the captain for the quad-A starting pitching corps as his talent in the minors simply never translated to the major leagues.

2011 was looking much the same for Hochevar, but something peculiar started happening just before the All-Star Break.

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Sniff, sniff… the last full month of the season, and the final installment of the updated in-season rankings is upon us. Third base has been a bit of a roller-coaster this season, starting out devoid of virtually any worthwhile candidates to plug in at the hot corner until today, when many players have resurrected their seasons and others have quite frankly resuscitated their entire careers. It’s not the deepest position to be sure, but it’s not quite the mess that it started out to be.

I want to be clear that this is not third base rankings should a draft be held today for 2012. This is a reflection of the slow, methodical meander which is a 162 game baseball season and where these gentlemen currently belong, give or take a few slots depending on your format.

Tier 1

Jose Bautista

There’s simply little to substantiate Bautista having room up here in the penthouse. His wOBA is .448 — the next closest is Aramis Ramirez at .375 (edit – Alex Gordon at .382). He hit as many home runs in July and August as Alex Rodriguez has hit all season. You could come up with dozens of these examples, but I’ll spare you.

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