During the Friday RotoGraphs chat, Mark Reynolds came up a lot, and let’s just say much of the sentiment could be described as vitriolic. There’s a lot of head scratching, hand wringing, and expletive-laden fire breathing going on right now as owners try and figure out just what in the world to do with a guy with such talent who currently looks like he’s trying to hit bb’s.

Adding to the misery is the news that Buck Showalter has hinted that Reynolds needs an extended period of time off in order to get his act together, which sounds a heck of a lot like a manager losing confidence in his slugging third baseman. Reynolds is currently owned in 71% of Yahoo leagues and 83% of CBS leagues, so Showalter isn’t the only person thinking of going to plan B. Whether he’s on your squad or on the wire, anyone who hit 100 home runs between 2008 and 2010 ought to be a person of interest, so let’s see if there are any tea leaves to be read.

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If you drafted Aramis Ramirez in the 8th or 9th round as many did, you probably expected to get the kind of production we all saw in the second half of 2010: .276/.321/.526 with 15 HR and 51 RBI in 62 games. His slow start to 2010 is of course well documented, highlighted by an April that was legendary in its ineptitude: .152/.216/.283.

But given his solid track record, the dearth of available talent at third base, and the strong finish, a lot of people targeted him as their regular at the hot corner. And now you can hear the collective foot tapping as people are waiting for Aramis to show up to the party.

While Ramirez has thus far managed to avoid an April and May quite as bad as 2010, there have been several people across the Al-Gore-fantasy-baseball-dream-catcher that have suggested he’s off to the same slow start, he’s washed up, or both. His current .273/.336/.364 is about two-thirds Ramirez, but clearly isn’t the kind of power production that owners had in mind. So let’s investigate.

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Third base has just been a minefield of excrement recently. Yes, I said excrement.

Jose Bautista has a bum neck, Ryan Zimmerman is out for another 6 weeks, Alex Rodriguez is on again off again with a variety of ailments, Pablo Sandoval is gone for breaking the bone all baseball players should have surgically removed, and even David Freese got in on the act with a broken hand of his own. Howard did a nice job of griping about third base on Thursday so I won’t try to continue that particular rant. What I’d like to do is look at a couple of players that some of us have had to turn to as we wait for something better to come along.

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I still have the Aramis Ramirez experience fresh in my mind where I dumped him in frustration mid-June 2010 as he was struggling to hit even Congressional approval ratings. And then you know what he did in the second half — he turned into, well, Aramis Ramirez — hitting .276/.321/526. Ergo, I’ve become particularly attentive to the don’t-overreact approach.

While not having the major league success nor pedigree that Aramis Ramirez boasts, Pedro Alvarez and his start to the 2011 season reminds me a lot of this situation. Being your third base guy for the season, I wanted to take a deeper look at his struggles (sample size be damned) and see whether or not he’s planning on pulling an Aramis Ramirez on you going forward. For good measure, we’ll also peek at Chone Figgins and his continued struggles.

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Michael Young had some comments after the recent Colby Lewis implosion project demonstration:

“Colby’s fine,” Young said. “He was cruising the whole game…Colby’s fine. Don’t worry about Colby.”

What you can take away from this are two things. We now know that Michael Young is bad liar and we know that you should be worried about Colby (if you weren’t already).

It’s easy for the Texas Rangers to not be so worried about Lewis since they’re 14-8, most of it without their MVP. But for fantasy owners who drafted Lewis on the expectation that he could re-create the Colby Lewis magic-bus-happy-ride from 2010, you ought to be concerned. When you give up six runs on seven hits over five innings pitched with four walks and three strikeouts and you consider that outing to have included your “best stuff you had all year,” there’s a problem.

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It’s hard to believe we’re coming up on the first month of the season, and even a little harder to believe some of the surprises in the performances of the boys at the hot corner. In general, this whole group has been pretty disappointing, but much of that has to do with injury and rotten luck. Some have been great, some have been train-wreck-awful, and we have several new names to add via eligibility updates.  And where a rising tide may float all boats, a collapsing building can produce new views – and thus, the tiers have been shaken up quite a bit from the original ranking.

There are so many changes to the original rankings, including the size and number of tiers, that I’m not going to note an up or down for every player that has moved. Rather, I’ll indicate any notable ascent or descent and give a little rationale thereafter.

Tier 1
Evan Longoria
David Wright
Ryan Zimmerman
Alex Rodriguez

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There has been some fairly creative positioning going on over the last couple of weeks, and while all of the players mentioned here are probably more useful in deep and/or league-specific formats, you might want to keep an eye on their roles going forward. If you’re particularly thin at any given position or trying to weather an injury (or prepare for one), being a position eligibility maven can sometimes patch holes until you find a better solution.

Ty Wigginton

Ian Stewart being dinged up early, Jose Lopez generally sucking, having a fairly diverse defensive skill set, and playing in Colorado makes Wigginton’s future rather intriguing. He may add OF to his eligibility soon giving him 1b, 2b, 3b, and OF eligibility, which, given limited roster space, makes him awfully useful.

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I don’t have to tell this audience about the what goes up must come down principle, but we’ve had some, ahem, “performances” that haven’t been quite up to snuff at third base and I thought it was high time to give their shortcomings a little virtual ink. This isn’t a comprehensive list by any means as there have been several candidates at the hot corner who haven’t lived up to expectations (Casey McGehee, Ian Stewart, Pedro Alvarez, I’m giving you the evil eye) but between Kevin Youkilis and Chone Figgins we’ve got good poster boys for small sample size analysis.

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I’ll be the third base guy throughout the season, and today I want to highlight a few situations worth monitoring at the hot corner.

Pablo Sandoval

It’s probably a good thing that Sandoval is off to a solid start, because there were some people mumbling “platoon” in the Bay Area, evidenced by his hitting 8th in the order versus one lefty and sitting against another.  Against righties this year, he has hit 4th, 5th, and 6th, so Bruce Bochy is still trying to iron out exactly what he wants to do with him. That Bochy would put him down in front of the pitchers spot in the order when lefties are on the mound is a little bit odd as his career splits aren’t eye-popping in terms of production:

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Amidst all these early season bombs, head-scratching starts from ace pitchers, fantastic starts from what’s-their-names, platoon battles, and, ahem, an appendectomy – betwixt all the frenzy of the start of the season, we have the nuts and bolts issue of position eligibility to watch for. To try and make your life just a teensy bit easier this time of year, here are a few guys that are picking up eligibility in the very near future that might help plug a hole in your lineup.

Mike Aviles

He’s a second baseman in most formats, but is considered a second baseman and shortstop in Yahoo. However, in just about any format, he’s soon to become a third baseman, which could be a real boon for any of you stony CBS-ers and others with the corner infield slot to fill. In Yahoo, he’ll need 3 more starts or 7 more appearances at third. In ESPN, he will need 7 more appearances. In CBS he needs just 2 more games to qualify at 3b and CI.

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