Here’s a quick recap of the whirlwind last 12 months or so of Jeremy Guthrie’s life, and you tell me which of these items seems to jump out at you the most:

• 1) After five years with the Orioles, was traded to Colorado in February in a deal that initially didn’t seem to make sense for either side
• 2) Missed nearly a month of time after injuring himself in a bicycle accident in April
• 3) Pitched so badly for Colorado that even though their rotation was easily the worst in baseball, he still couldn’t keep his starting job and was sent to the bullpen in June
• 4) Was traded to Kansas City in July for the equally-as-disappointing Jonathan Sanchez
• 5) In two months for Kansas City, suddenly became a shockingly effective starter
• 6) Somehow turned that stretch into a three-year, $25 million contract to remain with the Royals through 2015

For me, it’s that last point that immediately stands out. Three years! For the age-34-to-36 seasons of Jeremy Guthrie! You might say that it’s another case of “Dayton Moore being Dayton Moore”, and you might be right, but with the way the market seems to be going in the world of inflated television money, that might just end up being the going rate for someone of Guthrie’s skill. That’s terrifying to accept, though it’s part of a conversation that is far larger than just Jeremy Guthrie. Read the rest of this entry »

Russell Martin hit a career-high 21 homers in 2012, backed by a .192 ISO that was eighth-best among catchers with 350 plate appearances. On the surface, that sounds like the mark of a pretty good season, yet Martin was ranked only 18^th in Zach Sanders’ end of season catcher rankings, behind even non-starters like Ryan Doumit, Jordan Pacheco, & Jesus Montero. He was behind Brian McCann, who suffered through the worst year of his career while fighting injury, and he was behind former teammate A.J. Ellis, who made a splash in Martin’s old home of Los Angeles.

You probably know where this is going: Sanders was in no way wrong to rank Martin as low as he did, even despite the power. In nearly every other way Martin has continued his freefall from his outstanding first few years in the bigs, and it’s difficult to see him rebounding at this point. Going back to the question Howard Bender asked here in February of “Should You Trust Russell Martin?”, well, no. Remember, this is how Bender phrased his worry about Martin after the catcher’s first year in the Bronx: Read the rest of this entry »

After seven seasons spent meticulously climbing the Tampa organizational ladder, John Jaso finally got his first chance to play regularly in the bigs in 2010, and the then-26-year-old rookie catcher quickly made a splash. A .372 OBP! A 14.6% walk percentage! The luck to be with an organization that appreciated those numbers, enough to hit him leadoff 45 times!

That made Jaso a trendy fantasy sleeper pick headed into 2011, and… *thud*. That OBP dropped all the way to .298, thanks in no small part to a BB% that fell five points and a K% that rose nearly four, and it’s not like we weren’t already seeing this declining performance before he missed six weeks late in the season with an oblique injury. Oh, and to top it all off: in November, he was traded to Seattle for an alleged felon. Coming off a poor year, headed to a bad team in a ballpark that kills offense, and with competition from Miguel Olivo & Jesus Montero to deal with, Jaso was a complete afterthought headed into 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

I have to admit, when looking at Zach Sanders’ End of Season Shortstop rankings, I was initially slightly surprised to see that Elvis Andrus didn’t finish in the top 10. After all, Andrus is coming off another solid season, one in which he finished fifth among shortstops in WAR – that’s fourth if you don’t really consider Ben Zobrist a shortstop – and he grabbed the 50^th and final spot in Dave Cameron’s 2012 Trade Value series over the summer. With top prospect Jurickson Profar nearly ready to step in for Texas, Andrus’ name has become even more prominent lately as a possible trade solution over a fishing in a weak shortstop market, regularly coming up as a potential fit with Arizona as part of a deal for Justin Upton. At just 24 years old, Andrus would seem to be one of the brightest young shortstops in the game.

Then again, this might be a case where we need to separate things that don’t really matter in fantasy from things that do. The fact that he’s a well-regarded defensive shortstop matters a lot more to the Rangers than it does to fantasy teams, and you could say the same thing about the team-friendly contract that helped to land him in the Trade Value series. For fantasy purposes, what you have here is a durable player with little power (only three homers, better than just four of the thirty-three other shortstops on Sanders’ list), a good but non-elite batting average, and a stolen base total that declined from 32 or more in each of his first three seasons to just 21 in 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the predictions I made heading into 2012, there was not a single one I had more total confidence in than “Javy Guerra would lose his closing job in Los Angeles to Kenley Jansen.” After all, Guerra was an unheralded prospect who collected 21 saves in 2011 largely due to being the right place at the right time on a Dodger team which had already lost Jonathan Broxton, Hong-Chih Kuo, Vicente Padilla, & Jansen to injury. Jansen, meanwhile, was merely coming off a season which he set a record for highest K/9 rate (min. 50 innings).

It didn’t take long before we saw that prediction come true; Guerra blew several April saves and lost his job to Jansen by the first week of May, never to regain it. Jansen became one of the more dominating closers in the game when healthy—and more on that in a second—and so you’d think that he’d enter 2013 secure in his role racking up saves. Well, think otherwise, at least if GM Ned Colletti’s comments to Ken Gurnick of MLB.com about Brandon League can be believed… Read the rest of this entry »

I have shocking, breaking news: Robinson Cano is a fantastic baseball player. That should come as no surprise given that his 7.8 WAR was tied for fourth in all of baseball this year, of course, and it’s been that way for a while. Measuring only his offense using wOBA, he was the best second baseman in baseball in 2012, second-best (by a single point) in 2011, best in 2010, and third-best both in 2009 and 2006. In a galaxy of Yankee stars, Cano is among the brightest, having provided more WAR value to the team since 2006 than anyone other than Alex Rodriguez. Read the rest of this entry »

If you hit 26 homers and lead your league in basically every offensive stat from your position, but no one notices, does it still make a sound? That twist on the classic thought problem seems to apply to Arizona’s Aaron Hill, who bounced back from two consecutive disappointing seasons to become the second-best second baseman in baseball in 2012, both by WAR and Zach Sanders’ end-of-season fantasy rankings. The hype, however, including an All-Star snub, never seemed to follow.

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If you’d done nothing in 2012 but read the local papers, you might think that Adrian Gonzalez was among the biggest busts of modern times. Coming off a stellar 2011 Boston debut, his production was down, his Red Sox team was a circus – which he was not immune from after being reportedly caught up in the “text message to Boston ownership” controversy – and he didn’t even end the year with the team. In one of the most shocking trades in baseball history, he was shipped to Los Angeles just a year-and-a-half after the Red Sox gave up Anthony Rizzo, Casey Kelly, & Reymond Fuentes to acquire him and invested seven years & $154 million into retaining him.

While that reaction and Gonzalez’ culpability in the flaming collapse of the 2012 Red Sox are perhaps slightly overblown, it clearly wasn’t the year anyone expected. Gonzalez set full-season career lows in OBP, SLG, wOBA, & wRC+, managing to avoid bottoming out in WAR only because his fielding was so highly graded as compared to his early years in San Diego. Considering that Gonzalez was around the 11^th overall pick on average in ESPN leagues headed into the season, the fact that he ended up only 10^th just among first basemen in Zach Sanders’ end-of-year rankings has to be considered a huge disappointment. Read the rest of this entry »

Pop quiz, hotshot. Guess where Chase Headley, our 2012 National League Fantasy Most Valuable Player, was ranked among third basemen prior to the season by Yahoo! Sports. 10th? 15th? Try 22nd, below Michael Young, below Emilio Bonifacio, even below Ryan Roberts.

Now, guess where Headley finished the season at Yahoo!, but not just among his position, where he easily came in as the most valuable third baseman in the NL (and fourth overall); guess where he’s ranked among all players in both leagues, pitchers included: 12th overall. That’s right, the man who couldn’t crack the top 250 players before the season ended up being more valuable fantasy-wise than Robinson Cano, Fernando Rodney, & Gio Gonzalez, at least if you believe Yahoo! Read the rest of this entry »

As you’ll notice around RotoGraphs this week, many of my fine colleagues are looking back at their “10 Bold Predictions” from before the season and seeing how many of them came true. Having joined the team late, I had time to make only one prediction before the season started: “Andre Ethier Is Going To Have a Huge Season”. You can click back to that article to read the full explanation of why, but it basically came down to two reasons – first, he was finally healthy after two years of finger & knee troubles, and second, he would likely be motivated to prove his worth as he headed into his free agent year. I argued that if everything broke right, he could be a steal as a potential top-15 outfielder who was routinely going in the mid-30s in spring drafts. It didn’t quite happen; Ethier ranked outside the top-30 in most of the major ranking systems.

On the surface, Ethier’s 2012 looked a lot like his 2011, compiling a .348 wOBA as opposed to the previous year’s .343. (An increase in slugging percentage was mostly offset by a lesser OBP.) So what went wrong? For the first two months, not a whole lot, actually; like he’d done in the previous two seasons, Ethier got off to a hot start, hitting .324/.381/.569 with nine homers through the end of May. Read the rest of this entry »