Episode 288

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

In this episode, Paul Sporer, Eno Sarris, and Jason Collette are together in Phoenix for Baseball HQ’s First Pitch Forums and Arizona Fall League action! The trio discusses some of the goings-on from the conference including whether or not Justin Verlander and Kyle Hendricks are legit from their ’15 performance. They also discuss some of the players they’ve seen and talked to at AFL including Clint Frazier, Austin Meadows, and Alex Blandino.

Oh, and Paul totally embarrassed himself in his first draft of 2016… and it wasn’t with his picks for once. By the way, here are the first 23 rounds of that NFBC 50 round draft & hold. It’s Kentucky Derby Style slot picking so once your name is drawn from the hat, you can pick your spot. I picked 15 once 1-2-3 were gone (a couple others were, too, I was 6th or 7th out of the hat). I’ll be writing more about this draft in the coming week or so, but here are the pics if you wanna see where someone was (or wasn’t) drafted:

I’m team 15 (click to see clearer)

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Episode 287

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Jason Collette are back for the first offseason edition of the show and they’re talking Dusty Baker & Don Mattingly with their new teams, Thor’s innings increase, some intriguing options that were picked up, and the first part of their Free Agent preview including Matt Wieters, Jason Heyward, and Alex Gordon.

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Mitch Moreland had a career year in 2015. He only matched his previous high in home runs (23), but his AVG, OBP, SLG, 2B, and RBI totals were all the best of his six-year career. He only needed 132 games to set a new high in AB with 471, but his 515 PA were actually only second-highest for him. Was it real? Can he repeat or even grow as he enters his age-30 season?

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Episode 286

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris breakdown the World Series and get Eno’s prediction. Who are the key players on each side? How does KC’s contact-heavy game play vs. NYM’s power pitching-poor defense mix? Would you rather have the KC SPs or NYM RPs? And more. Then they discuss the AFL, going on now in Arizona, and highlight some guys they’re looking forward to seeing in two weeks including: Gary Sanchez, Alex Blandino, Dylan Bundy, A.J. Reed, and more.

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Eric Hosmer turned 26 this past Saturday. He completed his fifth season earlier this month and starts his second straight World Series tonight against the Mets. The 2015 season was his best yet, though that was due largely to the team around him as opposed to skills growth within his game.

His .297/.363/.459 line looks a lot like his 2011 (.293/.344/.465) and 2013 (.302/.353/.448) lines, but the 93 RBI and 98 R were easily career highs. Previous highs of 79 RBI and 86 R were both set in that 2013 season. Every other part of his game looked like something we’ve already seen.

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For years Yadier Molina has been the gold standard behind the dish known for both his tremendous defense and durability. He has 412 Gold Glove Awards (fine, just seven) and he’s caught at least 1000 innings seven of the last eight seasons and fewer than 930 just once in his 11 full seasons. Of course even he blushes at the workloads that KC is feeding Salvador Perez.

When Molina first started, his defense was the only reason to play him. He logged a .653 OPS in his first 1429 PA through age-24. The reps started to pay off as he started to turn his elite contact ability into some results with a .720 OPS in 1550 PA from ages 25-27. By now we’re looking at almost 3000 PA through his mid-20s and then we finally got a power surge with a .842 OPS in 1622 PA from ages 28-30 including a career-year in 2012 when he hit .315 with 22 HR, 76 RBI, 65 R, and 12 SB. He finished fourth in the MVP voting that year.

Over the last two seasons, he has been a blend of those first two samples with just a .687 OPS in 975 PA. In 2014, a torn right thumb cost him 40 games in the middle of the season. That injury looks like a signifier of his power decline as he returned to post just a .317 SLG in 27 games that year, but his 39 games prior to the injury yielded just a .315 SLG in 145 PA.

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Derek Norris was drafted as the 18th catcher off the board last spring and wound up eighth by season’s end. It’s pretty hard to label that anything other than a success, and yet it still feels a bit underwhelming when you look at the full line: .250/.305/.404 with 14 HR, 62 RBI, 65 R, and even 4 SB in 557 PA. Perhaps the line leaves me wanting more because the driving force behind his top-10 ranking was the playing time as opposed to any skills improvement.

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Episode 285

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris are back to discuss more playoff standouts including Daniel Murphy, Stephen Piscotty, Kevin Pillar, and Jorge Soler. They finish with scouting reports on the game 1 starts of each LCS and how the teams facing them might find success.

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We’re passing out awards this week at RG (we’re also delivering demerits, but not in this piece) and I’m looking at the Deep League MVP today. I share Eno’s position of what this award should be as he discussed in the Deep League Cy Young. What that means in a nutshell is that A.J. Pollock isn’t winning this one.

He had an undeniably fantastic season, rising up from a 104 hitter ADP to end up as the fourth-best hitter in baseball, but even factoring in pitchers only jumps his ADP 54 spots meaning he wasn’t exactly cheap despite being a tremendous return on the investment. Kendrys Morales was less expensive as the 226th hitter off the board, but he was drafted enough to log a real ADP on four of the six sites FantasyPros uses so he’s out, too, despite the incredible season.

I was a little lighter on my playing time requirements for consideration as we saw some guys do amazing things in fewer than 100 games this year, so I was looking for at least 400 PA. You can probably think of some of the top candidates immediately, especially if you won a league as the beneficiary of these free agent finds. The booming rookie class paid major dividends via the wire in large part because the arrival of several was well ahead of schedule, let alone the fact that they performed immediately.

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Episode 284

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Jason Collette are back to discuss Utley slide, some playoff standouts who are improving their 2016 stock, including Rougned Odor, Colby Rasmus, and Marco Estrada among others, and the playoffs at large (outside of the fantasy realm). And they finish the podcast discussing Jason’s bold picks from RW (AL, NL).

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