Look backwards at the catchers this year, and you’ll notice that two of the top catchers will lose their catching eligibility this offseason. So move everyone up two slots before you even begin to project next year’s crop. Down in the teens, you’ll find a couple that are approaching 40, and a couple that struggle to hit at the Mendoza Line in a good year. And then, at number twenty despite only 428 plate appearances, you’ll find the Cubs’ catcher: Welington Castillo. He’s on the fringe, but he’s capable of moving up and the table is set for him.

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Thanks to Zach Sanders, we have a retroactive fantasy leaderboard for value last year. Which is cool. But what if we could take away the resources we had to invest in those players? A first-rounder who returns fifth-round value is, after all, still a loser.

Thanks to FantasyPros, we can actually do this. They have an aggregate ADP from last March. If we just take the ordinal rank from our retroactive value board, and subtract the average ADP value, we get a ‘net’ value. Pretty easy.

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Well, Chris Davis is obviously the “real” Fantasy MVP. His ADP according to FantasyPros was seven spots worse than Hunter Pence’s, and he ended up eight spots better in the final rankings. But if you’d have asked me which guy I’d rather have going into this season, I would have easily reached for the power source in Davis. There were just too many warning signs with Pence to pick him. Right?

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We’re recapping all the predictions we did make, but there’s a whole slew of crazy things that none of us predicted. So let’s see if we can learn something from the crazy things that none of us saw coming, even though we tried to be strange.

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A season in the books! Not a bad one for me, two wins, five podiums, four bottom-half finishes… if only my AL-LABR team (11th) hadn’t stung so bad.

In any case, we made some bold predictions in the pre-season and it’s time to see how badly we whiffed. Although, I do remember phrasing one fairly vaguely to try and guarantee at least one ‘hit’ in the bunch. That’s cheating, I’ll readily admit. But I didn’t want to go oh-fer.

So, let’s look back at my ten then.

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Maybe you didn’t notice it because he’s been putting up stats that are virtually identical to those that he showed last year, but apparently Mat Latos has been pitching in pain. That’s what he told the Cincinnati Enquirer at least.

“It doesn’t really matter to me,” he said. “I could care less because I’m not trying to win over fans or anything like that. I’ve been pitching with an abdominal strain since the Texas game. I think it was at the end of the June.”

His ERA since then has been 3.41, so it couldn’t have been that bad. But, as an exercise in injury-spotting, with perhaps a thought to the soon-to-be 26-year-old’s keeper value, let’s take a look at what’s happened since that start in Texas.

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It’s almost impossible to prove empirically, but the anecdotal evidence is fairly strong: teams put bad lineups on the field the day after they clinch the postseason. Especially if they’ve clinched the division. Look at this stinker the Dodgers sent out on Friday, the day after they jumped in Arizona’s pool:

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Back in May, Chris Cwik noticed something very interesting about Andrew Cashner. His hard slider was gone. Whether the pitcher had done it to save his arm, or the pitch had changed because of the rigors, the pitch was gone. And, seemingly, the strikeouts with it.

It looks like the hard slider is back.

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Two weeks left in the season. At least a few of you are staring at the batting average category and wondering if you can do anything about it at all. You have 11/12ths of the season in the rear view weighing you down, it’s not likely. But I thought it might be fun to do a thought/math exercise.

If you could get lucky, and get the league-leader in batting average at every position over the last two weeks of the season, how far north could you push your team’s overall batting average?

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We all want home runs. And so it’s tough to stream for power — if they coulda hit homers, they woulda hit them allready. But we can look for the best situations for power, and look for borderline power guys for people of differently-sized leagues, and maybe we’ll help you ‘luck’ into some extra dingers for your playoff fantasy squad.

The basic philosophy is simple. Power is well-correlated with hot weather, and certain parks are more conducive to home runs. You can add in a fly-ball pitcher if you want to really want to set the scene for Elvis Andrus‘ one home run of the year.

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