It’s time to update the rankings!

Hopefully these rankings will allow you to find your own buy-low and sell-high opportunities. The disagreements between our different rankers should help. Jeff Zimmerman’s rankings are largely built upon a mix of Steamer and ZiPs, Zach Sanders has his own secret sauce, and Mike Podhorzer and I are a little more intuitive, even while we both use the projections as a basis. Hopefully we are representative of the different types of fantasy managers out there.

The first basemen shuffled the cards around a bit, but the elite are still the elite… except for one Anthony Rizzo, who is zooming up the ranks. To the point where we are wondering if he’s the number one fantasy first baseman going forward. Well, someone knew it was coming, and yet that same someone wouldn’t yet make Rizzo the number one guy. There are still the matter of his strikeouts and his final batting average.

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It looks like Roy Halladay is done — at least for a while, as he is expected to hit the disabled list with a shoulder problem — but the real question is if he is Done. He’s about to turn 36 and he’s aching in the worst body part for a pitcher. Just how bad is this news?

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At the beginning of last year, we took some heat for leaving Adrian Gonzalez near the top of the first base rankings. Our reasoning, if I can speak for the consensus ranking crew, was that power takes the longest to stabilize and we didn’t know for sure whether or not the power was going to come back. The player himself said his shoulder didn’t hurt any more. As the season progressed, the truth became more obvious, and he dropped in the rankings.

Going into this season, we had three consecutive half-seasons of evidence that his power was gone. We dropped him in the rankings, and I even made a bet that the other former Padre first baseman — Anthony Rizzo — would outperform him this year. Now the player himself has admitted what we’ve known for a while and suspected for even longer.

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Dude is 31 years old. Nate McLouth probably isn’t a new player. But there are reasons to believe in him, to believe in the changes he’s made.

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Perhaps I should have written this piece last week. Because last week, Justin Masterson had a sub-two ERA and people were talking about him and his new approach against lefties. Then again, this week he still has a 2.25 ERA and he’s ostensibly the same person. That’s the whole problem with believing in him, though — he’s still the same person.

In order to believe in change in an established pitcher, I want to see something change. Velocity. Pitching mix. Pitch usage. The quality of a pitch. First-pitch strikes.

I see none of these changes in Masterson, and least not at a level that would make me interested in a mixed league.

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Any long term discussion about Anthony Rendon is full of caveats:

Yes, but He can’t stay healthy — he hasn’t put up more than 160 plate appearances at any level or in any calendar year. Yes, but he’s probably a third baseman and the incumbent is pretty good — no matter how bad Ryan Zimmerman’s throws look, there’s still a first baseman signed to a fairly decent contract staring at Zimmerman accross the diamond. Yes, but we don’t know how good the power will actually be — power takes the longest to stabilize, and Rendon has not yet put up a one-year, one-level sample that’s big enough to really be predictive.

Yeah those caveats are all fine and good, but Anthony Rendon is healthy and in the big leagues. Right now.

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After going one for five with a home run Sunday against his old team, Nate Schierholtz has his seasonal line up to .343/.410/.629. That qualifies as ‘on fire,’ especially for a dude with a .272/.321/.413 career line going into the day. Of course his .400 batting average on balls in play makes much of what he’s doing unsustainable, but maybe there *are* sustainable parts to his start?

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The Rockies came to town, and with them they brought their enigmatic center fielder. Dexter Fowler is dripping with tools, but has averaged about seven homers and 16 steals per season to go along with his .272 career batting average to date. Ostensibly, I was asking Fowler about baseball. But I couldn’t help it. I ended up asking him about fantasy baseball, and his prospects of breaking out this year.

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A week into the season is a good time to check in on the states of platoons around the league. A strict platoon makes for easy lineup setting and under-rated value in deep leagues with deep benches, but for the mixed leaguers among us, we’re probably looking for a player to transcend their platoon splits and play every day. With that in mind, let’s check in on some situations that might be in flux.

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There’s a lot of Jose Fernandez talk going around. And he looks to be a legit young starting pitcher — his gas sat above 95 mph, his slurve/slider thing got plenty of whiffs, and he lived in the zone. But curves and sliders have platoon splits — to different extents — and it’s always good for a pitcher to have at third pitch when he’s encountering the lineup for a third time.

This is Jose Fernandez‘ third pitch.

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