The outfield is always a bear. So many dang players. We’ve got 114 ranked, and another 16 mentioned, which should get you all the way through your five-outfield twenty-team league and then one or two.

But a word first about our rankers and our rankings. One of the reasons we’re using four rankers is, as I said, to do a mini crowd-source. (I do like the idea of opening it up to our fans, so we’ll see about that as a long-term plan, by the way.) Something was made of a certain ranking of Chase Headley in the third basemen — but that ranking dragged the Padres’ hot corner man up one spot in the consensus. Seems like folly to make such a big deal about one spot, and, in a way, it represents the fact that some drafters out there will believe in Chase Headley too. Heck, our own xHR/FB analysis believes in Chase Headley.

But that’s enough about third basemen. Here, no doubt some of you will be upset about a certain ranking of Giancarlo Stanton. Well guess what. That ranking might have cost the powerful Stanton two spots in the rankings at most. And! Stanton doesn’t steal bases, has a high strikeout rate that could lead to a bad batting average, and is coming off a year in which he saw knee surgery. You could tell the story of Justin Upton, who has power, speed, and the ability to hit .300 — is it crazy to put him ahead of a possible one-category guy on a bad team?

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It’s time to finish up the infield. Surprisingly perhaps only to me, third base ended up being the deepest position more years than it wasn’t in my FanGraphs+ auction strategy analysis.

There’s probably more agreement at the top of this position than most, at least more than the shortstops. Once you get past the top three or four, the agreement stops, but then you also have a scrum that looks like it could be one single tier, all the way down past twelve. This could be a position you wait on if you miss the top guys in a mixed league. But don’t wait too long in deep league. It gets dicey again in the late twenties.

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You know what? I don’t think I have to link back to the positions we’ve done before. Because David Appelman was kind of enough to revamp the RotoGraphs landing page, and now you can easily access all your draft tools — including our consensus ranks, and later our tiered positional ranks — just by scrolling your eyeballs to the right an inch-plus. Scroll those eyeballs! Enjoy one-touch draft tools! Applaud the dark overlord!

Okay, back to shortstops. Given the health and bust/regress concerns of the other shortstops in the top five, maybe it’s not surprising that we have a new number one shortstop this season. Starlin Castro won’t wow you in the speed or power stats, but he is on the right side of his peak, and he has been slowly building his skillset, so it seems that his risk of regression is low, and he should be healthy, too. It’s in interesting that we agreed by not agreeing — only one analyst had Castro first, and yet it seems fine that he is first. It’s not like we can just wipe away those lost Jose Reyes seasons.

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We know y’all are starting to draft, so we’re going to pump the rankings out two at a time. We even started over the weekend, you might have noticed. The first baseman were first, the catchers were second, and now we get to the second basemen.

I’m partial to these guys — as a bad glove, no-bat youngster, I usually ended up at second base when I played. And it’s one of those positions that teams seem to find. There, among the failed shortstops and slightly athletic former tweener third basemen, they find a guy that works for them. And no, Matt Carpenter is not ranked here yet, (I might put him around 22nd), because you can’t play a guy in a position where he’s not eligible.

No matter where you find your second baseman, though, you need to find one. On to the ranks.

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Even though I personally find two-catcher leagues torture, I did have to pony up and get two guys in AL-LABR this weekend, so we thought we’d go pretty deep to help you out.

If you’re in a mixed league, with one catcher, it looks like you might as well wait until the end of your draft and spend less than your competitors. There’s a decent group at the top. A Mike Napoli / Brian McCann pairing would have plenty of upside and cost a lot less than Buster Posey.

But get down into the dregs of this position, and we know how bad it can get.

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Thing might look a little different this year. We’ve got tools upon tools for your drafts this year, and they should be easier to get to now. But we will still do consensus rankings, and we’ll still do tiered rankings. Because it’s all helpful in different ways.

But it’s time for the consensus ranks first.

It’s also worth putting down on ‘paper’ why we do the consensus ranks the way we do them. We have Jeff Zimmerman, Mike Podhorzer and Zach Sanders submitting their individual ranks alongside mine for a couple of reasons. The first is that four is the minimum ‘n’ we can give you: more of a sample should give you a better ranking. It’s like a mini crowd-source. And the second reason is really the same, in an alternate package: each of us uses projections to a different extent, and each of us uses intuition and research to a different extent. And yes, we have the Steamer projection numbers listed here, but no, none of the rankings is solely based on those projections. In any case, you’ll get five numbers to look at, and you can choose which one you like.

To the first basemen!

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It’s the prince and the pauper of infields on the north side in Chicago. You have a bonafide early-round young star shortstop, and a super sleeper first baseman, and then… the Cubs might not produce a third baseman or a second baseman worth rostering in any league.

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I finished last in 2012 in the FanGraphs Experts League on the ottoneu platform. There’s a lot of shame in that for me — I played hard all the way to the end and rarely have teams that finish at the bottom of the table, this team was fourth in the inaugural season, and finishing last changed the meaning of the team name in a bad way (Eno’s Slaughter). I may argue with Dave Cameron that more major league teams should do full rebuilds, but when it comes to my own dynasty teams, I usually try to remain competitive every year. Especially if there are prizes at stake. Cause, hey, you never know.

The process I went through with this team might represent, for me, a new understanding of how best to treat a bad team. I think I’d recommend it for real-life teams, even. While I maintain that the Mets should have traded Jose Reyes, maybe there’s room for them to sign David Wright in order to keep building for the future. Prospects aren’t the only way out of the basement, in other words.

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Lose Josh Hamilton from your outfield and the narrative will always be about overcoming obstacles. The real story here might just be how good the pieces around Hamilton always were, and how the Rangers’ outfield will continue to provide under-rated players that can fit on almost any fantasy team.

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We all know where the Angels play — no need to distinguish them from all the other Angels teams in baseball — and it’s likely that we know their front five, too. At least on day one. Because if there’s any team that’s likely to need their six, seventh, and even eighth starters, it’s the Angels.

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