Ug. In the FanGraphs home league on ottoneu, the fantasy guy in the room has been embarrassed. It’s a Perm needs to open up its doors and sell, sell, sell. I hang my head in shame. My team of old dudes that take walks didn’t take enough of them and proved to be too old.

Maybe you guys can help me spot my most sellable veterans. So far the sharks are circling for Jonathan Papelbon, mostly. He’s not real old, but I have to think about possible returns too. Help me out here. And if you do, I’ll give you a tip on a good deal.

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Time to update the ranks! As always, this ranking is more about performance the rest of the way than performance in the bank. On the other hand, this is not just a ZiPs RoS ranking. Human opinion introduces human error, but our minds are plastic and there’s at least the chance we can get ahead of the trends. So let’s try. Oh, and arrows denote a change in tier, not a change in rank.

Everyone’s All-Stars
Ryan Braun
Matt Kemp
Matt Holliday
Andrew McCutchen
Carlos Gonzalez
Justin Upton

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Howard Bender will be by at 1:15 but you can leave your questions starting now! Happy Friday.

You’ve heard about Howard Bender’s draft. And you’ll hear about Jason Catania’s draft and Jeff Zimmerman’s draft. Because we all got together and decided to pick six, deep league style. Our CI, MI, OF, C, SP and RP all had to come from a pool of players that was owned in less than 10% of Yahoo leagues. Here are my picks and why. In the order I drafted. I had the third pick of four.

Chris Heisey
A disclaimer about deep leagues and waiver wires: One thing you want are live bodies with some upside. It’s the usual caveat. So Heisey has flaws — he’s now struck out in 18.2% of his at-bats in his first 396 plate appearances, so he might have that flaw. Then again, his minor league rates were closer to 20% most years. He could improve in that category. His BABIP is fine (.308) and though his current ISO (.209) would rank high in his minor-league work, it would still fit. And he’s got a .192 ISO so far in the majors. He stole 27 bases against two caught-stealings in High-A, and had very good success rates all along. So he has good speed. And power. And could improve his strikeout rate. And is battling for playing time with a guy with a .245 career batting average and a strikeout rate over 33%. Yes please.

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Howard Bender will begin this chat at 1:15 EDT!

All of us deep league managers have to do the dirty deed at some point and pick up a player that makes us feel dirty. I still have Juan Pierre on my 20-team roster, for example. Hey, 100 outfielders start in that league, who cares how ugly he is right now. And I don’t mean in the face. He’s handsome enough I guess.

But here are two pitchers that you should avoid in pretty much every league. They just don’t have the underlying skills to be much better than average, and with pitching in abundance these days, there’s someone better out there. Even in NL- and AL-only leagues.

Guillermo Moscoso (1% owned in Yahoo)
He struck out eight Marlins! He’s given up one run in his last 17 2/3 innings! He pitches in a home-run-suppressing park! Yes, but. There really isn’t a single specific skill that you can hang your hat on with Moscoso. He has a putrid 4.6 K/9 which is supported by a bad swinging strike rate (5.4%). He’s had good control in the minor leagues, but his 3.56 BB/9 right now is below-average (hey! not terrible!). He has yet to show his minor league walk rate (2.5 BB/9 in MiLB) in the major leagues (3.90 BB/9). Last, but not least, he’s an extreme fly ball pitcher. His ground-ball rate this year is is 24.6%, and even with his other 14 2/3 major league innings added in, it only ‘jumps’ to 26.5%. Other players have come up and been underwhelming in their first 50-odd major league innings, but there doesn’t seem to be much upside here either. His Triple-A strikeout rate was around eight per nine, and that’s just not enough for a fly ball guy unless he has elite control. Until you see a bunch of zero-walk games, he’s a miss. Even then…

Vance Worley (5% owned)
This one might be more controversial. He’s probably going to end up fairly valuable to his real-life team, filling in as a fifth-sixth starter. The Vanimal has a 2.57 ERA of course, and his 3.44 FIP isn’t terrible. In his case, though, it seems that his 4.14 xFIP has a little more to say about his true talent level. Worley features the same sort of underwhelming stuff as Moscoso. 50 innings into his major league career, he has a 5.5% swinging strike rate. It’s built on a 91 MPH fastball, a decent 85 MPH slider, a rarely-used curveball and (by linear weights values at least) a poor changeup. If the changeup is indeed poor, he will be susceptible to bouts of ineffectiveness versus left-handed hitters. He gets some groundballs (46% career), but that’s only a tick above average (44% most years). Once his home runs per fly ball normalize (4.2% right now), more balls will leave his comfy little home park, and his ERA will balloon. He could be a spot-starter in some deep leagues, but don’t rely on the Vanimal, cause he might bite you.

Let’s check in on two outfield situations that might produce a waiver wire prize.

Roger Bernadina, Washington (16% owned in Yahoo)
My preseason favorite for a starting job has meandered his way back into a role for now, but how long will it last? Rick Ankiel could return and push the Shark out of his territory, as improbable as that sounds considering the former pitcher’s sub-.550 OPS. Still, when he returns in early July he should at least have above-average power and a rocket arm in center field, two things that Bernadina probably won’t manage. With the team making its way to respectability, and the fact that Bernadina is under team control for longer, the most likely plan has the Shark retaining his playing time somewhere on the diamond. Laynce Nix won’t keep his batting average looking this useful, or so says his career .247 batting average. Then again, he has a .322 BABIP and a .316 xBABIP based on his mix of batted balls. And he’s always had good power. And while we’re here, we might as well mention that Bernadina’s .256 career batting average and ZiPs RoS is just as pessimistic about his chances to keep producing at this level. And yet, Bernadina’s .344 BABIP is two points lower than his xBABIP. He’s got wheels and is hitting the ball on the ground (2.13 GB/FB ratio). Both outfielders might continue to show better batting averages than they have in their careers. If only one of Nix, Ankiel and Bernadina were right-handed, there might be a platoon to be had. In the end, though, as exciting as this run of competence from the Nationals has been, the team must look to the future. That means more of Shark roaming the outfield.

Lucas Duda, New York NL (0% owned)
Really, this blurb might as well start with Jason Bay and get it over with. Carlos Beltran will miss the occasional game, but if Duda wants to get enough plate appearances to be even deep-league relevant, he’ll need to steal some time from Bay. Lately, there’s been a few days where Terry Collins has given Bay ‘mental health’ days off, but if the expensive Omar Minaya acquisition returns to even 80% Jason Bay levels, Duda may find himself back in the minors shortly. Unfortunately, counting last year, we now have over 600 plate appearances of Bay sporting an HR/FB rate just around five. Hitting a career low in fly balls is not helping matters this year, either. Other than his expensive contract, there’s little reason to believe that he deserves time on a major league corner outfield right now. Which is not to say that Duda necessarily does either. He hasn’t found his power stroke just like Bay. But he’s only put up 65 plate appearances. Given time, he could hit .250+ with above-average power — his ISO has been .295 the last two years in Triple-A — and that’s more than you can say for Bay right now. Duda’s an okay flier in the deepest of leagues.

This is part of an ongoing pro/con series on RotoGraphs. Today we’ll look at the positive side of Matt Joyce. You can see the opposite side here.

Late last week, colleague Erik Hahmann was game enough to poo-poo a well-liked player on his favorite team — this is not an easy series. But today, we’re lucky. There are plenty of reasons to enjoy the Tampa-born 26-year-old outfielder, even if some regression is on the way.

Matt Joyce now has a .349 BABIP and we know that’s a little elevated in the context of the league as a whole. But, as some astute commenters pointed out, a batter’s unique mix of batted balls has as much to say about his BABIP as the fact that the number trends towards .300 across baseball. Using our trusty xBABIP calculator, we can see that his amount of line drives, fly balls, ground balls, infield and bunt hits should be showing about a .316 BABIP. That’s still strong and could still support a decent batting average.

Then again, batting average is not his game. His best average in a full minor league season was .273 at Double-A in 2009. He hits fly balls and has struck out in almost a quarter of his big-league at-bats. Now that he’s striking out less, his batting average might be decent, but it won’t ever be his best attribute when all is said and done.

No, his best attribute is his power. His overall minor league ISO wasn’t super impressive (.191), but a look at his career arc on the farm shows that he was adding punch as he advanced. The opposite might have been worrisome. His batted ball mix looks sustainable, too, so this is no fluke. He’s hitting more than 40% of his balls in the air as he always has, and more than average are going over the fence (12.8% HR/FB this year, 13.7% career, around nine is average). This year, he’s traded a few fly balls for line drives, but we can’t complain with the results. He’s now over 800 plate appearances into his major league career and has consistently shown us an ISO over .220. That’s regularly top-25 territory in a time when the league-wide ISO has dropped (.138 this year, .145 last year).

Of course, these pieces are all about degrees. If Joyce plays to his ZiPs rest-of-season numbers (.255/.340/.454 with another 10 home runs), both Mr. Hahmann and I could be correct. His batting average will have gone down and his fantasy production will have been a disappointment to many owners. But he also will have shown his trademarked power and have been a great pickup in many leagues. Is there any reason to be more bullish than ZiPs?

The key seems to be his strikeout rate. He’s showing a 21.3% number now, and has a 24.5% career rate. He struck out as much as 27% of the time in full seasons in the minor leagues, and ZiPs must be looking in that direction. Also, he whiffs on 9.5% of pitches, which is above average (8.4%). His current strikeout rate is a little worse than average (20.4%), so maybe he’ll strike out a little more. But does it really seem like a player with 800 PAs will suddenly strike out more than he ever has before? Perhaps we can believe his major league totals to date and pencil him in for a strikeout rate closer to his 24.5% career number.

If he strikes out less than ZiPs projects, and continues to exhibit the same power he’s always shown, he’ll be more likely to hit around .275 with another 12-15 home runs. That would fit with his entire major league resume, and give even skeptical owners a reason to feel bullish about Matt Joyce.