Some final cuts were made today, and a closer “decision” was made. Let’s get right into our first of many 2010 waiver wire articles, shall we?

Jon Rauch, Matt Guerrier, Jose Mijares, Pat Neshek
Well, it looks like Jon Rauch is not the winner of the Minnesota closer sweepstakes. Manager Ron Gardenhire announced that the Twins will go with a committee at the position, and Aaron Gleeman is right to predict some media hand-wringing and hair-pulling concerning the decision. In fact, as he points out, that insanity (or inanity) has already begun. While we applaud the decision from a real baseball viewpoint (a Mijares/Neshek platoon could be deadly in the ninth), it does make things difficult on fantasy owners. Jon Rauch still has the best package from an overall skills standpoint, but everyone on this list has had a good spring save Mijares. If you need some cheap saves however you can get them, take the guy from this group that is still available on your wire. It will be your closer lottery ticket.

Chris Young (SD)
There really isn’t any news to back up this item, but Young has pitched well this spring and went un-drafted in many leagues (319.46 ADP). He leads the Friars with strikeouts (16 in 17.2 innings) and has a nice ERA to boot (3.57 if you care about that sorta thing). The walk rate this spring (10 walks so far) is not terribly exciting, but he the surgery he’s recovering from did not show a torn labrum – just fraying – so there’s a chance he can recover to his former glory. Let’s not forget that he was a decent pitcher before last year’s (hurt) disasterpiece, regularly putting up k-rates over eight against average walk rates. Oh, and then there’s that home park that he plays in, too.

David Hernandez
Right after touting Chris Tillman as a good $1 option just last week, the Orioles go and reassign the youngster so that he can get more work in with his new pitch. It’s a testament to the young pitching talent the O’s have acquired that the guy behind him is also interesting – provided you are in an AL-only league and looking for a spot-starter / end of bench option. Now, Hernandez didn’t strike many people out last year (K/9), and he gave up way too many fly balls (FB%), but that was not the case in the minor leagues. Well, at least on one front. He’s always been a fly-ball pitcher (44.5% career in the minors) but he’s always struck out gobs of players (10.12 K/9 career in minors), too. He’s no slop pitcher, as his 93 MPH fastball is augmented by three decent pitches – so here’s a bet that Hernandez will look a lot better in his second attempt at the bigs.

There’s an Oriole starter that quietly moving up draft boards and garnering dark-horse votes for the 2010 ROY. He’s being lauded for his poise and polish, and fantasy managers are snatching him up despite his formidable AL East opponents. Talk of his dominating college and minor league performances spreads from water cooler to water cooler and the hype is growing.

That pitcher is not Chris Tillman. Still valued at $0 in AL-only leagues on LastPlayerPicked.com, Tillman is languishing on draft boards and isn’t inspiring the same excitement currently, despite possibly more upside. Is there an open secret sitting in the shadows behind Brian Matusz? Maybe it’s the whole left-handed thing.

It seems a fait accompli that Tillman will rise to the top of this rotation… eventually. The numbers from the minor leagues, though, don’t necessarily bear out all that optimism. For every positive, there’s seemingly a negative that brings an asterisk.

Take his strikeout rate – Tillman had a nice, steady strikeout rate all the way through the minors as he rode his 92+ MPH fastball and big breaking curveball to a 9.8 K/9 career minor league rate that never once dipped below a strikeout per inning. That’s beautiful. Less exciting is his career minor league 3.89 BB/9 that was actually over four walks per nine in the majority of his stops along the way. Much of the optimism about Tillman comes from his stellar work in AAA last year, when he put up an outlier walk rate (2.4 BB/9) that he had never once shown before. In his short time in the majors last year, the walk rate looked okay (3.3 BB/9), but the strikeout rate wasn’t there. Though he’s still young (21) and did most of his minor league work before he could drink, Tillman needs to repeat his 2009 control to really impress the general public, it seems.

Then there’s the pitching mix. The scouts like his fastball and his curveball, but it was his changeup that was the only pitch that scored positively in linear weights last year. He also gave up too many fly balls on mid-to-high-heat as Heat Mapper Dave Allen showed so beautifully late last year. That problem seems commensurate with his minor league career, where he had about an unimpressive one-to-one groundball-to-flyball ratio.

Can a fly-ball pitcher succeed in Baltimore, or can Tillman at least push his ratio back to his minor league level? No matter what, the home run rate should fall. His 2.08 HR/9 rate came on the heels of a 15.2 HR/FB percentage that shouldn’t continue.

There’s also talk of Tillman developing a cutter, which, as Daniel Moroz of Camden Crazies points out, might help him locate his pitches in a new part of the zone in between his high heat and his low curveball. Although the cutter is en vogue, and it doesn’t work for everyone, Tillman might really benefit from augmenting his pitching mix. Anything to keep him from grooving fastballs at the belt would, of course, help.

Taken as a whole, there’s more to like than dislike in the Tillman package. If you squint just right, you could see this young pitcher find his old dominant strikeout rate, push the groundball-to-flyball ratio back to his normal (if mediocre) levels, exhibit his new-found control once again, and drastically improve his results. That’s all without the intrigue of the new pitch added in. In an AL-only league, that’s certainly worth a dollar.

There have been requests for some deeper sleepers from managers in NL- and AL-only leagues, and so these dudes will abide. Over the next couple of weeks, Brian Joura and I will cover a few sleeper starters that you might be able to snag for a dollar in your NL- or AL-only draft. Joura kicked off this mini-series with a look at Jeff Francis this morning.

It seems that Jonathon Niese is currently in a battle with fellow lefty Hisanori Takahashi for the fifth starter position on the New York Metropolitans. If the Mets use the spring training stats to decide the battle, Niese will lose. Then he’ll end up in the minor leagues, starting every fifth day, and waiting for the Mets’ brass to finally tire of Mike Pelfrey or Oliver Perez once and for all. Because his long-term upside is superior, we’ll take a look at Niese here. Takahashi is 34, and though he features four legitimate pitches, he wasn’t a heavy strikeout ace in Japan and didn’t show a ton of durability either. He can hit the strike zone, but you wonder what will happen once the league sees him a couple of times.

Niese is in a different situation than the mid-career crafty veteran out of Japan. He is 23, was just ranked the Mets #5 prospect by maven Marc Hulet, and owns at least one strong major league pitch – his curveball. Or at least, that’s what the scouting reports say. As Hulet pointed out in his blurb on the young southpaw, his most effective pitch last year was actually his cutter (+1.3 runs). But now that’s two major league pitches, and it looks like he’s using them more and more each year and using his scratch-level 90-MPH fastball (-0.8 runs last year). It could be a nice mix even without an overpowering fastball.

There seems to be some institutional hesitancy when it comes to Niese, though. Perhaps his merely above-average strikeout rates in the minor leagues (7.83 K/9 career in the minors) didn’t inspire them. After putting together 22 starts in AA at age 22 (2008) with a nice strikeout rate (8.11), a decent walk rate (3.18), and a good groundball rate (53.1%), the Mets did call him up for two major league starts. The first major league player he pitched to (Rickie Weeks) took him deep, and it may have looked like he had a poor debut, but he did okay for a young guy and even racked up 11 strikeouts in his 14-inning cup of coffee.

Maybe it’s the constant speed of the New York news cycle, but when the team started Niese in AAA last year, it seemed to be a statement about the org’s belief in him. As could be expected, his strikeout rate fell a little (7.26 K/9), but everything else held steady and he earned his way back to the majors as an injury replacement for Oliver Perez first and John Maine second. Though the sample size wasn’t large, and the strikeout rates weren’t impressive (6.31 K/9), Niese seemed to settle down and pitched to a 3.25 FIP by limiting walks and improving his ground ball rate. His home run rate also fell precipitously (1.29 HR/9 in 2008, .35 in 2009), which was more in line with his career numbers in the minor leagues (0.53 HR/9 career in the minor leagues).

In any case, given the underwhelming nature of the starters in the rotation ahead of him, and their various injury histories, it certainly seems that the Mets will have no choice but to give Niese more starts this year. If Niese continues his trajectory by inducing more ground balls and limiting the walks, it seems that he would be a decent NL $1 option in 2010.

Let’s take a look at our third group of fifteen starters, the SP3 tier. Predictably, by the time you are looking at your third or fourth fantasy pitcher, the candidates begin to thin out and the valuations of the players vary wildly. Consider that this tier goes all the way from Matt Garza (119.67 ADP) down to Wade Davis (306.98). One is a pitcher on the rise with plenty of reasons to for a fantasy manager to get excited, and the other is a youngster just battling for a spot on the roster. Let’s focus on two pitchers that stretch the range and might provide good return on your investment.

Scott Baker (148.34 ADP) is currently a relatively cheap pitcher, going in about the twelfth round of a twelve-team mixed league. You can denigrate his lack of strikeouts (6.88 K/9 career), but there are plenty of other things to like about this young man. Take his walk rate (2.05 BB/9 career), for example. It’s been virtually identical over the past two years, even (2.19 in 2008, 2.16 in 2009), so he’s got that going for him. If you’re looking for flaws, he’s certainly a fly ball pitcher (33.7% GB, 45.4% FB career) and he’s had troubles with the home run (see last year’s 1.26 HR/9) that have inflated his ERA from time to time. Those that follow the Twins might have heard this record before (see: Kevin Slowey).

It’s a little worrisome that he’s moving to a new park, but at least one person thinks will play as a pitcher’s park (AL Petco!). Either way, if the park plays at all similarly to the Mall of America Field, which played between a 1.11 and .896 park factor for home runs over the past three years, he should actually be in for some regression in the home run department. That regression could even get him back to his excellent 2008 levels. (A note: all but nine parks played within that range last year, so it’s likely that Target Field will, too. Also, climate and altitude, not explicitly covered in the above study, are a big part of how a park plays. Those should be similar in the new park.) He still limits walks, he still has a good fastball/slider combo, and he’s still getting batters to reach on 30+% of his pitches outside the zone. The possibility of a high-threes ERA and low 1.2s WHIP is worth a 12th round pick.

It’s not often that a pitcher improves his underlying statistics and loses ground in his more visible numbers, but Gavin Floyd (185.06) pulled off that feat from 2008 to 2009. Here is the full list of component statistics that Floyd improved: strikeout rate, walk rate, home runs per nine, ground ball rate, fly ball rate, O-Swing rate, and contact rate. You got that? And yet somehow, his ERA went up to 4.06 from 3.84 – mostly because his BABIP normalized (from .268 in 2008 to .292 last year). Since his ‘luck’ stats were about where they should have been last year, most of the projection systems say that Floyd will repeat his year, perhaps with a little ERA inflation due to the difference between last year’s nice home run rate (.98 HR/9) and his career number in that category (1.37).

Here’s one thing, though: Floyd has not yet figured out the optimal mix of his pitches. His fastball is not a great pitch (-46.3 runs for his career), and so he’s using it less (47.8% last year, down from 66.7% in 2006). For the last three years, the pitch has begun to find a niche around the scratch level (-4.9 runs last year), and his other pitches have zoomed forward in productivity as he has relied on them. His slider (+7.5 runs) and curveball (+14.1 runs) both hit career highs last year. Even though Floyd threw his fastball ninth-least in the majors last year, he could throw it less (!) since he once threw his curveball regularly over 20% of the time before settling in around 18%. The point isn’t to say that Floyd will throw the fastball less and the curveball more and succeed – the point is that he’s a pitcher available in the fifteenth round that has a floor around the low fours in ERA, should put up a WHIP lower than 1.3, and is not finished figuring out the optimal mix of his pitches. There’s value there, no?

Imagine stumbling on this headline without prior knowledge of fantasy baseball. It would take quite a bit of explaining to understand that this piece will be about the starting pitchers from this list that have the best value vis-a-vis their draft position. Good thing most of you are ahead of the curve on that one.

The easiest way to find value in a tier is to just go ahead and pick the guy with the lowest ADP in the tier, and lo and behold, Dan Haren (40.24 ADP) is that guy for me in the first mini-tier. At first, there seems to be no negative in taking Haren in the early fourth round given his stature among the elite SP1s. For three straight years, he’s had an ERA below 3.33, a WHIP below 1.21, a walk rate below 1.8 per nine, and a strikeout rate over 8 per nine. Thank you, thank you, thank you and thank you. I know the cutoffs are a little random, but guess how many other starting pitchers in baseball have managed that sort of sustained excellence over the past three years. Yeah. None.

Let me stop you yeahbutters right now. I know what you’re saying. In 651 Pre-All-Star innings, Haren has a 3.08 ERA, 1.06 WHIP and a 7.45 K/9. In 575 Post-All-Star innings, he has 4.21 ERA, 1.32 WHIP and a 7.76 K/9. Those innings seem significant. I understand the yeahbutting. Here’s my rubber and your glue: Haren’s xFIP by month, career: 3.82, 3.72, 3.73, 3.54, 3.37, 3.64. I don’t see a problem here. Maybe give him a tick forward in roto leagues and a tick backward in H2H leagues where he may or may not disappear for your playoffs. But otherwise, if you want a pitcher in the first four rounds, Haren is your value.

The lowest ADP of the next tier predictably belongs to Chris Carpenter (72.73 ADP) and his elbow and shoulder held together by twine and adhesive. You’re getting a discount because of all that risk. But why should you get a discount for picking Jon Lester (58.95 ADP)? The cancer scare was a long time ago. His career strikeout rate (7.85 K/9) belies his true talent level, as a surge (9.96 K/9 last year) brought him to the top of the leaderboard in that category. Admittedly, there was some question about his walk rate (3.8 BB/9,1.31 WHIP in the minor leagues), but now he’s kept it under three for two straight years (2.82 and 2.83) and seems to have answered the question. He even had a poor BABIP last year (.323), so if he puts that elite strikeout rate together with better luck on the batted ball and the same nice walk rate – watchout hardware.

The last tier features a pitcher that is the subject of more than a few mancrushes. David G declared him an ace last year, Ray Flowers at Fanball.com likes him as an early second pitcher, John Halpin at Fox Sports thinks a gaudy win total is coming, Paul Bourdett claims to have liked him before he blew up, and you can check my Second Opinion graph for proof that I like the beanpole Rockie ace. Here’s a taste: Ubaldo Jimenez (100.58 ADP) has had better than 50% ground balls for two years in a row, and in the last two years he has improved his strikeout and walk rates each time. His fastball, slider and change all gave the Rox better than 9.6 runs in weighted value, and batters have an especially tough time with his changeup (23.2% whiff rate) and slider (19% whiff rate). He’s 26, burns worms, has nasty stuff that gets whiffs and comes cheaply. Does it get any better?

The news came down the pipe this morning that Joe Nathan has a torn Ulnar Collateral Ligament and is, in all likelihood, headed for Tommy John surgery. No pitchers in recent memory have rehabbed through a torn UCL. A moment of silence for Nathan’s 2010 season, and for all of the keeper league owners that were happy with their elite closer.

Now let’s have some fun with rampant closer speculation. The front-runner has to be Jon Rauch because of his mythical ‘experience in the role.’ Yes, because he closed for 40 innings in the National League, he’ll probably be the front runner to assume the mantle in Minnesota. Then again, one has to be concerned with his strikeout rate, which peaked in 2006 (8.47), recovered in 2008 (8.29) and dropped off a table last year in Arizona (6.30 overall). In general, he offers some nice strikeout ability (though not plus for a closer) and an above-average walk rate (2.89 career, 3.46 ’09 ML average).

On the other hand, there’s been some change in his mix as he’s aged, and it doesn’t seem to be good news. He’s using his fastball less every year (down to 52.8% from 67.9% in 2006) and replacing it with his curveball (up from 3.3% to 15.5% last year). The problem? His fastball has been worth 17.1 runs by linear weights over his career, His curveball? -1.3. Yeah, where is that fastball going?

Could the Twins instead turn to a man with a funky delivery that has his own blog and a penchant for juicing? What about Pat Neshek? He owns a sparkling 10.56 K/9 for his career, a decent 2.76 BB/9, and despite slight gopherball problems (1.12 HR/9 career), has a sparkling WHIP (0.96). He’s coming off TJ surgery of his own, but has pitched live ball in Spring Training (2 innings, 2 Ks and 1 hit if you must know). There is a whiff of Brad Ziegler about him, but here are his splits against lefties, from our very own splits pages: 8.59 K/9, 3.68 BB/9, 1.16 WHIP (good), 55.9% FB, 12.1% HR/FB, 1.64 HR/9, 4.70 xFIP (bad). This is all against 185 total lefty batters faced… this sample is not big enough to say definitively that he cannot handle lefties. This book is not closed. And since it is such a fun read, there’s at least one fantasy analyst that is banging the drum for Neshek to take over the closer’s role for the year.

What about Matt Guerrier? What about him? With a below-average 6.01 career K/9, and no corresponding excellent ground ball rate (45.5% career) he’s squarely third on this list. His .222 BABIP last year will surely regress and the Twins will once again have the okay guy they’ve always had. No closer here, despite last year’s seemingly excellent numbers.

One last note – the possibility that the closer comes from outside the organization is reasonably high. The Cubs inquired with the Jays about Jason Frasor, and because that team is rebuilding, it seems that maybe also Scott Downs might be available. Anthony Castrovince, the Cleveland Indians reporter for MLB.com, speculated on Twitter about Kerry Wood being moved to the Twinkies. These options may all be more palatable to a Twins team that wants to compete in their new stadium. Hey, they all have ‘experience in the role.’

When we took a look at the Royal shortstop situation on Thursday, it became obvious that the picture would not be complete without looking at the rest of the middle infield. And, as is our wont when it comes to position battles, we’ll have to consider defense – even if it doesn’t show up in our fantasy box scores.

There’s a lot of love for the incumbent at this position, and for good reason. Alberto Callaspo was, by wOBA, the second-best hitter on the Royals last year. His approach at he plate features gobs of contact (94.5% zone-contact last year, and 87.8% was the league average) and an average walk rate (8.2% last year, 8.9% ML average). Before last year, though, he didn’t show much power. Then he more than doubled his career ISO (.156 last year, previous career high was .071) and shot into fantasy relevance. The projections show some concern about that spike and all of them have him regressing in the power department in 2010. His minor league ISO (.119) would be an item in favor of that approach.

But if Callaspo can make all that contact with average power (.155 ISO is the league average), and play good defense at second base, he should win the battle with Chris Getz, right? Well, defense is an interesting question here. UZR does not love Callaspo, giving him a -2.9 UZR/150 in 209 games while Total Zone had him as pretty much a scratch defender at the position in the minor leagues. The fans? The fans, they don’t love him. The Fans Scouting Report has Callaspo as the fourth-worst fielder on the Royals, just below Jose Guillen. Ouch.

There’s a lack of consensus on the appraisal of the defense in the case of Getz as well. The Fans Scouting Report has him as significantly better in terms of range, speed and first step, giving him an average ranking of 3.3 to Callaspo’s 2.3. UZR doesn’t like him as much, but his -6 UZR/150 has only come in 101 games, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. Total Zone rates him as solid but not spectacular. In any case, the overall picture is one of player that has the chance to be better than Callaspo on defense.

If the Royals agree with assessment and need D, they will get Getz’ glove in there. What will his bat provide? So far it looks like below-average patience (7.1% walk rate), below-average power (.084 ISO), and good speed (7.3 speed score, 5.0 is average). There’s hope for a little more, though. Getz walked more in the minors (10.2%) and players usually improve in that category as they age. He had a sub-.100 minor league ISO, though, so it will only be patience and speed from Getz if he wins the job.

This is a tougher battle to handicap than the shortstop situation. The defensive numbers are not as clear, and the bats in question are somewhat similar. Because Callaspo’s power last year hasn’t been duplicated on the major league level, and because the team decided to acquire another second baseman in a trade, you have to consider that he is on thin ice. Getz does have an option left, and it may behoove the organization to demote him to AAA while they pump up Callaspo’s value and perhaps trade him mid-season. If Callaspo’s already shaky defense gets worse as he ages, he will only become less valuable in the coming years. His bat gives him the current leg up, and Callaspo should get regular at-bats somewhere on the field no matter how this battle shakes down, but neither one of these guys gets an unequivocal thumbs up because of the risk, and they only make late-round fliers in deep leagues at best.

There is no greater intersection of fantasy and ‘real’ baseball analysis than the Spring Position Battle. How better to reap the rewards of good number-crunching than the correct prediction of the winner of the lion’s share of playing time at a given position? It’s one of fantasy baseball’s best moments.

And there’s no easier place to look for this feeling than the worst teams in baseball. The worse the team, the younger the team, the more likely they’ll allow an inexperienced young man to steer the helm at a given position. The Pirates, for example, currently have 30(!) players with three years or fewer experience on their 40-man roster.

Follow this string of thought to the end, and you’ll inevitably end up looking at the team being run by the worst GM in baseball (if Tim Marchman is to be believed). There might be some debate about whether or not it’s more important to feature your best players up the middle, but it’s got to be a given that it’s not a good sign to go into camp not knowing who is going to make up your keystone combo. (The name of that combo should really be a clue.)

So we come to the Royals. At the incumbent starting shortstop position stands Yuniesky Betancourt. By WAR, he was the worst position player that qualified for the batting title last year, costing the Royals $2.2 million on top of his $3.375 million salary. He accomplished this (little) feat by walking only 4.1% of the time while also displaying below-average speed (3.9 speed score, 5.0 average) and power (.106 ISO, .155 MLB average). The worst part for such a ‘key’ defensive position? He had a -23.9 UZR/150 last year, which would be less worrisome if he didn’t also feature a negative rating for his career. I’m struggling to find something good to say, but apparently his demeanor can be even worse than his performance.

Let’s just say he doesn’t offer too much of an obstacle, should, say, Mike Aviles step to the fore. Aviles was once a too-old for his leagues prospect that tore his way through to the major leagues with good contact rates and not much else. He was once over-rated, yes, but now seems under-rated. His injury hurt his good contact rates (90.7% in the zone down to 85.6% last year) and sapped his average power (.155 ISO down to .067 last year). As exhibits in his favor, I submit his minor league ISO (.167) as well as minor league walk and strikeout rates that were virtually identical to his rookie year numbers. Aviles may not have been as good as he looked his rookie year, but he wasn’t as bad as he was last year.

In defense of his defense, there’s no real evidence that it’s terrible, despite the fact that he’s played all over the diamond and his general manager had the (misguided) idea that he needed to acquire another shortstop. His UZR/150 was great in his rookie year (+31.6 UZR/150) and bad last year (-12.7 UZR/150), but Total Zone had him as a positive defender at shortstop in the minors. The Fan Scouting Report pegged him as better than Betancourt even in his poor ’09. Aviles scored better than his competitor/teammate in every category… but arm strength. And now he’s coming off of Tommy John surgery. On the other hand, we must consider the case of Cesar Izturis, who had TJ surgery in 2005 and last year the fans say he sported an arm that was a little better than Stephen Drew‘s and a little worse than Jason Bartlett’s. Izturis had surgery on 9/16/2005 and returned in mid-June 2006. Aviles had his surgery 9/07/2009.

The normal caveats apply. This is is the Royals, we have no idea what’s going on at second base with Alberto Callaspo and Chris Getz (a post for another time), and every recovering arm is different, but in the interest of being unequivocal: By mid-June Mike Aviles should be starting at shortstop for the Royals.

Looking at our evaluation of the tiers at the first base position, two things come to mind pretty quickly. If the final mixed-league tier includes players as interesting as Billy Butler (86.14 ADP) and Derrek Lee (85.56), you know the position is deep. The second thing you might notice is that once you factor in average draft position, there aren’t many values in this position. Four first basemen go in the first round (Albert Pujols (1.11), Mark Teixeira (7.31), Prince Fielder (8.13) and Miguel Cabrera (10.20)), and it’s hard to call a first-rounder a ‘value.’

But go down into the meaty portion of the position – the middle tier – and you may uncover a nice sleeper. Lance Berkman (59.89) has to be considered one of the more valuable players available in the fourth and fifth rounds. I know he’s coming off a bad year, but let’s play around with his stats in a less-than-scientific way, why don’t we? Look at Berkman’s batting average and BABIP since 2002. It’s sort of remarkable:

Don’t know about you, but by the theory of Alternating BABIPs in Berkman’s Career, I think it’s a stone-cold-lead-pipe lock that Berkman puts up a BABIP well over .300 and therefore a batting average over .300 (talk about some serious P-value on that ‘research’). Also, Berkman missed time and if you pro-rate out his home run total, you get the Steady Eddie 30 home runs that you can usually expect of the Astros’ first-sacker. I’d rather have Berkman in the late fourth or early fifth than Justin Morneau (38.78) in the late third or early fourth, for example. They are very similar first basemen.

In the all-power no-batting average mini-tier, there’s a surprising result. it looks like Carlos Pena (76.35) is the new Adam Dunn (55.95). It used to be that the bad batting average pulled Dunn down too far, making him under-rated and a value pick. Now that he’s a fifth-rounder, though, that might not be the case any longer. Why not just wait and get the other Dunn two rounds later? (That which we call a Dunn by any other name would swing as big.) Maybe Penas’ peaks and valleys in batting average and ISO power have been more extreme than Dunn, but that can cut both ways. Pena could easily outperform Dunn this coming year, for example.

The late-round values litter the fantasy landscape like brown crusty snow days after a blizzard (I’m not bitter, I promise). Adam LaRoche (201.68) represents the safest option, but he probably also tastes like un-marinated tofu. If .275 and 25 home runs is all you need out of your first baseman, go ahead and pick him late. But if you want tofu, why not take Paul Konerko (211.73) the next round? Sure, his ISO and walk rates are trending downwards, but his contact rates are steady, and even in a reduced form he mostly features better power than Laroche. If you want a little upside, Chris Davis (159.89) has power (.230 career ISO), that much we know. If he can pull that strikeout rate back down to the high twenties (he had a 24% k-rate in the minors), and push that walk rate up (8% in the minors), maybe he’ll make Bill James proud. (And I bet he tastes like a big old Texas T-Bone.)

Over the offseason we’ll take a look at each position on the diamond and see how the past season affected the positional rankings and where there might be some potential bounceback value picks going into next year’s drafts. (See shortstops, catchers, second basemen, first basemen, third basemen, right fielders, left fielders and center fielders.)

The series perseveres! Here are the first two pitching tiers, otherwise known as SP1 and SP2. Remember that the arrow represents how they got here (last year’s movement) and not necessarily their long-term trend.

SP3 is where the wheat separates from the chaff, and everybody has to take a risk. The first sub-tier has some pitchers that look like first or second tier starting pitchers (if you squint just right). There’s really a lot to like about Matt Garza since his strikeout rate and contact percentages got dramatically better last year. His improvement has pushed him ahead of James Shields, who is still relying on that nice changeup and pinpoint control, and just needs that blip in the home run rate to correct. Scott Baker comes ready-made with a great WHIP and could finally put a nice ERA with it if the home run rate comes back down. Rich Harden moved up in the ranks by showing a (relatively) healthy year, as did Tim Hudson with his nice (though slightly punch-less) return. John Danks is still only 24 years old, and though there are warts, he’s shown the ability to improve before. He could do it again.

Unfortunately, that’s just about where the top-shelfers end. What remains are pitchers that have been so over-rated that they’ve once again become under-rated, and some interesting young pitchers that have all the risk inherent with young starters. Ted Lilly used to be under-rated, then he had a great year and was over-rated, and then he had some surgery and became under-rated again (got that?). If he falls to this level, he’s got to be a value again. Kevin Slowey is like Lilly-redux, really, with his okay strikeout rates, nice WHIPs, and now his own comeback from surgery. Gavin Floyd did some things right and some things wrong, and has some nice upside but plays in a tough park to sustain that home run rate from last year. Jered Weaver just keeps on outperforming his xFIPs by giving up tons of flyballs without the corresponding home runs (around an 8% HR/FB career), but good luck predicting if he’s going to have a sub-4 ERA or not. Max Scherzer is young, wild, interesting and moving to the tougher league. I personally have an (unhealthy) man-crush on Wade Davis, but as always I remind myself that there’s inevitably a period of correction with every young pitcher, and I pledge to (try to) wait as long as I can before I pick him.

The last sub-tier (the “Hold Your Nose” tier) features a couple of veterans that once were considered top-shelfers but have shown their warts. A.J. Burnett and Carlos Zambrano have both been big-strikeout pitchers in the past, and both have shown that their wildness and arm issues will keep them from being elite for the forseeable future. Call Zambrano Little Z (and then run like heck), or perhaps even the “NL version of AJ.” Ryan Dempster rode the Ted Lilly roller coaster but seems like a steady investment for last year’s return. J.A. Happ got lucky last year (and finds himself in a tough park for the upcoming season). He deserves to drop, no doubt about it. But this tier also serves as a reminder – you can’t have a blindspot because you hate (or love) a player. At some point, any player can become a value once again.