A couple months ago, Landon Jones wrote this column about Anthony Rizzo’s impressive adjustments in 2014. In that piece, Landon focused on Rizzo’s improvement against fastballs, as well as his altered approach. Obviously, not much has changed since Landon wrote that article, so I’m not going to bother retreading any territory he already covered (especially since I agree with his analysis).

However, there is one area of Rizzo’s game that I feel we could certainly talk a bit more about, and that’s his newfound ability to hit southpaws. This has always been my big reservation with Rizzo, stretching back to his days as a prospect, and it wasn’t so much a bat-speed issue for me, as it was concern regarding his swing plane.

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I’ll freely admit that this column is highly speculative in nature, and based on plenty of assumptions. However, that’s kind of what this time of year is for as a fantasy writer. It’s the time of year when you start going through your “What ifs” for the next season, and I think I have a pretty intriguing “What if” scenario for John Jaso.

For the second consecutive year, Jaso had his season cut short due to continued concussion symptoms. For very good reason, this has led to some speculation regarding Jaso’s future behind the plate, or possible lack thereof. The A’s already took steps in 2014 to get his bat in the lineup at designated hitter, but even with his 32 starts at DH, the 47 starts he made behind the dish proved to be too many, and Jaso’s 2014 season ended just like 2013 did.

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I’ve been a staunch supporter of Wilin Rosario for awhile now, and was especially high on him coming into this year. As I pointed out in my preseason Bold Predictions column, the 25-year-old had hit 49 homers in his two previous seasons, and was reportedly set to start playing some first base, to keep his bat in the lineup on an everyday basis.

As it turned out, Rosario played first base for a measly 25 innings in 2014, likely due in no small part to the fact that Justin Morneau had his best season since 2010. Still, that extra playing time for Rosario never materialized. He ended up hitting the disabled list twice — once in May with a viral infection, and again in August with wrist inflammation — limiting him to 106 games.

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Every season brings with it a new crop of breakouts; some are real, while some are mirages. Oftentimes, a “breakout season” ends up being that player’s career year, and I think we saw that with several players this year. What I’m going to do today is just briefly touch on three players that I think played themselves into unreasonable expectations for 2015.

Danny Santana

I really like Santana. In fact, I really like everyone I’m writing about in this column, I just see significant gaps between their actual skill level and perceived 2015 fantasy value. Santana is pretty much the posterboy for this mindset, as I was thoroughly impressed by the 23-year-old this year. I think he has a future as a very valuable utility knife, he’s just not a top-five — or likely even top-ten — fantasy shortstop.

Santana was indeed a top-five fantasy shortstop from the moment he took over as the Twins’ leadoff hitter at the beginning of June — he was ranked No. 10 overall for the season, but was easily top-five from June on. His lowest on-base plus slugging in any given month this year was actually in June, when he put up a .773 OPS. Aside from that month, he was well into the .800s all year.

The problem is, Santana probably won’t be a top-ten fantasy shortstop next year, because he was pretty clearly playing well over his head this year. Through 692 plate appearances between Double-A and Triple-A, Santana hit two home runs. This year in the majors, he hit seven in 430 PA.

I believe in the speed, and think he can be a 20-25 steal guy annually, although I’ll be curious to see if he can replicate the success rate of his 20-for-24 mark from this season. From 2011-2013, Santana stole 71 bases, but was also caught stealing a somewhat startling 39 times.

I’m clearly not buying the power, and he’ll likely never pile up the runs like he did this year, either. While his .319 batting average this year was very impressive, this is a career .273 minor-league hitter in 2,352 PA. His batting average on balls in play in the majors was .405. Furthermore, his ugly plate discipline (4.4% BB-rate, 22.8% K-rate) is uninspiring, to put it mildly.

I think most of you came into this column knowing that Santana isn’t quite the player he looked like this year, but keep in mind when planning for 2015 that he played above his actual talent level in nearly every category this season. Santana is a classic regression candidate in just about every way possible.

Josh Harrison

The 27-year-old Harrison is much the same story as Santana, in that he likely played above his head in many ways this season. It’s not that he’d never shown power before, it’s that he had never shown much over-the-fence power. Harrison has always produced his fair share of doubles and triples, keeping his isolated power well above .100 for most of his minor- and major-league career.

However, coming into 2014, Harrison had never hit more than seven homers in any given year of his professional career. Whether Harrison’s 2014 approach is sustainable or not is one question, but it’s certainly fair to look at his 13 homers — nearly twice his previous career high in the majors or minors — as a bit of a fluke.

Furthermore, if/when his .353 BABIP from 2014 regresses, he doesn’t have the plate discipline to compensate. Harrison’s 4.0% walk rate this year was actually a massive improvement from his career 2.6% walk rate coming into the season, and it was still awfully low. This all, of course, means fewer opportunities to steal bases and score runs.

Like Santana, I think Harrison has a long, productive major-league career ahead of him as a super-utility type, but I fear we’ve seen his best season.

Johnny Cueto

I’m not going to get too long-winded about Cueto, as Mike Petriello wrote a great column on him just a couple weeks ago. I’m just going to throw my own two cents in. Seeing as Cueto has maintained a sub-3.00 ERA for four years now, I’m obviously not referring to his season as a “breakout” — Cueto’s breakout came in 2011, and it was legit. It’s hard to doubt that he’s a truly elite fantasy commodity, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that we’re probably not going to see his career-high 8.94 K/9 strikeout rate again.

Cueto didn’t really do anything all that different to explain why a guy with a career 7.30 K/9 in nearly a thousand innings coming into 2014 suddenly started striking out a batter per inning. Which is why I just can’t trust it at all. As Mike pointed out in the above-linked column, Cueto generated a ton of whiffs with his change this year, but his overall 9.8% swinging strike rate wasn’t far off his career mark of 9.1%.

Batters swung at 35.6% of Cueto’s pitches outside the zone, a career high, and he threw more first-pitch strikes (62.9%) than ever before. However, just like the change-up whiff rate, both of those marks were very minor improvements on the numbers he’s been putting up for the last few years. I guess I can explain why Cueto suddenly spiked his strikeout rate; he was just a little bit better than he usually is in a few different ways, and the sum of those parts was a career-high strikeout rate.

This year was pretty much the idealized version of an already-great pitcher. I just can’t quite see him ever again having as much fantasy value as he did in 2014.

The 2014 season was my first here at RotoGraphs, and I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly. As for today, this column is helping distract me from the fact that Jeff Beliveau’s seventh-inning meltdown yesterday cost me a considerable sum in a deep roto league, coughing up my razor-thin leads in both ERA and WHIP, sending my team tumbling down two spots on the final day of the season. Fantasy sports are a fickle mistress.

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This is it, folks. Your last chance to skim the wire, trying to scrape up every last win you can, or rack up enough last-minute strikeouts to gain a roto point. With one exception, all the following pitchers are available in more than 95 percent of Yahoo leagues and, depending on which stats you’re chasing, can help give your team that eleventh-hour boost to championship glory. (If you’re hunting wins, target the Saturday guys, because Sunday is far dicier in that department.)

Saturday 9/27:

Rafael Montero vs HOU

Montero, a preseason top-five prospect in the Mets system known for his excellent command, has actually had some pretty serious command issues ever since arriving in the majors, as his hideous 4.85 BB/9 will attest. On the bright side, he’s still been piling up strikeouts at a solid rate (8.31 K/9).

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Start spreading the news. Martin Prado has truly woken up in the city that never sleeps. I wrote a few paragraphs about Prado last month, explaining why I’d rather have him than Dustin Pedroia rest-of-season. Now I feel compelled to study him a bit deeper, since he’s continued raking, despite battling a nagging hamstring issue that kept him out for a few games, but sure hasn’t slowed down his production.

Since being traded to the Yankees, Prado has snapped out of a year-and-a-half long slumber to put up some of the best numbers of his career. Since moving to the Bronx, Prado has been the No. 4 fantasy second baseman, hitting for both power and average. Just a quick look at his season stats, split between the two clubs, is jaw-dropping:

• w/ARI (436 PA) – .270/.317/.370, 5 HR, .099 ISO
• w/NYY (133 PA) – .310/.331/.543, 7 HR, .233 ISO

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2014 has been a lousy year for Jason Kipnis and his fantasy owners. After back-to-back campaigns as a top-five fantasy second baseman — No. 5 in 2012, No. 3 in 2013 — he is the No. 21 second baseman in standard formats this year. He has provided less fantasy production than Brock Holt.

On Wednesday, Kipnis attempted to explain his disappointing season in a rather bizarre interview with MLB.com. He mostly pointed to his new contract as an excuse, saying that it forced him to try to do too much early in the season. The problem with this explanation is that April was easily his best month of the season, as his .766 on-base plus slugging was a full 100 points higher than in his best month since. It’s now mid-September and Kipnis still hasn’t broken out of his season-long slump.

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The other day, while looking for starting pitchers to stream in one of my leagues, I stumbled across Michael Wacha on the waiver wire. (This league only has one DL slot, so players who miss considerable time are often dropped.) I was pretty pumped about this and picked him up immediately.

I told my co-owner Seth, and he was significantly less excited than I was. “He’s not going to pitch enough to matter,” he said. Wacha’s rehab assignment after missing nearly three full months was limited to just one 34-pitch start in Double-A, and he tossed just 50 pitches in his return to the major-league rotation. With so little time left in the season, I figured we should probably look into whether Seth was right. Would that roster spot have more value if we continued to use it for streaming?

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Normally, I produce tiered second-base rankings for my first piece of each month. Now that it’s September and trade deadlines have passed in 99.9% of fantasy leagues, it’s not very useful for me to fill this space with my thoughts on players that owners cannot acquire. Therefore, I scoured waiver wires to find three lightly owned middle infielders who could help fantasy owners over the season’s crucial final weeks.

Joe Panik (15% Yahoo, 20.8% ESPN, 26% CBS)
194 PA – .318/.366/.397, 23 R, 1 HR, 15 RBI, 0 SB

Despite providing consistent production that has him at No. 7 among fantasy 2B over the last month, Panik’s ownership rates are far from widespread. Eno Sarris wrote a great piece yesterday in which he interviewed Panik about his approach at the plate, so I’m not going to get too long-winded here, but we should definitely still take a moment to discuss his fantasy value.

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