Check out last month’s rankings here.

~

No more bland, rote tiers from this guy! Thanks to the urging of commenter “Urban Shocker,” my eyes are now open to the fun that can be had with ridiculously labeled tiers. You see, I used to just write these monthly second-base columns with boring old numbered tiers. That is, until Urban Shocker convinced me in the comments section of my April rankings to name my tiers from then on.

To be perfectly honest, the task of doing these monthly rankings can get rather stale — for both me and you — as the season wears on. Eventually, it gets to the point where the rankings barely change, because 30-day samples don’t substantially change the way I/we think about a certain player.

Furthermore, there’s only so many ways I can say “Jose Altuve had a good month again,” or “Dee Gordon steals lots of bases,” or “Holy crap, Dan Uggla is so incredibly terrible!” (Actually, never mind on that last one. I will never get sick of making jokes about Uggla, who got paid $13 million last year to post a weighted offense 72% below league-average.)

Read the rest of this entry »

You don’t have to dig too deep to find an article on Robinson Cano’s early-season struggles. Everywhere from regional newspapers to ESPN.com, the extremely wealthy 32-year-old’s inability to hit baseballs is a hot topic. Rightly so, one would surmise, seeing as the guy’s hitting .253/.295/.337.

I still included Cano in the second tier — also known as the New Orleans Tier — of my May second-base rankings. (Spoiler alert: The tiers for next week’s June rankings will be named after Kurt Russell films.) In fact, I had Cano ranked second overall, and not a single commenter took umbrage with that ranking.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last couple weeks, a 24-year-old former top-ten overall pick has been on fire. He has started 13 consecutive games, batting leadoff or second in 12 of those games. He slots in as the No. 6 fantasy second baseman in that stretch. Furthermore, he’s already third-base eligible in Yahoo leagues, making his sixth appearance (fifth start) of the season at third on Sunday.

On the year, this player is now hitting .262/.338/.431, with two homers and four steals. Sounds like a guy we should be jumping all over, right? Would you ever in a million years expect his ownership rates to look like this?

• 6% Yahoo, 3.4% ESPN, 11% CBS

Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since Orioles second baseman Jonathan Schoop went down with a sprained right knee, manager Buck Showalter has been covering the keystone in some wonderfully weird ways. Without backup Ryan Flaherty — who hit the disabled list himself with a groin injury — Showalter turned to a couple of highly unorthodox options.

As Jeff Sullivan outlined last week, the Orioles called up natural second baseman Reynaldo Navarro, but used him sparingly before ultimately optioning him back to Triple-A on Friday. Instead, Showalter has relied on Jimmy Paredes — who had made just eight starts at second in his five partial major-league seasons — and first baseman/corner outfielder Steve Pearce, who had never logged an inning at the position in his 11-year professional career.

Read the rest of this entry »

Check out last month’s rankings here.

I am, if nothing else, a man of the people. This month, I am integrating reader feedback to improve upon both the helpfulness and the overall fun factor of this feature. Regarding the helpfulness, as commenters pointed out last month, I should probably rank Mookie Betts, even though he’s not eligible in all formats.

As commenters also pointed out last month, I could have just ranked him instead of explaining why I am or am not ranking him, thus saving myself both time and effort. Still, I felt compelled to account for my actions, and here we are, several possibly unnecessary sentences later.

Now, the fun factor. I was encouraged to come up with clever names for the tiers, as opposed to my previous yawn-inducing numerical system. Therefore, I am this month grouping players into tiers based upon the relative subjective quality of cities I’ve visited. I enjoy travel almost as much as baseball, and I have strong feelings about the places I’ve been — both good and bad — that are quite suitable for comparison to second basemen. Why not.

TIER ONE – ANNECY, FRANCE
Jose Altuve

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been receiving lots of questions about Rougned Odor lately, in the comments section of my weekly second-base posts. Being the fool that I occasionally am, I wrote up an entire post about Odor, without realizing that Ben Duronio did so less than a week ago. Thankfully, my views on Odor are at odds enough with Ben’s that I was able to retool the post you’re reading now into a counterpoint of sorts.

Like I said, I’ve been fielding plenty of questions about Odor, and understandably so. He’s off to a putrid start, slotting in as the No. 37 fantasy second baseman through the season’s first few weeks. He has just eight hits, good for a .140 batting average that has many owners in early-season panic mode.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just two weeks into the season, it’s still mighty important to not overreact to any small samples. Still, we can draw some conclusions based on things like playing time and batting order position — and perhaps a little bit on performance — to identify players who will be on the rise in next month’s second base tier rankings. Below are three 2B-eligible players who were buried in my April rankings, but await healthy upward promotions.

Devon Travis (53% Yahoo, 80.4% ESPN, 83% CBS)

For this month’s tier rankings, I included the following note regarding Travis: “If he can hold down the starting job, he’ll likely jump up a tier next month.” The 24-year-old is tearing the cover off the ball, to the tune of a .356/.408/.644 slash, with three homers. There’s no way he’s losing his job to the likes of Steve Tolleson and Ryan Goins, and Maicer Izturis’ eventual return from a groin strain doesn’t seem like a threat to Travis’ job either.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is always the most challenging time of year for me as a fantasy writer. Every statistical sample size is way too small to analyze. I haven’t been to any minor-league games yet, so I don’t have any scouting reports to share. There’s just not a whole lot to write about yet.

Point is, this is a great time to discuss more general topics, because that’s far more interesting for me — and hopefully you — than my hot takes on Ian Kinsler’s awesome first week. With that in mind, let’s dive into a topic that’s been on my mind quite a bit lately, that of the lightly owned super-utility player.

There’s nothing sexy about the lightly owned super-utility player — to be henceforth referred to as a LOSUP — but the ability to use that player to plug multiple lineup holes is a somewhat underrated commodity. In relatively deep leagues with a reasonable number of bench slots, I always like to have a LOSUP floating around.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m entering my first full season doing second-base tiers, after a midseason call-up last year. One small housekeeping item to get out of the way is that I prefer to only include players who are more or less universally eligible at the position. For example, Mookie Betts played 14 games at 2B last year, making him eligible on some sites and ineligible on others. Thus, he does not appear on this list. Additionally, I only ranked players who are currently on Major League rosters.

One thing that was interesting for me as I assembled these rankings is that I don’t have particularly strong feelings about the specific order within some of the tiers, but I have a considerable amount of conviction regarding the tiers themselves. In other words, this year’s 2B crop has some pretty clear-cut groups of elite, near-elite, above-average, etc. With that, let’s get to the rankings:

TIER ONE
Jose Altuve
Robinson Cano

I quite nearly gave Altuve his own tier, but I believe enough in a Cano bounceback that I made room for him too. I wrote about the Houston infield a few weeks ago, so you can check that out for more of my thoughts on Altuve. Short version: I absolutely love Altuve, and do not expect much regression in 2015.

Read the rest of this entry »

I went 3-for-10 on my Bold Predictions last year, which is probably right around the sweet spot. Here, you will find this year’s crop of my unlikely — yet within the realm of possibility — predictions. These aren’t in any particular order, other than the order in which I thought of them. So, I guess they are in a particular order. They are in my chronological mind-order. Except for No. 10. I wrote that one fourth. Kind of ruins the whole theme. Oh, well.

1. Jorge Soler is a top-ten outfielder.

I’ve been crazy-high on Soler for quite a while now, so who better to lead off my Bold Predictions than the 23-year-old Cuban? Soler’s tools are out of this world, and they were on full display at every level last year, as he tore the cover off the ball, regardless of the level of competition.

Read the rest of this entry »