Braun Cleared – Fantasy Ramifications
Ryan Braun will not have to serve a 50 day suspension for performance enhancing drugs. While many ramifications may come from this ruling, I will get to the meat of the matter. How does the ruling affect his and his teammates fantasy value?
Ryan now jumps up from a late 2nd to 5th round pick with the suspension, to being one of the first players taken. Before the news was released, many people considered him the top pick in the draft. This high ranking should not change, but it may just a bit.
I do see some reasons for him dropping from a top 3 pick to maybe a top 6 pick. Some fantasy owners may hold some animosity against him. They may feel he cheated the system, whether true or not, and they want nothing to do with him. Another reason for him dropping would be owners viewing him as a risk for getting tested positive again. Finally, other owners may believe he was using steroids and his production will drop. When given the opportunity to pick between Braun and a similar player (Matt Kemp), the owner may take the other player since they see him as less of a risk.
The Rest of the Brewer Hitters
I didn’t see the rest of the Brewer’s hitters going lower in drafts because of the possible Braun suspension. They should not have dropped and here is why. Braun is about a 6 WAR player. Assuming Braun’s production gets replaced with a replacement level player, the Brewers would lose about 2 WAR (or 20 Runs) over the 50 games he was lost. The 20 runs would work out to 40 Runs+RBIs over a replacement player. Assuming Braun would get credit for half the total, only 20 Run+RBIs would be left to spread out among the rest of his teammates. It would be about a 3 Runs+RBI drop for each of the 6 players hitting before and after him in the lineup. The numbers would have been even less if the Brewers could have found a player with above replacement level ability.
A trend I could see happening is that owners assumed the rest of the Brewers were under valued and begin to value them more highly. I will look in a few weeks to see if any of their ADPs have moved since Braun was cleared.
Greinke has had motivational issues in the past. If the Brewers had struggled without Braun, Zack’s motivation may not have been 100%. With Braun in the lineup helping the team score runs, Zack is likely to be more motivated. A motivated Zack is a productive Zack.
Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.
I’ll chose to factor in that he is no longer cheating and his bat speed will be slowed….. pass
24 previous tests that didn’t give wonky results and weren’t mishandled tend to disagree with you. i would assume he puts up the same numbers we would have thought he was due for if the false positive had never been leaked by the media.
Given that his lawyers didn’t argue the test results, instead arguing chain-of-custody loopholes, calling his result a “false positive” seems overly generous.
That said, I’d still take him somewhere in the top 5 overall.
They aren’t allowed to argue the test results. The policy is set up such that they have no recourse to attack the test unless they can at least put some doubt on the procedure first. They did attack the results somewhat as well if you believe what guys like Will Carroll have said, it just isn’t public yet.
However my point is even if he was using it is short term, he has passed way too many tests to think he has been juicing his whole career and he didn’t see some big spike in production. He is a top 5 pick.
I dont think he was cheating his entire career, and I dont think he did anything intentional that led to the dirty test, but to claim that he didnt have a big spike in his production last year is not true. He doubled his overall production last year more than any other year in his career.
I know you’re a home town guy and all, and want to believe in the “guilty until proven innocent” claptrap that Brewer fans are spouting all over the internet today, but his playoff performance and his 2nd half clearly show a performance that was above and beyond any he has had in his career.
To believe otherwise is either being a homer, or having total blinders on. It was a dirty test, and he got away with Baseball murder.
Live in your fairy tail world, I’ll live in the real world.
It’s not like any of Braun numbers this year were better than most previous year. He took more walks, thats about it.
Correct that to say “In a year in which offense took a nose dive, Braun took a lot more walks, got fewer ABs, and still managed to keep all of his power numbers up,” and you’ll have a true statement.
Barring a very surprising decision by the treatment board, MLB will have the ability to test him at will this year. If you truly believe Braun wasn’t cheating, I suppose this doesn’t give you pause, but it should.