Can Josh Fields Power His Way To Relevance?

by
February 6, 2009

Josh Fields was a two-sport star at Oklahoma State, as he was the starting quarterback for the Cowboys and helped lead them to two wins over Oklahoma during his tenure. Fields made the decision to concentrate on baseball and he was the 18th pick of the 2004 draft for the White Sox.

Despite not having the baseball-heavy background of some of his peers, Fields turned in a nice year at Triple-A in 2006 and was considered one of the top prospects in the game for the 2007 season. He responded by hitting 23 home runs in 373 at-bats in his rookie season.

But 2008 was a different story. Fields spent most of the season in the minors and when he did play in the majors, manager Ozzie Guillen constantly harped on his poor defense. Additionally, Fields suffered from a patella injury last year and had off-season surgery on his right knee.

However, Fields is a guy to watch because the starting third base job is his to lose. Yes, his strikeout rate is alarming. But this is also a guy with a .221 ISO in his 478 plate appearances in the majors.

If you miss out on the top tier third baseman and none of the lower tier guys strike your fancy, Fields is an excellent gamble on the late rounds of your draft. He has the opportunity to get 550 at-bats and he has produced power at both Triple-A and the majors in the last three years when given a shot at regular playing time. Fields offers 25 HR power at the end of a draft, something not many players can say.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.




 

8 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Jon
16 years ago

I have a little problem converting “late rounds” to auction dollars for my 4X4 AL roto league. I picked up Fields at $10 late last year in a trade. he’s in his last year under our rules (keep for 3 years unless you bump up his contract $5 per year of extension). If he starts, as now looks likely, is $10 still too high?

0