Guess what, we’re still evaluating playing time battles in preparation for the 2016 fantasy baseball season. You can catch up on every team we’ve covered in this post. I already slogged through the Philadelphia Phillies pitchers, so let’s just hammer out the rest of their roster battles.
Over the next several weeks, RotoGraphs will highlight intriguing position battles that could have implications both on the field and in your fantasy draft. This week, we focus on the AL East.
In case you’re wondering how to characterize the New York Yankees’ front office strategy, you need only ask GM Brian Cashman. “You want to get younger, athletic, and good…That’s what we’re trying to do.” The Yankees’ 40-is-the-new-27 experiment is coming to an end and while 2016 won’t yet be the Year of the Millennial in the Bronx, young talent at first base, catcher, and the outfield signal that time could be coming soon.
Every year after the RotoGraphs consensus positional rankings are published, I compare my column of ranks to a recalculated consensus after excluding mine. It’s a fun little activity and it allows me to figure out why I might be more bullish or bearish on a particular player than the rest of the crew. Although I published all infielders in one post in the preseason, I’ll only look at a couple of positions at a time for the recaps. We’ll start with the catchers and first basemen.
For years Yadier Molina has been the gold standard behind the dish known for both his tremendous defense and durability. He has 412 Gold Glove Awards (fine, just seven) and he’s caught at least 1000 innings seven of the last eight seasons and fewer than 930 just once in his 11 full seasons. Of course even he blushes at the workloads that KC is feeding Salvador Perez.
When Molina first started, his defense was the only reason to play him. He logged a .653 OPS in his first 1429 PA through age-24. The reps started to pay off as he started to turn his elite contact ability into some results with a .720 OPS in 1550 PA from ages 25-27. By now we’re looking at almost 3000 PA through his mid-20s and then we finally got a power surge with a .842 OPS in 1622 PA from ages 28-30 including a career-year in 2012 when he hit .315 with 22 HR, 76 RBI, 65 R, and 12 SB. He finished fourth in the MVP voting that year.
Over the last two seasons, he has been a blend of those first two samples with just a .687 OPS in 975 PA. In 2014, a torn right thumb cost him 40 games in the middle of the season. That injury looks like a signifier of his power decline as he returned to post just a .317 SLG in 27 games that year, but his 39 games prior to the injury yielded just a .315 SLG in 145 PA.
Entering the year, Francisco Cervelli had a career high of 317 plate appearances in a single season. The narrative was familiar: he could hit, he could receive, he just couldn’t stay healthy. The 29-year-old finally shook the injury prone label with a 510 plate appearance, 3.8 WAR season.
Frankly, the best thing we can say about Wilson Ramo’s 2015 season is that he stayed healthy and managed over 500 PAs. He ended the season with a .231/.260/.360 line with 16 doubles and 15 home runs which were a decided disappointment for those of us who had invested in his offensive skills.
As a 23-year-old catcher in 2011, Ramos opened eyes with 15 bombs in 435 Plate Appearances to go with a .267 BA. His .177 ISO that season was encouraging and matched his 2010 mark in Triple A. Ramos’s K rate of 17.5% was supported by his Minor League career numbers and was in line with a 22 game stint he had in 2010 in his introduction to the Majors. Sandwiched between the 2012 and 2014 seasons that were marred by injury, Ramos clubbed 16 HR’s and batted .272 in just 303 PAs in 2013 with an 81% contact rate and a 40.7% hard hit rate. No wonder he was considered a future hitting star at the catching position and some had predicted that he could approach 30 HRs with a full season of PAs.
Matt Wieters is a free agent, and as Mike Podhorzer explained, the Orioles appear unlikely to extend him a qualifying offer. The team could still bring Wieters back on a new contract, but I expect them to move on in part because of the less-expensive in-house option, Caleb Joseph.
Joseph does not fit the mold of a prospect who would inherit the job of a departing veteran. In fact, he is less than a month younger than Wieters. However, because of a lengthy minor league career, Joseph has just two years of major league service time and remains under team control with the Orioles in 2016 for very little salary. Meanwhile, while Joseph does not share the offensive potential that once made Wieters such a prized prospect, he does offer the team enough defensive value to merit a full-time job.
In the majority of fantasy leagues, Jonathan Lucroy was likely valued as a top five catcher. His strong batting average, respectable power, and best of all, consistently high plate appearance totals, made him a top option at the position. But as the books closed on the 2015 season, Lucroy finished just 12th, the last man to accrue any value in 12-team mixed leagues that start just one backstop. We’re used to catchers disappointing, which is why many fantasy owners choose to “punt” the position and just go cheap, refusing to pay the market rates for the elite. So let’s find out what went wrong.
Derek Norris was drafted as the 18th catcher off the board last spring and wound up eighth by season’s end. It’s pretty hard to label that anything other than a success, and yet it still feels a bit underwhelming when you look at the full line: .250/.305/.404 with 14 HR, 62 RBI, 65 R, and even 4 SB in 557 PA. Perhaps the line leaves me wanting more because the driving force behind his top-10 ranking was the playing time as opposed to any skills improvement.
Over the offseason, the Red Sox refused to trade catching prospect Blake Swihart (plus others) for then-Phillies ace Cole Hamels. In retrospect it was a wise move if only because other components on the roster failed spectacularly. If one of Hanley Ramirez, Pablo Sandoval, or Rusney Castillo had performed as expected, then Hamels may have been the difference between a Wild Card berth and a trip home. As it turned out, he would have been dealt again at the deadline.