In contrast to what we did last season, this year we’re doing monthly updates for our positional rankings as laid out by Eno Sarris and his minions. In addition to that, we’re doing our monthly positional tier updates as well which should aid you in your waiver pick-ups and trade negotiations when you’re comparing values. The rankings can be found over here and below is how I see them by tier… Read the rest of this entry »
Pop quiz, hotshot: without looking, try and name the three batters at the top of the MLB leaderboards in on-base percentage (entering Wednesday).
Give up? Well, Matt Kemp at the top should be no surprise, since he’s coming off an MVP-caliber season and just finished up one of the best Aprils in decades. David Wright in second isn’t a shocker either; after a few down seasons, he’s healthy and motivated for the surprisingly pesky Mets. And in third place… Josh Hamilton? David Ortiz? Joey Votto? All worthy choices, and all in the top ten, but if you really guessed that the answer was a 31-year-old catcher with 244 career MLB plate appearances under his belt entering the season, then you’re either an enormous Dodger fan or an immediate member of the A.J. Ellis family.
All season long, the common refrain around the Dodgers is that they’ve been carried by the dynamic duo of Kemp & Andre Ethier, with little support from the rest of the lineup, and that’s not entirely true: Ellis enters play on Friday carrying a line of .306/.449/.468. That’s good for for 1.1 WAR in just under a month of play, and the ensuing .392 wOBA places him fifth among all catchers, despite not having near the type of power you’ll see from those ahead of him like Matt Wieters & Buster Posey. After hitting a double and a homer off of Jhoulys Chacin on Tuesday, he’s now reached base in fifteen consecutive games, thanks in large part to his 20.2% walk rate, third best in baseball. (Lest you think this is a function of hitting in front of the pitcher, think again, because this is serious business; he even enters games to the excellent and appropriate “Walk” by the Foo Fighters.)
Yet for all of his early achievements, Ellis has gone all but ignored in fantasy baseball. He’s owned by just 4% of teams in Yahoo and a miniscule 0.8% in ESPN leagues, far less than several clearly inferior options. Those numbers are so tiny that it basically means that Ellis is a free pick-up in all but the most extremely deep leagues.
If you’re looking for help at the catcher position, now is the perfect time to start looking at buying low on certain guys. Regular backstops such as Russell Martin, Geovany Soto and even Brian McCann are struggling out of the gate and it’s probably time to start putting in a few offers and see what it would take. But what about Alex Avila? After struggling as a rookie, Avila turned things around last year and put up a tremendous stat line that vaulted him into this year’s preseason top ten and turned him into a highly coveted commodity on draft day. Now here in his third full season, he’s posting a woeful slash line of .220/.303/.424 and people are starting to wonder if last season was for real or just a fluke. Is he a good buy-low candidate? Read the rest of this entry »
As we wrap up the month of April it’s time to go back to your waiver wire and sift through some of the names of players that have been dropped over the last few weeks. Usually they are players who were taken in the later rounds of your draft and, with an early season slow start, have been discarded by their owners and forgotten on the free agent scrap heap. However, a number of those players are now starting to turn things around and could be timely adds to your roster, whether it’s for a starting position or even just quality depth. Here are a pair of just such examples and, even better, at thin positions.
Two of the catcher situations we said we would continue to follow closely throughout the season revolved around a pair of up-and-coming backstops who, based on pure talent and upside, were expected to eventually steal away the starting job on their respective teams. Devin Mesoraco from the Reds was being paired with incumbent backstop Ryan Hanigan while the Rockies brought in former-Reds catcher Ramon Hernandez to mentor Wilin Rosario and set him up for future success. We might be just three weeks into the season, but according to the current game logs, neither youngster is running away with anything right now.
With just about 10 games into the season and no one amassing more than 40 plate appearances, the Small Sample Size Police are in full force right now. Hot starts, cold starts, nothing matters to these brazen fantasy owners who dismiss such meaningless statistics at this time of year. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t have a little fun and appreciate the good fortune bestowed upon us by the fantasy gods as our catchers come flying out of the gate, white-hot, and throw us some always helpful power stats. I mean, would you rather be sitting there lamenting Russell Martin’s ice cold start and wonder if his batting average will actually be worse than 2011’s .237 mark or give in to your child-like giddiness over the fact that Alex Avila has picked right up where he left off last season? Yeah, that’s what I thought… Read the rest of this entry »
In an effort to limit the number of times people use the phrase “sample size” in the comments section, a quick post on which minor league backstops to keep on your radar seems more appropriate than discussing Alex Avila’s .417-4-2-5 batting line through three games. While most rosters are set, save for a few tweaks here and there, there are a number of catchers in the minors that are looking pretty darn good. Dynasty league owners probably have them locked onto rosters already, but in other leagues, they should be known by you in case something goes wrong on the big league level.
He probably only cost you a buck in your auction or a 23rd round pick in your 12-team, two-catcher, mixed league snake draft. Not a very steep price to pay at all. But the handwriting is already on the wall and it’s only a matter of time before Ramon Hernandez becomes a wasted pick for you. Wilin Rosario is the catcher-of-the-future in Colorado and when he made the 25-man roster over this past weekend, Hernandez and his owners are learning that the future is now.
For those that love to follow industry leagues, the Tout Wars drafts took place this past weekend in New York City. In addition to their usual rundown, this year introduced a brand new Mixed League and as I was looking over some of the rosters, Josh Donaldson’s name stuck out to me. He went for $4 to Rotowire’s Derek Van Riper who went with a “stars and scrubs” approach, but considering some of the other names that went for a buck, along with RotoGraphs’ reader Jeff’s question in the Catcher Tiers piece, it seems that Donaldson is on quite a few people’s fantasy radar these days. Now the question remains, is he worth a look?
So we’ve been through the Catcher Consensus Rankings and we’ve heard some of my initial thoughts on said rankings. Well, now it’s time to put these guys into tiers so that you can see which players are most comparable to each other in expected production and where you can likely find them in your draft. I’ll also chime in with a few thoughts here and there…