The grind of baseball can sometimes sap the joy from the sport. Thus, it’s refreshing when a champion of the people emerges. Such a hero appeared on the scene late in the 2018 season – Twins catcher Willians Astudillo.

The catcher/first baseman hasn’t been viewed as a legitimate prospect since he was a teenager in the Phillies system. Even then, you had to dig deep to find him. Now 27, he’s become a folk hero for his base running, home run antics, and refusal to walk or strike out. Scouts call him bad-bodied. To a layman, it looks like their pudgy local plumber is running around on a field with a bunch of chiseled professionals. Just wait until he bends over…

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Yesterday, Wilson Ramos officially signed a two-year contract with the Mets, marking the end of the “Travis d’Arnaud, breakout candidate” hopes. Ramos will now join his third team in two seasons, as he began last year with the Rays, but finished with about a quarter of his plate appearances in Philadelphia. Let’s check the park factors to learn how the change in parks might affect his value. Since he recorded the majority of his plate appearances in Tampa, and played there all season in 2017, we’ll compare their park to Citi Field in New York.

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It’s been a chilly offseason thus far, even with the big James Paxton trade last week, but the Braves have singlehandedly helped spark the hot stove with a couple big moves on Monday. Let’s take a look at the fantasy fallout from the latest set of moves:

Nationals Sign Kurt Suzuki

This is actually a return for Suzuki as he spent part of 2012 and 2013 with them, though you might’ve missed it given his meager .239/.297/.344 line with the larger sample in ’13 netting just a 57 wRC+ in 79 games. He meandered his way through three mediocre seasons in Minnesota (86 wRC+) before landing in Atlanta where he enjoyed a mid-30s surge. He put up the best work of his career with a robust 116 wRC+, 31 HR, and 100 RBI in 697 PA in a dynamic platoon with Tyler Flowers.

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We’re about to flip the calendar to July and many of us have teams that are floundering in the middle-to-low end of the standings. If there’s any hope to contend, not only will your current players have to turn it around, but you’re going to need some gems to emerge either off the wire or via trade. Acquiring elite assets will cost elite assets and if you had those, you wouldn’t be in this position in the first place so it’s time to take some gambles. Here’s a list of affordable assets who could perform well beyond their cost based on previous performance, skills, and/or improved health.

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Well, maybe not you, specifically. The royal you. The editorial.

Kyle Schwarber has had himself a pretty dang good season so far. It’s exactly what I needed. Having just inherited my first ottoneu team — a relatively downtrodden 9th-place team (of 12) — and hardly knowing the rules, I took a gamble and traded a $12 Jon Gray for a $6 Patrick Corbin, a $7 Willie Calhoun, a $3 Jake Junis, and a $20 Schwarber. I liked every piece of the trade (although I, now regretfully, cut Junis during spring training, not really understanding the dynamics of the draft, my finances, or of ottoneu generally). But acquiring Schwarber at his relatively exorbitant price given his 2017 season was a risky proposition, especially after a summer of these headlines:

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A plethora of information is available to fantasy owners with most just a repeat from one season to the next. For this reason, it’s tough to find anything new or helpful. Joe Rosales has stepped forward this year to provide six pages of useful injury nuggets in the Bill James Handbook, especially relating to catchers. Here are some of the highlights

1. Baseball Info Solutions is now collecting detailed injury information

Finally, and good luck. Building a comprehensive database is the key component to really understanding injuries. From personal experience, it’s just a pain-in-the-ass to track in-season injuries and also compile the end-of-season database. While, I’m sure the information is not going to be free to the public, at least the information is being collected for someone like Mr. Rosales to compile.

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I’m still continuing my commentary rankings even as we start releasing our Composite Rankings. These Average Draft Positions come from our projection pages. Each colored bar represents the start of a new tier.

Commentary Rankings:

• SP
• 1B
• 2B

Composite Rankings:

• C
• 1B

Let me know how you’re attacking C in the comments below. I’m open to taking Sanchez in the second round, but not specifically targeting him. From there, I’m likely to wait until the mid-100s or later to get my first catcher. I could double up with a Gattis/Ramos or wait for my second and get a Grandal/Iannetta. I did make some changes in these rankings compared to my initial run of the Composite C rankings, moving Lucroy up a spot and Iannetta up a few. Reminder: these are for a standard 5×5 league. Generally thinking of a 15-team league, but things wouldn’t change all that much for 10- or 12-teamers.

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Our staff composite rankings are back! We’re kicking things off with Catcher and we’ll be rolling out a new position each day over the next week-plus. I will still be doing my commentary by position rankings to give a quick little thought, but those will be separate posts. When all the positions are out, I’ll make a spreadsheet that has all of them together with team and league columns added.

We’re using Yahoo! eligibility requirements which is 5 starts or 10 appearances. These rankings assume the standard 5×5 categories and a re-draft league. If we forgot someone, please let us know in the comments and we’ll make sure he’s added for the updates. If you have questions for a specific ranker on something he did, let us know in the comments. We can also be reached via Twitter:

• Paul Sporer
• Jeff Zimmerman
• Mike Podhorzer
• Justin Mason

There will be differences, sharp differences, within the rankings. The rankers have different philosophies when it comes to ranking, some of which you’re no doubt familiar with through previous iterations. Of course the idea that we’d all think the same would be silly because then what would be the point of including multiple rankers?! Think someone should be higher or lower? Make a case. Let us know why you think that. The chart is sortable. If a ranker didn’t rank someone that the others did, he was given that ranker’s last rank +1. On catchers that wasn’t necessary because we all ranked 50 which made getting a top 40 pretty easy.

Updated March 12th – Paul updated Lucroy with OAK and adjusted his Iannetta ranking after further research.

Key:

• AVG– just the average of the four ranking sets
• Adj. AVG– the average minus the high and low rankings (maybe less necessary with just four rankers, but we had it in past years)
• SPLIT– the difference between the high and low rankings

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In my last article, I examined the potential value differences between the top-50 rank players and their average draft position (ADP). Today, I will examine the next 50. While the first list contained quite a few players moving up, today’s list is a little more balanced with over and undervalued players.

One of the biggest takeaways from the first article was the extra replacement value catchers receive in a 2-catcher format. To simply explain the idea, I will turn to Joe Bryant who goes through a fitting example but with football.

The league’s bottom catchers are so bad so any catcher who can hit has good value. Evan Gattis being ranked #17 got most of the scrutiny in the rankings. As was pointed out, the projection may be high on the plate appearances but the process was still sound. Here is how Gattis compares to the last catcher ranked (Yan Gomes) and Francisco Lindor compared with the last middle infielder (Kolten Wong).

Yan Gomes is such a sink, especially with a total of 55 Runs+RBIs. It’s imperative to understand and value catchers correctly for each league formats. It’s a potentially huge advantage for those owners who spend the time. Read the rest of this entry »

11/22/17

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 18, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER18!

Follow us on Twitter

• @sporer
• @enosarris
• @jasoncollette
• @justinmasonfwfb – Producer

Notable Transactions/Rumors/Articles/Game Play

• Aaron Judge shoulder surgery
• Shohei Ohtani coming
• Twins talking Gerrit Cole
• Brewers seeking big arm?
• Mark Appel DFA’d
• Blue Jays in J.D. Martinez market?

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