Archive for First Base

Previous Rankings

Preseason

May

June

July

As many of the other positional rankings were impacted rather significantly by the trade deadline, the first basemen stayed in place with the exception of Steve Pearce. I am sticking with having lesser tiers, but making them larger. Especially since nobody complained last week, which is mostly my gauge when evaluating my rankings. So thank you for that.

Per usual, these rankings are reflective of 5×5 batting average leagues, even though there may be times that I am over/under-rating a player based on my inclination to play in more OBP leagues. Eligibility is increasing like wild flower, so I apologize in advance if I missed any eligible first basemen.

I really love cereal and I am trying to go on a diet that would essentially eliminate cereal from my life for the time being. In honor of my love of cereal, I have named my tiers after my favorite cereal. And no, these choices are not subjective. These are objectively my favorite cereals and should be yours as well if you are able to appreciate the finest in sugared breakfast foods. Read the rest of this entry »

This week I’m feeling a little shallow. The two players I’m covering are probably unavailable in very deep leagues but are certainly under-owned in smaller leagues. I’m talking 14, 15, or maybe even 16 team leagues with small benches. To my friends playing in those deepest of deep leagues, I’ll get you next week.

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This week I wanted to check on three teams with injuries at first base and what timetables those teams are looking at for returns, along with analysis of their replacements. I skipped the Cardinals in this write-up because most fans should be rather familiar with Matt Adams and Jedd Gyorko is being picked up like crazy in most leagues, so his availability has started to get limited in deeper leagues.

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I wanted to try something I have never done before, but always enjoy reading when others do it. I’m referring to blind comparisons, where you compare two or more players’ statistics without saying who they are. When Paul Sporer and I went to an HQ seminar, the presenters did this a lot. Sporer was pretty good, where I think I said Adam Eaton for every player with a low ADP and a decent amount of stolen bases. Like I said, this is my first shot at this so I doubt I will come up with any crazy pairings just yet, and I limited this article to first basemen so the sampling is a bit smaller than if I did the whole league. In the words of Ghostface Killah, “Be Easy.”

These are numbers I compiled Thursday morning, so if anything big happened yesterday, I would’ve missed it. Though one game shouldn’t skew these numbers that much, obviously. Also, for ADP, I went to FantasyPros who compiled the ADP from NFBC, CBS, Yahoo, ESPN, and RTS, then averaged those numbers. Let’s get started.

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All-Star Week is a time when most managers, guilty of familial neglect, take a break from fantasy baseball and reconnect with loved ones. But those managers lose. Because while they’re playing with their kids or gardening with their significant others, you’re scouring the waiver wire for cheap sources of saves and power. You’re welcome.

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Previous Rankings

Preseason 

May

June

It’s been interesting to watch the path of first basemen this season, as some of the big names started off relatively slow. I probably had too many tiers since guys were all over the place and I was still getting my feet wet with this process. I was now able to cut it down to five tiers and I am feeling more comfortable with these evaluations than past ones mainly because the numbers are starting to normalize well.

Alex Chamberlain brought up an interesting question in his rankings, regarding what people are looking for. Should these be rest of the season rankings? End of season? Where players currently stand? I definitely don’t want this to purely be a ranking of what players have done so far, since you can go to other websites and they can quantify that. As I mentioned in my other rankings, these are more predicative, though admittedly, I weighed current season performance more than I have in my other rankings. Although the Jose Abreus, Adrian Gonzalez‘, and Mark Teixeiras gave me some trouble when trying to rank since there should be some bounceback, but their performance so far has not shown much of it (at least in terms of fantasy value).

John Coltrane died on July 17, 1967. In honor of his music, I have decided to set up the tiers by my favorite Coltrane albums. This list can change frequently, and I left off the live performances because that is a whole other world that I may not have been able to escape. However, if you’re new to jazz and want to explore Coltrane, these albums are excellent starting points. I love his later stuff, but that can get a little too crazy for somebody not very familiar with jazz.

Tier 1: A Love Supreme

Paul Goldschmidt

Anthony Rizzo

Miguel Cabrera

Rizzo had not been placed in the first tier previously because of his low batting average, but the counting stats were certainly there. Now that his batting average is finally where it should be (.281), I can’t see any reason not to include him in this tier. There wasn’t too much of a doubt he could get to this point, especially with his previously low BABIP, so it’s good to see he was able to get that BA up in such a short amount of time.

Some of the other players outside of the first tier may have better counting stats than Goldschmidt and Cabrera, but you are not going to find many players more consistent than these guys. Goldschmidt gets the top ranking because he adds value with the stolen base as he has 11 right now.

Tier 2: Giant Steps

Edwin Encarnacion

Wil Myers

Chris Davis

Brandon Belt

Eric Hosmer

Joey Votto

Carlos Santana

Mark Trumbo

Freddie Freeman

I should’ve had Wil Myers higher earlier, but his low BB% really concerned me. He has improved that as he is very close to 10% (9.6), and outside of batting average, outdoes Goldy in every fantasy category. Based on performance so far, he has been the number one fantasy first baseman. Again, though, this list accounts for what will happen and I still think Myers will do very well, but the HR/FB is a bit high to sustain (20.4%) so there will probably be some regression. Not enough to sell him, but enough to say by the end of the season he is not in the top tier.

Overall, this is an excellent tier, especially with Freeman and Votto performing at the levels we generally expect from them. All these guys can help you in 3-4 categories, and are weak in at least one. Some because of environment (Belt’s low HRs), some because of situation (Freeman’s low RBIs), or others because that is who they are (Santana’s low BA).

Tier 3: Lush Life

Chris Carter

Albert Pujols

Mike Napoli

Adrian Gonzalez

Jose Abreu

Hanley Ramirez

Travis Shaw

C.J. Cron

Mark Reynolds

David Freese

Now we’re entering the tier where you only getting about 2-3 categories of strength which each player. This is also a pretty old group so age and health are definitely concerns for these guys. Adrian Gonzalez has not done much in fantasy with only 6 HRs, so he could be a good buy-low candidate. Then again, according to Jeff Sullivan, maybe the lack of power is real. The BA is strong as are the RBIs, and nothing really jumps out with his numbers that indicate that this lack of power was expected.

David Freese has played very well for the Pirates this season, and is seemingly outperforming his platoon partner (John Jaso) at first. Freese has value because of the super utility role he has, so he gets a nice amount of playing time. If Jaso continues to struggle, Pirates may consider calling up Josh Bell, which would take some 1B time away from Freese, though not totally stunting his playing time.

Tier 4: Ballads

Matt Adams

James Loney

Dae-Ho Lee

Logan Forsythe

Joe Mauer

Mark Teixeira

Matt Adams will probably see a lot more playing time now that Brandon Moss and Matt Carpenter are on the DL. Always a nice power source and could get some nice RBI opportunities, so he may be worth riding the wave especially if he gets hot.

I wasn’t a huge Loney fan when the Mets initially picked him up, and I wrote about his highs and lows here. Then the power has seemed to come back (.165 ISO), which now makes him a very intriguing player. Could be chalked to small sample size, but may also be because of Kevin Long, as noted on Mets Merized Online. Similarly to Daniel Murphy, Kevin Long has worked on Loney’s stance and approach to hit for more power. Seemingly, it has worked so far and has certainly worked for Murphy since the end of last season.

Mark Teixeira has had a tough season and based on what he has done this year, he should be in a lower tier. I can’t give up on his past years just yet and don’t want to miss out on that potential power surge, hence putting him in the fourth tier. I have nothing more substantial than that.

Tier 5: Blue Train

A.J. Reed

Ryan Zimmerman

Logan Morrison

John Jaso

Tommy Joseph

Byung-Ho Park

Mitch Moreland

Rob Refsnyder

Billy Butler

Yonder Alonso

Chris Johnson

Marwin Gonzalez

I’ve been surprised Reed has struggled the way he has so far. Didn’t think he’d set the world on fire like Tyler White did when he first came up, but thought he would hit better than .138. Out of this group, he has the most upside and would be the most likely guy I would invest in if these were my only options. Zimmerman has been a surprise in that he has been healthy and pretty brutal. Probably unfair I stuck him in the 5th tier and didn’t do the same to Teixeira, but I just don’t see much upside to Zimmerman anymore.

Disabled List (Tiers based upon return)

Matt Carpenter (Tier 2)

Brandon Moss (Tier 3)

Justin Bour (Tier 3)

Lucas Duda (Tier 3)

Steve Pearce (Tier 4)

This week I wanted to take a look at the three top 1B prospects in AAA. I am not suggesting that these players will definitely get called up this season, but these are players I wanted to look at further either because of performance or because of opportunity. The player may not have a direct path right now, but could be moved creating that necessary path. The player may not be called up this season, but may provide value in those deep keeper leagues where minor leaguers hold value and could be an asset next season. Note that this article was written Thursday morning, so some of the stats may be off by a day.
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The worst batted ball in baseball is the pulled grounder. It heads right into the shift, right into the waiting glove. The best batted ball is the pulled fly ball. It soars majestically into the night.

The line between the two is razor thin. Hitters want to get that good wood on the ball and yank it for power, but if they roll over the top at all, it’s the worst idea. That’s why up the middle is the safe idea. You build a safe, solid swing.

But what about the guys living on the razor’s edge? The guys pulling a ton of balls, but pulling them in the air? Maybe they’re doing something that makes their power more believable. They’ve got the best batted ball figured out.

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I currently work in education and one of the subjects I used to teach was fifth-grade social studies. Something I would work on with my students is spectrum thinking. The idea behind this is that there are multiple perspectives when it comes to historical events. Instead of simply telling my students an event from one singular perspective, I tried to provide for them the multiple perspectives in the hopes they could draw their own conclusions about why certain events occurred and which positions were more justified. Admittedly, this was not always effective with all my fifth-graders as some of my students were not developmentally ready for this type of critical thinking. I imagine this would be more effective at a high school level.

The point of bringing this up is not to reminisce about my days as a teacher. In history, things are rarely black or white: there is a lot of gray. When evaluating players, the same can be true. Even when we are right about our predictions, this doesn’t mean that the prediction had an absolute certainty of happening or not happening. There are probabilities for certain things happening and nobody is 100% correct when making their pre-evaluations. I imagine this is not a new concept to those reading this. And even if it is, hopefully you will learn something new from this perspective.

Today, I am going to look at two first basemen who may become relevant depending on how deep your league is. It would be easy for me to dismiss their recent performances, which would make the point of this article pretty useless. I am going to attempt to go through some spectrum thinking by looking at the highs and lows of both hitters. More likely than not, I won’t be able to make any concrete conclusions, but you will hopefully be able to gain some additional perspectives on what values these players could potentially provide. Read the rest of this entry »

I understand that BABIP data is not necessarily complete data. However, I do think there is some value in looking at what players’ BABIP looks like relative to their careers. For this article, I just explored qualified 1B according to Fangraphs data and took out rookies (think: Byung Ho Park) since we don’t have past data to compare it to. Again, this data should not significantly alter your fantasy plans, but is worth considering when looking to buy or sell the MLB qualified first basemen.

For this table, I simply subtracted Career BABIP from the players’ 2016 BABIP. I could’ve included more players, but I wanted to start small instead of filtering out every single player with 1B eligibility regardless of sample size. A positive difference means that a player is outperforming their BABIP, whereas a negative difference means the opposite where a player is underperforming their career BABIP. Here is what the table looks like:
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