Somebody had to write about Billy Butler, and I do kind of enjoy finding creative ways to say “this guy really sucked,” so let’s get to it, shall we? Here’s the long and short of it, as told through breakfast analogies: Country Breakfast was a full meal for even the heftiest appetite back in 2012. Last year, he played more like Continental Breakfast, albeit one that still had a waffle iron and maybe even some sausage links under a heat lamp. This year, Butler amounted to little more than a bowl of store-brand corn flakes and an overripe banana. Or, say, a crusty croissant. With no butter.

I’m not even sure where to begin, because Butler regressed in so many ways. His nine home runs were his fewest since hitting eight — in a whopping 243 fewer plate appearances — as a rookie in 2007. His isolated power was a career-worst .107. His 6.8% walk rate was a career-low. His 15.9% strikeout rate was 0.4% shy of being a career-high.

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Miguel Cabrera was the third-best first baseman this year by our end-of-year evaluations, but his owners paid first-best fantasy player prices. Take a look at his isolated power — the main missing component this year — over his career, and last year actually looks familiar. Has Cabrera returned to being the player he was earlier in his career?

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Mike Napoli didn’t have quite the campaign in 2014 fantasy baseball players hoped he would. But, given the mid-round price they paid in mixed leagues, they were clearly prepared for some downside. He batted .248 with a .370 OBP in 500 plate appearances, but it’s the 17 home runs (and largely resultant 55 RBIs) that were a bit disappointing and largely the reason he was basically a replacement-level asset in roto leagues this season.

There aren’t any glaring signs of an immediate rebound, either. Napoli will be 33 next year. He has a bad body type. He’s already dealt with various health issues for the past few seasons. He has platoon-split issues. He strikes out pretty frequently. If he isn’t going to hit 25 bombs, then he’s probably not going to be much good in the fake baseball game.

Perhaps there’s some salvageable value, though. Those negatives could drive down his cost significantly. Fantasy owners tend to steer clear of hitters like Napoli. Will he fall, and how much will he, if he does?

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First base has a disproportionate number of hitters who are left-handed and hit for power. As such, there is no position in baseball that has been as impacted by the defensive shift. Pretty much every team has bought into the shift on one level or another, and while some players with extreme pull tendencies escape notice because they do not fit the stereotype (hello Jimmy Rollins!), teams are going to err on the side of shifting players who look like Matt Adams and Lucas Duda.

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On 7/18, Madison Bumgarner changed his positioning on the mound. Eno noted it and Madison Bumgarner confirmed it. Bumgarner has worked to make his pitches (and I presume his release point) very similar through video and in front of a mirror “making sure he sets up in in the right places.”

Eno summed it up: “Bumgarner is ready to make the most of his old playbook. Throw lots of fastballs, cutters, and curves, all from the same release point, all with similar spin, and all exploding out of a slow, deliberate delivery.”

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Adrian Gonzalez was pretty fantasy baseball valuable this year. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ first baseman wasn’t, in the preseason, expected to be quite so fantasy baseball valuable. That made him a good deal. He was 11^th on the RotoGraphs consensus rankings list at first base coming into the 2014 campaign and finished as a top-five commodity after it.

A-Gon is kind of boring, to many fantasy baseball players. I recall conversations prior to the season in which folks basically said as much. He had the look of a reasonable consolation prize if you missed out on the sexier first basemen. A big reason was that he’d seemed to have lost the ability to contribute significant power production, which made the evaluation understandable, but which also seemed a little premature. Mike Podhorzer acknowledged that he had no notable explanations for his “bullish” ranking of Gonzalez but that folks just seemed to be undervaluing him, and Pod was right.

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• Jon Roegele at The Hardball Times examined the recovery success rates for Tommy John surgeries. Here are a couple of the major points.

To summarize, this examination of Tommy John surgery has shown that while the overall success rate has not seemingly improved over time, in recent years players have been able to get back on the field in the same league faster than they did when the surgery was less common.

And

As far as attrition goes, there is naturally a downward trend for return rates as players age. Comparing Tommy John survivors to all major league pitchers (injured and non-injured, in the last column) shows that recovering from the surgery tends to occur at around the same rate as typical pitchers manage to stay in the league for a given age range. Some age bands are better, some worse, but with sample sizes this small for Tommy John patients it is hard to make a definitive statement in this regard.

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It’s quite possible Albert Pujols’s obituary was written a little too soon. I wrote him off; not entirely, but basically. Projection systems liked him fairly well early on; I didn’t, mainly due to injury concerns. Perhaps, that’s indicative of the leagues I play in, and their setup – OBP leagues mostly, where he hasn’t been quite as valuable lately. Either way, I didn’t want much to do with King Albert this season. I owned him in one league – an Ottoneu points league, purchased for $23 ($400 budget). I wish I had owned him in more. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple months ago, Landon Jones wrote this column about Anthony Rizzo’s impressive adjustments in 2014. In that piece, Landon focused on Rizzo’s improvement against fastballs, as well as his altered approach. Obviously, not much has changed since Landon wrote that article, so I’m not going to bother retreading any territory he already covered (especially since I agree with his analysis).

However, there is one area of Rizzo’s game that I feel we could certainly talk a bit more about, and that’s his newfound ability to hit southpaws. This has always been my big reservation with Rizzo, stretching back to his days as a prospect, and it wasn’t so much a bat-speed issue for me, as it was concern regarding his swing plane.

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Just in case you didn’t know, Chris Carter finished the season tied for second in home runs with Giancarlo Stanton. Also in the top five were Nelson Cruz, Mike Trout and Jose Abreu. One of these is obviously not like the others, although Cruz is a cut below Stanton, Trout and Abreu yet still a cut above Carter. We all know that Carter is a one-trick pony (or a three-true outcome pony), but it’s amusing how different he is from the rest of this group when you look at something other than home runs. For example, the three studs in the top five all had a wOBA over .400 for the year while Carter’s was .346. And those three studs all contributed at least 40 offensive runs more than average while Carter contributed just shy of 13 more than average.

For the purposes of this column, it’s more important to note that the production of all four other guys in the top five of home runs was essentially worth $30 or more. Carter’s production was worth about $15. To be fair, Carter vastly out-earned the $1 at which I had him valued in the preseason, but this just illustrates how truly limiting the batting average is even when the power production is as good as you can expect it to be. Read the rest of this entry »