I’ll freely admit that this column is highly speculative in nature, and based on plenty of assumptions. However, that’s kind of what this time of year is for as a fantasy writer. It’s the time of year when you start going through your “What ifs” for the next season, and I think I have a pretty intriguing “What if” scenario for John Jaso.

For the second consecutive year, Jaso had his season cut short due to continued concussion symptoms. For very good reason, this has led to some speculation regarding Jaso’s future behind the plate, or possible lack thereof. The A’s already took steps in 2014 to get his bat in the lineup at designated hitter, but even with his 32 starts at DH, the 47 starts he made behind the dish proved to be too many, and Jaso’s 2014 season ended just like 2013 did.

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• OK, I got the data finally cleaned up. I have quite a few players added who look to be back for 2015, but I will keep them on until some resolution is complete. For example, John Hamilton is messed up. I will keep him on there to track him until he is playing 100%. Basically, I would rather have a potentially healthy player on the list than miss someone who may be hurt.

• Quite a few players state they will be ready for spring training which is vague. For any player giving spring training as a return time, I set their date to February in the spreadsheet.

• Adam Wainwright’s elbow is acting up as gets near the point when pitchers have their second Tommy John surgery. He came back pitching in 2012. Since then he has thrown three full seasons (582 IP) and nine post season games (54 IP). He is at the sweet spot for when pitchers need their 2nd TJS as I state in this Hardball Times article:

I ran a brief study using the up-to-date TJS database and found those pitchers who had their first TJS from before 2011 averaged 4.5 years until they needed to go under the knife again, with a median time of 4.0 years. These numbers are in the ballpark of the 650 innings value we originally found.

The seasons are bit on the low side, but he is at 636 innings. No matter how the post season goes for him, I will not be paying top dollar for him next season

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Episode 173

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

RotoGraphs writer Zach Sanders and Nicholas Minnix discuss:

Alex Rios; Adam Wainwright; Yasiel Puig; Bryce Harper; Shelby Miller; and, right in Zach’s wheelhouse, the end-of-season catcher rankings, which went up at the beginning of this week.

As usual, don’t hesitate to tweet us or comment with fantasy questions so that we may answer them in our next episode.

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The Oakland Athletics are undoubtedly quite pleased with the breakout at the plate of Derek Norris in 2014. He batted .270/.361/.403 in 442 plate appearances, posting obvious career bests in AVG and playing time, both of which proved useful to fantasy baseball players.

Two aspects of Norris’ production in his supposed breakthrough season seem to warn his owners not to get too far ahead of the backstop’s train, however. He hit 10 home runs, but eight of them came before the All-Star break, in only 28 more PAs than he accrued after the season’s faux midpoint. His uptick in PT could be traced to team need as well as some notable gains in his splits versus right-handed pitchers early in the year, especially in terms of strikeouts, something I chronicled in June, but that discipline against same-handed pitchers faded as the season wore on.

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The last backstop with positive value – OK, basically, he was a zero, but we’re looking at the bright side, here – in 2014, according to the Zach Sanders end-of-season catcher rankings, is none other than Tyler Flowers. That finish of 16^th among those whose primary responsibilities came behind the plate – so, excluding Carlos Santana and Joe Mauer – made him a viable option for those in two-C mixed leagues all season.

No rational person would have predicted that the Chicago White Sox’s squatter would continue to produce like he did in March/April: .354/.398/.415 in 88 plate appearances. He struck out 35.2% of the time that month and registered a .560 BABIP. The starting surge came without much in the way of extra-base hits, as the .061 ISO that month demonstrated. If Flowers wasn’t going to hit any bombs, what good was he? Some serious regression was on its way, and it was probably going to include a rest-of-the-way batting average of about .150.

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A quick skim through Zach Sanders’ catcher rankings reveals some familiar faces.

Buster Posey sits at the top. Breakout sensation Devin Mesoraco is third. Evan Gattis, Miguel Montero and Travis d’Arnaud are all there.

And ranking eighth: Dioner Navarro?
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I’ve been a staunch supporter of Wilin Rosario for awhile now, and was especially high on him coming into this year. As I pointed out in my preseason Bold Predictions column, the 25-year-old had hit 49 homers in his two previous seasons, and was reportedly set to start playing some first base, to keep his bat in the lineup on an everyday basis.

As it turned out, Rosario played first base for a measly 25 innings in 2014, likely due in no small part to the fact that Justin Morneau had his best season since 2010. Still, that extra playing time for Rosario never materialized. He ended up hitting the disabled list twice — once in May with a viral infection, and again in August with wrist inflammation — limiting him to 106 games.

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The verb in the headline is a person. But once a person has broken out like Devin Mesoraco has this year, the first instinct is to look for lightning to strike again in the same fashion. Given the season Grandal just had — 15th-best in the end-of-season rankings — maybe he’s even further along than Devin Mesoraco once was. Maybe it’s still fair to wonder if he can Devin Mesoraco.

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The Astros apparently listened to their analytics team when they acquired Collin McHugh. You see, McHugh’s spin rate on his curveball is exceptional. Maybe it’s not quite that cut and dry, we’ve talked about his move to the four-seamer over the two-seamer was great for him. But read this newest snippet on McHugh and you’ll see that spin rate was huge for his acquisition:

The Astros’ analysts noticed that McHugh had a world-class curveball. Most curves spin at about 1,500 times per minute; McHugh’s spins 2,000 times. The more spin, the more the ball moves during the pitch—and the more likely batters are to miss it. Houston snapped him up. “We identified him as someone whose surface statistics might not indicate his true value,” says David Stearns, the team’s 29-year-old assistant general manager.

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Every season brings with it a new crop of breakouts; some are real, while some are mirages. Oftentimes, a “breakout season” ends up being that player’s career year, and I think we saw that with several players this year. What I’m going to do today is just briefly touch on three players that I think played themselves into unreasonable expectations for 2015.

Danny Santana

I really like Santana. In fact, I really like everyone I’m writing about in this column, I just see significant gaps between their actual skill level and perceived 2015 fantasy value. Santana is pretty much the posterboy for this mindset, as I was thoroughly impressed by the 23-year-old this year. I think he has a future as a very valuable utility knife, he’s just not a top-five — or likely even top-ten — fantasy shortstop.

Santana was indeed a top-five fantasy shortstop from the moment he took over as the Twins’ leadoff hitter at the beginning of June — he was ranked No. 10 overall for the season, but was easily top-five from June on. His lowest on-base plus slugging in any given month this year was actually in June, when he put up a .773 OPS. Aside from that month, he was well into the .800s all year.

The problem is, Santana probably won’t be a top-ten fantasy shortstop next year, because he was pretty clearly playing well over his head this year. Through 692 plate appearances between Double-A and Triple-A, Santana hit two home runs. This year in the majors, he hit seven in 430 PA.

I believe in the speed, and think he can be a 20-25 steal guy annually, although I’ll be curious to see if he can replicate the success rate of his 20-for-24 mark from this season. From 2011-2013, Santana stole 71 bases, but was also caught stealing a somewhat startling 39 times.

I’m clearly not buying the power, and he’ll likely never pile up the runs like he did this year, either. While his .319 batting average this year was very impressive, this is a career .273 minor-league hitter in 2,352 PA. His batting average on balls in play in the majors was .405. Furthermore, his ugly plate discipline (4.4% BB-rate, 22.8% K-rate) is uninspiring, to put it mildly.

I think most of you came into this column knowing that Santana isn’t quite the player he looked like this year, but keep in mind when planning for 2015 that he played above his actual talent level in nearly every category this season. Santana is a classic regression candidate in just about every way possible.

Josh Harrison

The 27-year-old Harrison is much the same story as Santana, in that he likely played above his head in many ways this season. It’s not that he’d never shown power before, it’s that he had never shown much over-the-fence power. Harrison has always produced his fair share of doubles and triples, keeping his isolated power well above .100 for most of his minor- and major-league career.

However, coming into 2014, Harrison had never hit more than seven homers in any given year of his professional career. Whether Harrison’s 2014 approach is sustainable or not is one question, but it’s certainly fair to look at his 13 homers — nearly twice his previous career high in the majors or minors — as a bit of a fluke.

Furthermore, if/when his .353 BABIP from 2014 regresses, he doesn’t have the plate discipline to compensate. Harrison’s 4.0% walk rate this year was actually a massive improvement from his career 2.6% walk rate coming into the season, and it was still awfully low. This all, of course, means fewer opportunities to steal bases and score runs.

Like Santana, I think Harrison has a long, productive major-league career ahead of him as a super-utility type, but I fear we’ve seen his best season.

Johnny Cueto

I’m not going to get too long-winded about Cueto, as Mike Petriello wrote a great column on him just a couple weeks ago. I’m just going to throw my own two cents in. Seeing as Cueto has maintained a sub-3.00 ERA for four years now, I’m obviously not referring to his season as a “breakout” — Cueto’s breakout came in 2011, and it was legit. It’s hard to doubt that he’s a truly elite fantasy commodity, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that we’re probably not going to see his career-high 8.94 K/9 strikeout rate again.

Cueto didn’t really do anything all that different to explain why a guy with a career 7.30 K/9 in nearly a thousand innings coming into 2014 suddenly started striking out a batter per inning. Which is why I just can’t trust it at all. As Mike pointed out in the above-linked column, Cueto generated a ton of whiffs with his change this year, but his overall 9.8% swinging strike rate wasn’t far off his career mark of 9.1%.

Batters swung at 35.6% of Cueto’s pitches outside the zone, a career high, and he threw more first-pitch strikes (62.9%) than ever before. However, just like the change-up whiff rate, both of those marks were very minor improvements on the numbers he’s been putting up for the last few years. I guess I can explain why Cueto suddenly spiked his strikeout rate; he was just a little bit better than he usually is in a few different ways, and the sum of those parts was a career-high strikeout rate.

This year was pretty much the idealized version of an already-great pitcher. I just can’t quite see him ever again having as much fantasy value as he did in 2014.