Archive for Keeper Strategy

2012 Shortstop Keeper Rankings: First Tier

As you’ve seen, we’ve started to roll out our 2012 keeper rankings. Today we look at the top tier of shortstops, which includes two unsurprising names.

Troy Tulowitzki ($22)

It comes as no surprise that Tulowitzki is in the first tier. Over the past three seasons he has the eighth highest wOBA in baseball, behind only Miguel Cabrera, Joey Votto, Albert Pujols, Jose Bautista, Ryan Braun, Prince Fielder and Kevin Youkilis. No shortstop comes within .20 points of Tulowitzki’s mark of .396. We’re talking keeper rankings, though, so what he did three years ago may not be relevant for 2012. Let’s take a look at last season. The 27-year old had another excellent season, hitting 30 home runs while driving in 105 runs. He doesn’t steal bases anymore, going from 20 in ’09 to nine in ’11, but when you have the power he does it’s a non issue. His strikeout rate was down while the walk rate ticked up. He reverted back to hitting more line drives and fewer ground balls, seeing his LD% jump from 15 to 19.

If patience is a virtue then Tulowitzki is one of the most virtuous players in the game. His Swing, O-Swing and Z-Swing percentages are all well below league average while his Contact, O-Contact and Z-Contact percentages are all above league average. When he sees a pitch he likes, he hits it. It truly is hard to find any flaw in his game. The only time he’s seemed human was May of this year when he put up a .196 BABIP and .278 wOBA. Take out that month and his seasonal wOBA jumps from the ~.380’s to .440. He finished the season as the 28th ranked player according to Yahoo!, which isn’t too far off from his 23rd place finish in 2010. I actually think our values have him ranked a tad low at 25th overall and $22. He’s just starting the prime seasons of his career and plays a premium position in a great hitter’s park. He’s going to remain in this top tier for the foreseeable future.

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Third Base Keeper Rankings: Tier One

I have a bit of an undesirable task of trying to make some kind of sense out of the third base mess from the past season. On the one hand, we have guys like Ryan Zimmerman and David Wright who are typically top shelf third basemen heading into the season. However, if you’ve looked over the FVARz database, you’ll notice their actual fantasy value relative to on-field performance was keeping company with Danny Valencia and Daniel Murphy. So what a top tier at third base for keeper value looks like is probably open to a great deal of debate.

Fortunately, what’s not debatable is who leads off the first tier, and that’s quite obviously Jose Bautista – who ranks a country mile (or should I say country click to honor our friends to the North) ahead of the rest of the pack. The big question after Bautista’s breakout 2010 is what he would provide as an encore, and to my surprise, he was every bit as good in 2011 (in fact, he was better if you count WAR at night to put you to sleep like I do). Bautista improved his batting average, his walk rate, and lowered his strikeout rate and while he was a little dinged up, he still managed to be the only player to hit better than .300, record 40 or more home runs and drive in and score more than 100 runs. He is one of the no-doubters in terms of keepers, certainly considering the dearth of talent at third base.

And now it gets interesting.

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2012 AL Outfielder Keeper Rankings: First Tier

Yesterday, we began the process of unveiling our 2012 keeper rankings here at RotoGraphs, starting with the first tier of catchers and National League outfielders. Today, we get to American League outfielders with tier numero uno.

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2012 NL Outfielder Keeper Rankings: Top Tier

The fantasy season has largely drawn to a close — sure there’s Pick Six all the way until the final out — so it’s time to start thinking about the offseason. Here at RotoGraphs we’ll be unveiling our keeper rankings, tier by tier, position by position. For outfielders and pitchers, we’ll combine them at some point, too.

Here are your top tier National League outfielder keepers this offseason:

Matt Kemp
The number one producer in fantasy baseball last year according to Zach Sanders’ new calculator, Kemp had a season for the ages. One more home run and he would have had the fifth 40/40 season in the history of baseball. Even with slightly more power/speed combo players in baseball these days, it was an exemplary year. The mercurial 27-year-old center fielder put up career highs in hits, home runs, RBI, runs, walks, and stolen bases. That alone makes him a candidate for regression, but it’s nice to see what peripherals were actually in line with his career work. His strikeout rate, for one, improved over last year (23.1% this year, 25.4% last year) but really just settled into to his career rate (23.4%). Maybe his 10.7% walk rate won’t happen again (career 7.9%), but maybe it will. Kemp walked at about an average rate in the minor leagues and patience and power come with age. Speaking of power, his .262 ISO was a career high, but it comes off a steady three-year improvement in that category. He’s also slowly been shifting from hitting ground balls to hitting fly balls — after putting up a 1.4 GB/FB in 2008, he’s steadily pushed that ratio to the 0.9 he showed last year. First you get the fly balls, then you get the power. His HR/FB rate has followed the same steady progression.

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2012 Keeper Rankings for Catchers: 1st Tier

Throughout the season, we ran a series of fantasy rankings for each position at the top of each month to help you keep track of the risers and fallers and to see who might be worth a sell high or buy-low effort.  Well, this week, we are rolling out a series of Keeper Rankings for each position to help you get a leg up on the competition and begin your preparation for the 2012 season.  Each author will take his assigned position and each post will be dedicated to a specific tier within that position.  With that, here is the top tier for catchers in keeper leagues.

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ottoneu Keeper: Matt Joyce

About a year ago, I very happily traded Ian Stewart for Matt Joyce and Reese Havens in an ottoneu league. Joyce was just $3; Stewart was $12 (Havens was also $3 but that isn’t really relevant – this is not a story about my infatuation with MI prospects, which is how I ended up with Stewart in the first place).

I thought this was a steal but the feedback from other owners was basically, “meh.” I was pretty surprised. Sure, Stewart had been a very good player, but he was about to lose 2B eligibility and move to a position where his value was much lower (I also had Ryan Zimmerman and Jose Bautista). I had turned a guy with what I saw as questionable value and a too-high salary into a dirt cheap #2 or #3 OF. But since then, I have heard a ton about every outfielder on the Rays roster (Carl Crawford became a Red Sox, Manny Ramirez and Johnny Damon became Rays, Manny became retired, Sam Fuld became a legend, Desmond Jennings became a star, BJ Upton became trade bait), but Joyce seemed to get lost in the shuffle.

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Keeper Question: Adam Wainwright

How different would the Cardinals’ season have been if Adam Wainwright hadn’t walked off the mound in spring training with a torn ulnar collateral ligament? Their improbable September run surely wouldn’t have been so dramatic, in fact, they may have been closer to the division-winning Brewers than they were to the Wild Card runners-up. It’s even possible to concoct a scenario where they don’t trade Colby Rasmus for bullpen and rotation help, though there’s ample evidence to suggest that Rasmus would have received his marching orders anyway.

At this point, even though losing Wainwright was a big blow, it’s impossible to say the Cards would have progressed any further than they have without him. They’re tied 1-1 with the Brewers in the NLCS, and while a rotation of Chris Carpenter, Wainwright, Jaime Garcia, and Kyle Lohse looks more imposing than Carpenter, Garcia, Lohse, and Edwin Jackson, St. Louis has done more with less all season.

Next season the Cards may or may not have Albert Pujols to key their offense, but they will get Wainwright back, and while that’s not quite a push, it could soften the blow of Pujols’ absence. Of course that assumes Wainwright’s recovery path looks more like Jordan Zimmermann’s or Stephen Strasburg’s than, say, Francisco Liriano’s. This leaves the Cardinals and fantasy owners in largely the same place, wondering which Wainwright will show up in 2012.

While I can’t promise you that Wainwright will take the mound for his first start as though nothing had changed, three factors make me confident that he’s worth keeping.

First, given the state of both the surgical and rehab plans, successes are now much more common than failures. While J. Carl Cook’s words — “minor surgery is surgery someone else is having” — are certainly accurate, repairing a UCL is no longer exotic and unusual in the way it once was. Teams generally have a doctor they like to use, a rehab plan they trust, and results are getting more consistent because of it. For a sense of what the surgery and standard treatment plan are, I highly recommend this piece by Sports Illustrated’s Will Carroll, who does a great job of laying out what the state of the art really is. Regimentation alone doesn’t guarantee a perfect outcome, but it does make it more likely that a player will make a full recovery.

Second, the Cardinals have a track record of getting pitchers back to form quickly after they return to the majors. Even with some consistency in the rehab plan, some teams seem to be more successful than others at getting pitchers back at or near their previous level. The Nationals, for example, have had two key pitchers go under the knife recently and neither seems too worse for the wear. They’re playing it safe with both Zimmermann and Strasburg, but both showed the stuff upon their return that made them top prospects. The Twins, on the other hand, haven’t seen the same level of success in getting pitchers back quickly. Both Joe Nathan and Liriano found success after their surgery, but both took longer than expected to reach that point.

Carpenter had his surgery in the midst of the 2007 season and while he hasn’t been the healthiest pitcher in baseball since then, his elbow is no longer a source of his problems. More recently even than Carpenter, Garcia had the procedure and is another success story. It’s easy to forget that Garcia’s strong rookie campaign in 2010 was also his first year back from his Tommy John surgery. He showed no ill effects in either that season or this one. Like the fine print at the bottom of every investment bank’s ads, past performance is not a guarantee of future results; that said, the team’s recent success in bringing starting pitchers back effectively gives me high hopes for Wainwright’s return.

Finally, Wainwright’s pitch selection had become more varied over the past three seasons. If he were a two-pitch pitcher, I’d be concerned. A pitcher who has only a fastball and one great offspeed offering runs a larger risk of struggling to find command of the slider or curve and getting shelled as hitters wait for a fastball in the zone.

I hate to keep burying Liriano, but this is what happened to his 2009 season — the team understandably wanted him to throw fewer sliders, but this lead to his fastball getting tagged to the tune of 25.4 runs below average. Wainwright throws four pitches, all of which graded as above-average offerings in 2010, which makes it less likely that he’ll find himself in a position where he can’t throw anything for a strike except the fastball.

There is one caveat I should point out before unequivocally recommending that you keep Wainwright: There are very few pitchers I am in favor of keeping, especially in mixed. Pitching is so deep right now that even if you were to lose Wainwright, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to find a suitable replacement. There are considerations to be made based on more than just Wainwright’s health, but those are going to be based on how many players you can or want to keep, as well as league idiosyncrasies.

Wainwright has been worth about 6 wins in both of his last two seasons. Had he done it again in 2011, it would have made him a top-10 pitcher this season, even in a year of very good pitchers. He may not be as sure a thing as Roy Halladay or Clayton Kershaw, but everything I see points to Wainwright entering the 2012 season as an effective pitcher and a solid, top-of-the-rotation fantasy arm.


Carlos Lee: Is There Anything Left?

Carlos Lee is best known for the 6 year, $100M contract he signed with the Astros. While he has not lived up to it as a player, he has be a serviceable fantasy option. His home run power has been going down steadily and it is degrading his fantasy value.

The 35-year-old is seeing his power numbers take a nose dive over the past few years. His home run total have gone down each year starting in 2006 with 37 HR and ending with 18 in 2011. The drop in power can be attributed to his inability to hit the ball as far. Here is a graph of his home run and fly ball distances over the past 4 years with a LOESS averaging curve added:

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Dom Brown Up or Down?

On a team accused of aging quickly — though the space-time continuum has something to say about that — Domonic Brown is the youngest, most exciting offensive piece. But now he’s spent two seasons on the quad-A shuttle and all he has to show for it are some mediocre-looking statistics. Is he still on his way up? Is he a decent keeper?

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