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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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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 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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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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A classic “which player would you rather have?” scenario:

Player A: .299/.366/.541 with 37 HR, 105 R, 99 RBI, and 9 SB
Player B: .301/.412/.547 with 31 HR, 90 R, 94 RBI, and 2 SB

From a fantasy perspective, these two players are pretty close. B has a better slash line, while A has better counting stats and doesn’t lose the slash categories by a meaningful amount. If we’re looking at AVG instead of OBP, I’d rather have A, but if I’m stuck with B, I’m hardly rending my clothes in mourning. If we introduce opportunity cost into the equation, my preference is stronger: Player A likely wasn’t available to you unless you had the first overall pick in your draft, while Player B was probably on the wire until about mid-April. Give me B and a first-round pick. Read the rest of this entry »

With the season at an end, it is time for those in keeper leagues to turn to the off-season, and for ottoneu players, this starts with one of the most unique parts of the ottoneu format – the arbitration process.

The process itself is actually quite simple:

• Every owner votes for one player on every other team
• The player on each team who receives the most votes becomes a free agent
• At the preseason auction, each owner gets a $5 discount on the player voted off his team

See? Simple.

But if you haven’t been through it before, the strategy can be a bit confusing. Having played five previous seasons of ottoneu fantasy baseball, I wanted to give you my take on the most common voting strategies.
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Not a lot has gone well for the Red Sox in September, that much has been well documented, but someone forgot to tell Jacoby Ellsbury to pack it up. Red Sox hitters are hitting .278/.339/.463 with 32 HR, a quarter of which belong to Ellsbury as part of his .365/.408/.687 line in 125 PAs this month. His line for the season is equally compelling: .322/.377/.554 with 32 HR and 38 SB. Whether he is the AL MVP remains to be seen, but he’s certainly performed like an MVP, keeping the Red Sox afloat despite the pitching staff’s best efforts to the contrary.

There’s not an owner out there ruing having Ellsbury — John Henry included — so It may seem like a no-brainer to keep Ellsbury, especially given his nearly double-digit WAR. But just like his lost 2010 season didn’t do much to influence his 2011 campaign, 2012 isn’t 2011. Having a realistic sense of how much of his value he’ll keep is the key to making a sober keeper decision.

One factor will change this analysis right from the top, and that’s whether your league uses an articulated outfield or whether you just need to fill 3-5 general OF spots. If you need a CF instead of just an OF, Ellsbury enjoys a nice boost to his value, as his competition at that spot is much less compelling than if RF and LF are included.

Looking solely at Ellsbury’s WAR is going to artificially inflate his fantasy value as his 16.8 runs saved on defense is virtually irrelevant in this context; it matters more when evaluating a Red Sox pitcher than it does for Ellsbury himself. Instead, looking at wOBA is going to give us a pretty good sense of how he’s contributing in the offensive categories most leagues care about. He doesn’t suffer much for the switch, as his .403 wOBA means that he remains a top-10 player, but it does position him more accurately as one of best players this season rather than the prohibitive leader.

The two parts of Ellsbury’s game that I see being the least likely to spontaneously regress are his base-stealing and his batting average. At some point, his speed will start to fade, but age-28 seems awfully early. How much he runs will depend a little on how the Red Sox choose to set up their batting order, but I don’t see much chance that he both stays healthy and doesn’t steal 30 bases. His speed is also an asset in terms of batting average, which has been stably high for almost his entire career — injury vacated 2010 notwithstanding.

What determines Ellsbury’s 2012 draft position and what will make a big impact in any keeper decision is whether or not you think his power — or at least some part of it — will stick around for another season.

The player that just keeps coming to mind as a comparison for Ellsbury’s spontaneous display of concentrated aggression is Joe Mauer. Mauer’s 28 home runs in 2009 seemed to indicate that the power you’d expect from a player of his size was finally showing up and it certainly influenced not only his fantasy values, but also his massive new contract. Two years later, Mauer has hit less than half of that 2009 total with just 12 home runs total since the start of the 2010 season. I’m not necessarily suggesting that Ellsbury is going to lose most of next season to bilateral leg weakness, but the sense that we’ve probably seen his peak value this season is right.

Like Mauer, Ellsbury saw his HR/FB take a huge leap this season, though his rose about 7 percent, where Mauer’s jumped over 10 percent from his career norm. Just because it’s a comparatively smaller leap doesn’t make Ellsbury’s any more sustainable per se, but it means that if he regresses to his career norms again next year, the drop won’t be quite so drastic.

30 HR power has never been part of the scouting report on Ellsbury, and while scouting reports aren’t gospel, there aren’t many guys who make the leap from “average to good gap power” to “potential cleanup hitter” and can make the change stick. If he hits 15 home runs next year, it would still be his second best season ever and yet less than half his total from this year. The question you need to ask yourself as an owner is whether that potential drop of 15-20 HR is a deal-breaker for you.

To me, unless you’re burdened with an outfield of Ellsbury, Matt Kemp, and Jose Bautista with just three spots to fill and no UTL, Ellsbury is going to bring enough to the table to be worth keeping. He’s going to give you solid SB and AVG numbers, and will be driven in a fair amount by the rest of the Red Sox’s order, which gives him at least three categories where he’s a huge asset. Just don’t let this year’s outburst prevent you from either keeping or drafting a more consistent power threat to pair with him. Let whatever power remains next year be a bonus, not a driving force behind the decision to keep him.

Today’s suggested Would You Rather comes via email from someone named SuicideKing and I couldn’t be happier about posting it here.  Talk about throwing something right in your wheelhouse!  If you’ve been reading all season, you’ll know I’ve never been shy about my dislike for drafting Joe Mauer as high as he usually goes and that I’ve been a huge Alex Avila fan all year.  But this is business here, so let’s do an objective comparison and then I’ll turn it over to the rest of you for further discussion.

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It’s the final week of our look-ahead to the 2012 fantasy baseball season by highlighting potential impact rookies at each position. Because it’s never too early to begin thinking about next year, even if you’re trying to win your league right now. And for those of you in keeper leagues, particularly deeper ones, these primers will be especially helpful, because you’ll find out which young players may be worth snatching up now — before other owners get a clue — so you can hang onto them next season, when their value kicks in. Think of it like an investment requiring only a little up-front cost that could pay off big in the near future.

Much like my Mining the Minors columns on this site, which focus on current-season impact more than long-term upside, these 2012 rookie primers are meant for players who will fulfill or are expected to fulfill their rookiedom next year. Also much like my MTM work, the point here is to find the right mix of opportunity and talent, so that you’re picking up a player who can contribute, either in a starting role or as a reserve, from Day 1 or soon thereafter. Chances are, I’ll hit on many of these same players in depth at some point in future Mining the Minors columns, but for now, it’s good to get ahead of the curve with a snapshot of the talent at each position.

To give you a brief idea of just how this sort of thing can be worthwhile, I’m in two deep keeper leagues, one AL-only and one NL-only, and around this time last year, I picked up Mark Trumbo, Jordan Walden and Brandon Beachy. Worked out pretty well, if I do say so myself.

Click on the position to see previous primers: Catchers, First Base, Second Base, Third Base, Shortstop, Outfielders

Here are the starting pitchers.

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