The base off-season has officially begun and that means it is time to start looking forward to the 2012 season and projecting player performance. One of the most difficult categories to project any significant change in is stolen bases. Steals are as much of a result of speed and base stealing ability as it is opportunity and the mere willingness to run. I decided to sort all qualified hitters by Spd Score, which was originally created by Bill James and includes stolen base percentage, frequency of stolen base attempts, percentage of triples, and runs scored percentage. Although I am not a big fan of the metric since runs scored percentage is too team dependent to be included in the statistic, Spd Score is pretty much the best speed metric available by default. I compared the top Spd Score hitters to their stolen base totals to determine who may see a spike next year.

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This batch of American League outfielders is the smallest. The reason? Unlike those from the first tier, none of these players can be counted on to be an OF1 because of some kind of flaw, obstacle or hiccup…but all three of them are also capable of being your top OF in the end, if you squint through the appropriately-colored glasses.

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The top of the outfielder food chain is a crowded place. Between our first National League tier, the first American League tier, and these three talented dudes, we’ve already got nine excellent players. It seems to make sense to wait to pick your OF1 in mixed leagues, doesn’t it?

Tier One
Matt Kemp
Ryan Braun

Tier Two
Justin Upton
Little Brother did a lot of things right this year. He cut his strikeout rate to one that was better than league average for the first time (18.7% in 2011, 23.9% career). He hit a career high in home runs, runs, RBI, and stolen bases. His ISO was the best of his career, too (.240 in 2011, .211 career). In the end, only five outfielders in all of baseball outproduced Upton last year.

The fact that there’s no obvious outlier in his peripherals can only be considered a good thing. Sure, he hit all those career highs, but all of them were within hailing distance of his career numbers (other than, perhaps, strikeout rate). His BABIP (.319) was reasonable and below his career number (.337). His increase in power was tied to an increase in fly balls, but even that seems sustainable. he hit 44.8% fly balls last year, and his career number is 41%.

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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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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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Power is typically the hardest to come by in free agent pools across the land, but Josh Willingham and Logan Morrison were likely undrafted in many shallower leagues (think 12-team and fewer mixed leagues), yet contributed solidly in the homer category. Let’s see what we might expect for 2012.

Josh Willingham

Jason Catania discussed him a bit yesterday, but I wanted to look a little more in-depth. Willingham is a free agent this off-season and has always hit in pitcher’s park. Of course, that hasn’t stopped him from posting a .214 career ISO, but it will still be interesting to see where he ends up. Willingham is an extreme fly ball hitter, which is what you love to see from a power guy, though it does hurt one’s BABIP, and resulting batting average. His HR/FB has jumped around between 11.3% in 2010 to a career high 17.5% this past season. It would probably be wise to assume a bit of decline in his FB% (maybe to the mid-40% mark, rather than high-40%), while his HR/FB dips as well, though his new home park may have some effect here.

The good news is that although those two factors would take a bite out of his home run total, his contact rate should improve from its career worst mark. As Jason mentioned, health is the key for Willingham, but if it cooperates, another season of mid-20 home run production to follow. And if all the stars align, he does have the skills to clear the 30-homer plateau for the first time.

Logan Morrison

After hitting just two home runs in all of 2010 (albeit in just 244 at-bats), Morrison surprised many by swatting 23 out of the park this season. But maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised. In early 2009, he fractured his right wrist, causing him to miss two months of action and he complained of continued soreness during spring training in 2010. This would help to explain the power outage. In 2007 in Single-A, he hit 24 homers in 453 at-bats with a .216 ISO, so the power skills had certainly been displayed before. That said, he needs to hit more fly balls to increase my confidence in the power being sustainable, and it is hard to believe he will come close to repeating an 18.1% HR/FB ratio.

He should absolutely see more at-bats next season, assuming he doesn’t miss another meet-and-greet or have a Twitter battle with new manager Ozzie Guillen. So although the rate of homers is sure to decrease, his increased playing time should ensure another season of 20+ homers. Factor in a .265 BABIP that should jump and you have a guy who may even yield a profit versus his draft day cost.

For the first time in 14 seasons, Bobby Abreu failed to record double-digit totals in both home runs and stolen bases.  He picked up 21 steals this season, but his power fell off considerably as he only hit 8 home runs and posted his lowest ISO (.112) since his very first cup of coffee with the Astros in 1996.  And for the second consecutive season, he posted a batting average in the .250’s, also reminiscent of his late 90’s time in Houston.  Now, no one wants to be the one left holding the bag when the bottom falls out on a star player, so the question that fantasy owners must ask themselves on Draft Day 2012 is, “Is he done or can we squeeze one more productive season out of him?”

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Baseball is a grind. It’s 162 games played nearly every day over a six-month period. By extension, then, the fantasy version of this unending onslaught of a sport can be — and often is — just as overwhelming.

Look, it happens: Late-summer hits and the portion of your brain that was tending to your fantasy baseball team on a regular basis instead shifts its focus to other things, like vacation, fantasy football or the hot chick named Tiffany who spent the summer as a lifeguard at the local beach and hung out all the time at your favorite bar.

That’s why, unless your team was good enough to be in contention all the way down to the stretch run, chances are, you missed out on a few things as the season wore on, particularly into August and September. That’s when the non-contenders tend to check out (if they haven’t done so weeks before), but it’s also about the time that even those chasing after that elusive championship start suffering from tunnel vision as their eyes become focused solely on the prize.

Now that we’re a couple weeks removed from the crush and rush of the final days of the fantasy season, allow me to point out a batch of American League outfielders who performed better than you might have realized, thanks to end-of-season surges or new opportunities. There just might be a nugget or two in here that you didn’t notice the first time around. You know, while you were too busy ogling Tiffany.

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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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