At the time of this writing, there are 37 major league hitters with a wRC+ of 150 or higher. There are the usual suspects: Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, and Nolan Arenado are on the leaderboard to no one’s surprise. There are exciting young prospects, including Mitch Haniger, Aaron Judge, and Joey Gallo. Then there are unexpected names like Eric Thames, Cesar Hernandez, and Robbie Grossman.

Lengthy articles could be, and have been, written about any of the players above. One player who hasn’t received much publicity despite some relatively prolonged success is Grossman.

He checks in with a 158 wRC+ in 67 plate appearances so far this year. Steamer projects a .322 wOBA and 99 wRC+ for the rest of the season (ROS), and that projection puts him just a few ticks behind his highly-touted teammate Max Kepler. Although Kepler is three years younger and may have a higher ceiling, the point is that name recognition can play a pretty big role in how we analyze players.

Also, Grossman used to be bad. From 2013 to 2015, he had just a .281 wOBA and 77 wRC+ in 202 plate appearances against left-handed pitching, despite being a switch hitter. Since 2016, however, Grossman has a .417 wOBA and 166 wRC+ in 170 plate appearances against lefties. Even with his early-career struggles against lefties, Grossman now has a lifetime .344 wOBA and 118 wRC+ against them. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I inaugurated RotoGraphs’ Small-Sample Normalization Services, or SSNS. Said services attempt to contextualize good and bad starts within a particular player’s history of achievements (or lack thereof). Assessing player performance based on small samples seems distinctly difficult in April, when, for whatever reason, we perceive players with tattered histories as blank slates. Occasionally, there’s merit to these perceptions. More often, we find out a player’s April is no different than his May or June or July, for example, when a small-sample performance might go less noticed than it would when starting from zeroes.

Here are a handful of players that have caught my eye lately.

Name: Jason Vargas, KCR SP
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Starling Marte was suspended for 80 games on Tuesday after testing positive for Nandrolone back in Spring Training and then losing the subsequent appeal. Let’s be honest, the first thought for most of you was how it impacts your fantasy league, whether you have Marte or not. Replacing him will be no easy feat. He was a firm second rounder all draft season, going at pick 23 on average and falling no lower than pick 36 in NFBC drafts.

Despite losing 10 homers off his 2015 total, he still finished as the fifth-best outfielder last year according to ESPN’s Player Rater. Over the last four seasons, Marte has averaged 13 HR and 37 SB with a .292/.349/.448 line despite only once playing more than 135 games (153 in ‘15). He is coming off a career-high 47 SB and has at least 30 in each of the four seasons. Speed is the driving force behind his value and will be the toughest aspect replace. We’ll look at the potential in-house replacements as well as a group of available outfielders at the various sites worth considering.

IN-HOUSE

Austin Meadows, the team’s top prospect, was the first name to cross everyone’s mind when they heard about the suspension. However, GM Neal Huntington has suggested that Meadows isn’t quite ready just yet:

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Just before the season started, the FanGraphs staff (including RotoGraphs contributors) was asked to make its official predictions for the upcoming season. We took our best shot at predicting the playoff teams, MVP and Cy Young Award winners, and Rookies of the Year for 2017. Perhaps in the coming weeks we will check in with the top picks for MVP and Cy Young, but in this article, we’re going to look at the top rookies.

Our staff picks on the American League side had Andrew Benintendi (40 votes) as the overwhelming favorite to be named the league’s top rookie, with Jharel Cotton (4) and Mitch Haniger (4) rounding out the top three.

Over in the National League, Dansby Swanson (27 votes) was the favorite by a wide margin, followed by Robert Gsellman (12), Manuel Margot (5), and Hunter Renfroe (4).

While it’s extremely early and still much too soon to make any concrete statements about who will win this year’s awards, let’s take a look at the wide-ranging early season performances of the players we expect to be the game’s top newcomers: Read the rest of this entry »

With about a week of 2017 baseball data in the books, there are already thousands of innings, plate appearances, and batted balls to parse through. We’ve seen a perfect game bid, a cycle, multi-home run performances, and a huge lead blown in the ninth. Unfortunately, something else we’ve seen are injuries to key players. Like the crack of the bat and pop of the glove, injuries are a part of the spot. They’re bad for the player, the team, the fans — and fantasy owners.

When a key player on your fantasy roster gets injured, it often leaves you scrambling to fill the unexpected hole. The following exercise is designed to help you survive such situations. We’re going to look at viable players who are readily available in most fantasy leagues. To qualify for this list, a player must be owned in less than 50% of all Ottoneu fantasy leagues, based on the Ottoneu Average Salaries page. He also must be able to help your team right now (i.e., no prospects).

Getting right to the list, here are of five players worth a shot in an emergency who are owned in less than 50% of Ottoneu leagues, along with their positional eligibility, average salary, and owned percentage: Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t mean to over-hype anyone. Or maybe I do. I don’t know. I seek to provide an adequate amount of hype and keep things in perspective. That said, I’m pretty excited about Josh Bell. You may know him, you may not; he’s slated to be the Pirates’ primary first baseman, maybe with a little bit of backup outfielding thrown in. Josh Shepardson talked about him and his general skill set in November. Bell’s young and a several-time top prospect, although the highest he ever reached on any given list was MLB.com’s, at No. 34 overall prior to 2015. Nothing to sneeze at, but he never carried the same hype as, say, Yoan Moncada currently does. He’s Eric Longenhagen’s No. 50 prospect this year and KATOH’s No. 25. Knowing the gory math that goes into KATOH, I’m very partial to it. Also, all of this suggests I’m not early to any kind of party here. I’m reluctant to claim as much. I just can’t help but produce my own tributes every now and then.

Bell walked more than he struck out last year. As a rookie. That’s what gets to me. Not that it’s never been done before, and it’s not like it was a huge sample size — 153 plate appearances. I found plenty of examples in the last 25 years to compare; Bell’s rookie season is almost a dead ringer for that of Doug Mientkiewicz, a first-ballot Surname Hall of Famer but otherwise mediocre ballplayer with a decent three-year peak.

Where Bell diverges from Mientkiewicz — and everyone else, for that matter — is his hard-hit rate (Hard%). Mientkiewicz decidedly did not hit the ball hard. Among rookies since 2002 (because that’s as far back as our batted ball data from Baseball Info Solution dates) who notched at least a .130 isolated power (ISO), none hit the ball as hard as Bell. Again, small samples, but this is already a decent list to top.

When we expand the sample from rookies to all hitters in that same timeframe, things become even more interesting. Here’s a list of every hitter, in no particular order, who, in any given season, minimum 150 PAs, achieved (1) more walks than strikeouts, (2) an ISO better than .130, and (3) a hard-hit rate better than 33 percent.

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This post was inspired by Trey Baughn’s Bargain Shopping: Five for $5 from December. With just days remaining before the start of the 2017 baseball season, most fantasy auctions and drafts are completed. However, since some will take place this week, and since most fantasy owners are always interested in making savvy moves to improve their rosters, now is as good a time as any to talk about fantasy bargains. To qualify for this list, players must simply cost less than $6 on the Ottoneu Average Salaries page (sorted by “All game types”) and be beyond rookie status. Getting right into the list: Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s finish up the hitting side of Pod’s Picks and Pans with a look at the outfielders. Since we draft so many of them, there are far more opportunities for disagreement. For this position, I’ll only consider Picks to be those in my top 60 and Pans to be those in the consensus top 60.

Outfielders March Rankings Update

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We are updating our rankings for the stretch run of draft season!

We’re using Yahoo! eligibility requirements which is 5 starts or 10 appearances. These rankings assume the standard 5×5 categories and a re-draft league. If we forgot someone, please let us know in the comments and we’ll make sure he’s added for the updates. If you have questions for a specific ranker on something he did, let us know in the comments. We can also be reached via Twitter:

• Paul Sporer
• Jeff Zimmerman
• Mike Podhorzer
• Brad Johnson
• Justin Mason
• Al Melchior

There will be differences, sharp differences, within the rankings. The rankers have different philosophies when it comes to ranking, some of which you’re no doubt familiar with through previous iterations. Of course the idea that we’d all think the same would be silly because then what would be the point of including multiple rankers?! Think someone should be higher or lower? Make a case. Let us know why you think that. The chart is sortable. If a ranker didn’t rank someone that the others did, he was given that ranker’s last rank +1.

February Editions:

• OF
• SP
• 1B
• SS
• 3B
• 2B
• C
• RP

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The 2017 World Baseball Classic has been riveting thus far. Many of the teams are loaded, and the players and fans have been wildly into it. Saturday’s game between the Dominican Republic and the United States was perhaps the greatest heavyweight match-up the game has ever seen. The lineups on both sides were absurd, and the game lived up to the hype. The Dominicans overcame a 5-0 deficit to win in dramatic style, 7-5.

The Dominican lineup could be the best ever, but the United States gives them a run for their money. Since the majority of FanGraphs readers are, presumably, American, and pulling for Team U.S.A., it struck me that it would be fun to analyze the roster from a fantasy perspective. Although many on the roster are undisputed stars, there are overrated players, players to avoid for other reasons, and potential bargains mixed in. Let’s get right into it, analyzing the starting position players on Team U.S.A.: Read the rest of this entry »