Mike Trout was the MVP of baseball this year. He had to fend off a good season from Mookie Betts, but there was no questioning that Trout was amazing. Flip to the fantasy world and it was Betts who triumphed over Trout. With an extra 49 plate appearances and slightly better 5×5 numbers, Betts did just enough to score $3 higher than our favorite fish. Of course, if you happen to play in an OBP league, Trout’s .441 OBP destroyed Betts’ .363 OBP. Real baseball is an OBP league.

In case you’re just tuning into this series for the first time, I recommend going back in time and starting from the beginning. Luckily, you won’t need a time machine. The post on catchers has notes on important methodological changes. You can also go straight into the calculator to tweak values for your league.

For these articles, I’m going to assume a 12 team, 5×5, standard deep roster with a pitching cap of 1475 innings (most leagues are 1450 or 1500, I split the difference). I set the batter split at 65% because that produces what I consider to be the most realistic position adjustments.

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Carlos Santana had/is having quite the season. It’s his best by virtually any metric. Pick slugging, isolated slugging, strikeout rate, batting average, hits, home runs, even baserunning runs, and you’ll get either a career-best or second-best effort this year. He ended up the 10th-best fantasy first baseman and we have so many positive changes to choose from if we want to say why he was so good this year.

Here’s my guess: he swung more this year. I’ll explain, but it’s clear from his career-low walk rate and career-high swing rate that he was more aggressive. That might have been more important than anything else he did, and that might give us a road map to finding other mid-career breakouts like Santana.

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Wrapping up my position-by-position look at the 2016 power surge, we hit third base and outfield today. If you missed the first two pieces, here are the catcher/first base and second base/shortstop ones.

THIRD BASE

The hot corner didn’t set any records with its power output in 2016, but the 17 hitters who popped at least 20 homers tied for the third highest ever. The previous highs had a Giants-like even year pattern with 2004 (17), 2006 (21), and 2008 (18) being the other three seasons with at least 17 hitters achieving the feat. Homers have been on the rise at third base the last three years with just eight reaching 20+ HR in 2014 and then 15 last year.

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We’ve done a good thing for those of you that still care about fantasy baseball right now. The Auction Calculator now has 2016 stats as an option so that you can look backwards at what has just happened. That’s going to be part of our effort, on the way to the end of the year, to look at last year to learn more for next year.

This is an important part of fantasy that usually gets ignored. Not only does the league itself change year to year, so retrospection is important in that way, but we can learn things about fantasy itself that will improve our ability to value players going forward.

The fourth-best player in the game last year, by this list, has already inspired a possible change to the auction calculator going forward. Let’s see what else it jars loose.

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Joe Camp won his league, probably because he reads us and listens to our podcasts here, I dunno, but that’s my guess, totally not because he’s an Associate Professor of electrical engineering. Anyway, he won his league, and his leaguemates started chirping about a couple trades he made that year that may have appeared lopsided at the time — my personal opinion is that vetoes suck, and are a dampener on league activity, and we should all be active and talking to each other as much as possible, so if you were on it, you would have made that lopsided trade first — and so Mr. Camp set out to prove he would have won the league anyway.

The way he did it? He took the worst team in the league and replaced everyone on the team with the best free agent pickups of the year. He then compared that team with everyone’s originally drafted teams. The free agents easily won — 96 points to 87 for the best drafted team.

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I usually get three or four of these Bold Predictions right every year, and I’ve grown comfortable with that level of success. Any more and they aren’t bold enough, any less, and they’re useless. That said, wait till you see number one. It’s a doozy. It’s *so* wrong that it should probably invalidate all my hits. It’s *so* wrong that I’m questioning why any of you are here right now. It’s *so* wrong I want to throw crap.

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I’m an Alex Dickerson fan, but I don’t know if anyone else is. He at least appears to have gone largely without fanfare thus far, as evidenced by his lowly ownership rates (4.7 percent at ESPN, 5 percent at Yahoo!). He never projected to be much of anything; former FanGraphs prospector Kiley McDaniel graded Dickerson’s tools below-average across the board, with exception to his plus raw power, and Dickerson led a weak crop of Padres prospects prior to the 2015 season in terms of projected WAR.

Fast forward to 2016, and Dickerson doesn’t look so meager. In 240 Triple-A plate appearances, he generated the Pacific Coast League’s 3rd-best wOBA. In fact, it eerily resembled that of the lauded Willson Contreras, and it only trails by a nonzero margin that of the seemingly powerful Mitch Haniger. Dickerson not only cranked up the power, posting a career-best .240 isolated power (ISO), but also shaved more than 7 percentage points off his strikeout rate (K%). The hit tool that once graded out well-below-average suddenly looked like a solid asset. While some hitters sacrifice power to refine their plate discipline or contact skills, Dickerson’s 3-year ISO of .199 from 2013-15 increased about 40 points.

The best news is the gains have carried over to the Major League level. To attest, Dickerson’s plate discipline, by definition, is above average:

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Two weeks ago, I facetiously appended “Deep A.L. West-Only Leagues” to the end of my column’s title since the two players I wrote about both played in the A.L. West, specifically in Oakland. As if there are A.L. West-only leagues. Actually, are there A.L. West-only Leagues? Or any division for that matter? Do any of you play in divisional-only leagues? If so, why? And how’d you settle on your division? Please let me know in the comments because I’m dying to hear what a frustratingly unsatisfying experience that must be.

Well, this week I’m at it again championing two more unheralded and under-owned A.L. West players toiling away in fantasy obscurity, eager for the opportunity to play on a contender. Even one of the digital variety.

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In fantasy, I generally consider utility players to be more valuable than ever in September, when expanded rosters allow managers to schedule in a few more rest days for their regulars. Throw in the fact that these guys have already played five months of baseball, and the combination of nagging injuries and general fatigue further encourages managers to work in additional rest days.

The last thing you want in the fantasy playoffs is empty lineup slots. Of course, there’s the obvious caveat that it’s difficult to find productive utility players on waivers at this point in the season. In other words, don’t go picking up Cliff Pennington just because he’s eligible at four positions. Let’s not get carried away here.

The three players featured in this piece are all widely available, and capable of producing when they find their way into your lineup.

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Previous rankings:
August
July
June
May
March/April (Preseason)

* * *

It’s hard for me to feel like these rankings are worthwhile. Something like two-thirds of you are in your respective league’s playoffs or have already been eliminated. For those of you to whom this pertains, now we’re rolling the dice on small sample sizes — something inherently subject to volatility. Also, we’re practically a week into the month already.

So I won’t waste too much breath here. The following rankings reflect classic 5-by-5 rotisserie (“roto”) formats. Just please remember: this is your playoff hunt. If you play in a roto league, you know which categories you need to chase. I can’t answer that for you. But that category (or plural) are inherently more important to you, and you should value National League outfielders who contribute meaningfully to that category (or plural) accordingly. If you play in a points league, find power bats who minimize the split between their strikeouts and walks (assuming you are punished for the former and rewarded for the latter).

With that said, let’s dig in.

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