If you’re still in the hunt for a fantasy championship at this point in the season, let me just say, nicely done. Labor Day marks the stretch run of the fantasy season, during which our preferences for substantive changes in approach or ability run secondary to riding out any and all hot streaks we can get our hands on. With that in mind, I’d like to turn our attention to our titular hero, Andrew Toles, a free-swinging, light-hitting outfielder, fighting for time on a crowded and talented Dodgers roster. I know, I know that sounds terrible. But I should also mention he’s absolutely raking right now and has speed in spades.

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The calendar has flipped to September, which means we’re down to the final stretch of the season. As a result, there are a plethora of characters and stories circulating through baseball, but at the moment I’m particularly interested in three outfielders; Bryce Harper, Jason Heyward, and Jay Bruce.  Three national league right fielders, each playing for a contender, and each going through various stages and degrees of struggle.

Jason Heyward came into the season with a newly minted 184 million dollar contract, which he has presumably framed somewhere in his house.  If it were me, I’d probably have a copy framed in every room of my house, but that’s neither here nor there.  Bryce Harper entered the season as the reigning NL MVP, with many claiming he was going to officially dethrone Mike Trout as the greatest player in the sport.  Jay Bruce, well, he might not be as accomplished or wealthy as the other two, but was acquired by a New York Mets team that placed huge hopes that not only would he help them down the stretch this season, but also act as leverage to perhaps extend Yoenis Cespedes, or even replace Cespedes altogether next season. Those are big shoes to fill.

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Once again, I present to you my monthly update of the AL Outfield Tiers. As always, these are my rest of the season ranks for the position. There is a month to in the regular season and as the clock runs out for the regular season it becomes harder and harder to do these ranks. Value at this point depends on what you need in your league. A player like Jarrod Dyson may not be as valuable as Ian Desmond all things being equal, but if you are searching for speed then he may be to you. So, keeping this in mind I have done my best to give ranks that best reflect my value while giving a boost within tiers to players like Dyson that may offer elite production in singular categories for those needing to make up last minute points in roto formats. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m always reluctant to discuss a player whom we have recently featured at FanGraphs. Indeed, Rylan Edwards noted that, unlike swimming, Keon Broxton is not boring. Jeff Sullivan also recently covered Keon Broxton, ushering everyone on board his respective bandwagon (Broxton’s, not Sullivan’s). It’s a good feature, and its biggest takeaway is the following: Keon Broxton is hitting the ball pretty damn hard.

Broxton has slipped a bit — he no longer holds the top spot, ceding it to Nelson Cruz, Giancarlo Stanton, and some kid named Gary Sanchez. Stanton hasn’t played in two-plus weeks, so it stands to reason that Broxton’s exit velocity has slipped in the last week. That’s fine. As is, it’s still elite.

Except, woah, the strikeouts. Right? That’s alarming. It’s not so alarming that it’s a dealbreaker. Sullivan even brought up the idea of Broxton being a center-fielding Chris Carter. For a team like the Milwaukee Brewers, that would work just fine.

It’s the composition of the strikeouts — in other words, the way Broxton gets to those strikeouts — that kind of blows my mind.

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Listeners of the podcast should be well familiar with this format. Paul Sporer and I try to come up with a few salient points about each player to help you make your decisions. So This week I thought I’d help as many of you as I possibly could with one article. So let’s take three (okay six) hitters and three pitchers from the twitter mailbag and have us some fun.

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After much deliberation, the author has decided that this Deep League Waiver Wire piece will not include any puns involving Tommy Pham’s last name.

Last week, an errant Mike Montgomery fastball sent Matt Holliday to the DL opening up left field in St. Louis. Assuming no surgery is required (and we can expect an answer on that this week), Holliday is likely to miss up to 5 weeks with a broken thumb. The day before, the Buschmen placed Matt Adams on the DL with left-shoulder inflammation leaving a void at first base. Over the weekend, the Cards were linked to Carlos Gomez, a logical replacement for Holliday should John Mozeliak land him. But until then, it looks like St. Louis is kickin’ it with an amorphous blob of defensive versatility and one perfectly suitable in-house alternate, Tommy Pham (2% Yahoo, 1.6% ESPN, 5% CBS).

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If I had a dollar for every time I used this lede, I’d have, what, like, four dollars? I can’t help myself. Blind résumés are my jam because so much of how we value players is tied up in our biases and preconceived notions. Alas, Starling Marte and, of all people, Hernan Perez make for excellent comparisons when prorating their 2016 stat lines. Per usual, I won’t tell you who’s who:

Did you figure it out? The home run column gives it away, given Perez (Player B) has hit more home runs than Marte (Player A) in about half as many plate appearances. Outside of that, we’re looking at mirror-image power, stolen base rates, and plate discipline, the latter of which is most fascinating to me. We’ll dig into the weeds in a bit here — Perez has some faults we ought to acknowledge — but for all intents and purposes, Marte and Perez are nearly-identical, very-elite options through the end of September. (Last week I mentioned this — that Perez could be a top-flight outfielder from here on out — and, frankly, I’m surprised I got virtually no push-back from readers.)

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Last week, I wrote about two players straddling the borderline between deep and standard league relevance. But my beat is the Deep League Waiver Wire. So this week we take a look at one Mr. Keon Broxton and how he can address your need for speed and perhaps even mix in a little power while he’s at it.

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Without looking, take a guess at who leads the majors in stolen bases per plate appearance. Most of you probably chose Billy Hamilton, and while you aren’t far from being right, you are still wrong. While Hamilton’s pace of swiping a bag in 11.1% of his PA is mighty impressive, someone else is at an even more ridiculous pace of 11.6%. (Author’s note: As pointed out in the comments section by user “Regression is Mean,” Hamilton stole four bases yesterday to bump his rate up to 12.1%.)

Believe it or not, this mystery player is not even owned in 10% of Yahoo or ESPN leagues, as he currently sits at 8% and 9.5% ownership on those sites, respectively. (CBS owners are catching on, as he’s 20% owned on that site.) Who the heck is this player, and why isn’t he on your roster?

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

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Last month, I asked what you all wanted from rankings. A few responded with answers I expected: rankings should reflect rest-of-season performance, informed by past performance. It seems almost silly I even asked in the first place. The reason it came up is because I think fantasy owners occasionally underestimate how impactful a month or two of extreme regression can be. It makes it especially difficult to rank someone like Marcell Ozuna circa June 1: he had a monster BABIP (batting average on balls in play) through May, and while he flashed still-legitimate power, we could reasonably expect the batting average to fall.

Like clockwork, it has. Ozuna’s BABIP by month: .281, .459, .284, .280. May was the obvious outlier in which all of Ozuna’s good fortune on balls in play was concentrated. The isolated power has, too, somewhat predictably, dipped since then. Ozuna wasn’t even a top-60 outfielder in July. Such is the nature of small samples. And yes, two months of baseball is still a fairly small sample. Joey Votto was batting only .249 through June 30. Then July happened, and now he’s batting .293 with about 20 more runs and RBI apiece (as well as a dropped foul ball).

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