If you’re hurting for outfield help in your deep mixed or mono league, this week’s deep league waiver wire is to the rescue!

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Previous rankings:
March/April (Preseason)

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For this post, I had written something entirely different, but I woke up early to change it. All of it. I didn’t dream about it — no, not quite. But I came close. This month has proven to be pretty difficult. Maybe “finicky” is the word.

So many hitters are producing at similar levels with similar peripherals to support them that it’s hard to tease them apart. I tried a full re-rank and I had clustered something like 20 or more guys together twice. I try to limit each particular tier to maybe a dozen hitters, so coming away with only three-or-so tiers was problematic. That’s why I decided to wake up early and do this over. The ranks haven’t changed much, but certain guys have moved a lot, and I will try to identify which guys are most likely to move up or down by the time the June iteration of these rankings roll around.

Also — and this is totally unrelated — I think more readers were infuriated by my omission of Tommy Pham (who has all of one plate appearance this year) than my ranking of A.J. Pollock over Bryce Harper. Y’all crack me up sometimes.

You know the drill: I rank National League outfielders, you yell at me in the comments. Consider all rankings fluid within tiers but not between them (except at the top and bottom of each tier, perhaps). Normally, I would tell you that players should be reserved to their respective tiers, but I think there’s much more opportunity for movement here than ever before (ever before, in the context of me doing this since the beginning of last year). Lastly, if I omit a name, politely let me know in the comments.

Unless it’s Tommy Pham. Then shhhhhhhhhh.

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Here we go again! It is time for the monthly update to the AL Outfield tiers. These tiers reflect my rest of season rankings. Just a warning: I am not extremely reactionary in the first month of the season. So, if you think I should have Colby Rasmus in the first or second tier, don’t be offended if I don’t respond to your comment with much more than a “come on bro!” Of course you can see my preseason tiers here:

AL Tiered Outfielder Rankings: Preseason Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s go deep down into the depths of your free agent pool. It’s where the risks are great and hidden treasures may emerge. Today’s theme is speculating on two guys that could remain worthless, but will cost you next to nothing to find out.

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This week we look at two hitters available in deep leagues whose uncharacteristically good contact thus far warrants a closer examination. Obviously, as should be stated with almost any analysis at this point in the season, small sample caveats apply. And now that we are disclaimed, let’s irresponsibly dig for upside!

Preston Tucker (2% Yahoo, 2.8% ESPN, 8% CBS) – Tucker burst onto the scene last year in Houston posting a .243/.297/.439 slash line. Wait, that’s not very good. Why did I say burst? Oh right, because Tucker actually posted a 120 wRC+ through July before tanking in just 83 plate appearances the rest of the way. Tucker’s decrease in playing time obviously coincided with the arrival of Carlos Gomez.

But even beyond the trade deadline’s roster crunch ramifications, Tucker just stopped making good contact. His soft% increased to an alarming 32% from August onwards. He also stopped taking walks, reaching base via the free pass just 3.6% of the time.

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We are lost in the sea (puddle?) that is the small sample size portion of the season. We’re trying to find a mooring, some stat that we can really use to identify believable results. This is where I link you to the pieces about stabilization of stats, wipe my hands demonstratively and end the piece with a leaderboard.

Wait, I am going to do something like that, but with a few words of caution and analysis as well. For one, it seems to get lost that stabilization is merely the point at which the stat itself is more meaningful going forward than the league average. In other words, league average regression is still meaningful after this point, and the stat itself is still meaningful before that point. It’s all a continuum.

Instead, use the list as a way to judge the relative importance of stats. Easy enough. We’re past the point of stabilization for swing rates — not for reach rates or contact rates — and we’re not at the point where ground ball and fly ball rates stabilize. And yet, we can use swing rates, and ground ball and fly ball numbers, to judge players, because those stats are more meaningful than the others.

There’s also a second level here that shouldn’t be swept aside. Swinging less and hitting more fly balls is not — by itself — the greatest marker for improved performance. Some players should swing more and hit more grounders, of course. But here we’re going to look for guys that could benefit from better plate discipline and who could gain more power from more fly balls.

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Humor me for a second. Pretend that you don’t already know this post is about Mark Trumbo. OK, good.

As of Monday morning, through 48 plate appearances, Bryce Harper hit six home runs, stolen three bases and walked twice as often as he struck out. It’s ridiculous to extrapolate, but acknowledge that Harper has basically replicated Barry Bonds‘ historic and infamous 2001 batting line through a small sample size, and it gives you a sense of just how monstrous of a start Harper has had — at just 23 years old.

Now, try to comprehend that Harper, per weighted runs created (wRC+), isn’t even the best hitter in the game right now. There must be luck involved, you think to yourself, and you’re certainly right in one instance: Daniel Murphy and his .500 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) have vaulted Murphy to the top of the leaderboard.

But right below him, sandwiched between him and Harper, mere decimal points of a percentage point of wRC+ better than Harper, is Mark Trumbo. Mark Trumbo, of the career 110 wRC+, is, in a sense, hitting like peak Barry Bonds. They got there in different ways, but numbers are numbers. I guess everyone is due for a good week, Trumbo included, right? Or is there something more to this?

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Mike talked earlier this week about being patient, essentially arguing that the best moves you can make this early in the season are no moves.  In other words, the season is so young and the sample size so small that you shouldn’t overreact.  While that is probably true, it doesn’t hurt to prepare yourself to pounce on a potential free agent waiver pick up if you see a skill or talent that looks convincing.  Sometimes you need to jump early to find the best bargain of the season, so here are four players that I’m watching closely over the next week or two.

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I alleged, behind closed doors, that I would cook up something pertaining to batting average on balls in play (BABIP) and the new shift data FanGraphs now hosts on its leaderboards. But, alas, such allegations — that I, uh, made, against myself — were false. There are more pressing matters to which I must attend.

Such as Gregory Polanco. Polanco, of the consensus top-100 prospect rankings in 2013 and 2014 prior to his debut. Polanco, of the pleasantly solid production that still, almost 1,000 plate appearances later, somehow, somewhat inexplicably, disappoints us.

If you don’t own Polanco, you may not know his weighted runs created (wRC+) currently ranks 8th among all National League outfielders. Better, his wRC+ isn’t elevated by an unsustainable BABIP or home runs per fly ball (HR/FB), like the seven hitters who rank ahead of him (except Bryce Harper, who is superhuman bordering on not human at all). One could argue, with nonzero persuasiveness, that Polanco is the (second-) best pure-hitting NL outfielder in the game at this exact moment. It’s a very specific subset of hitters, yes, but if you bestowed that title on me, I’d be pretty jazzed.

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I just spent that last two weeks on vacation with my family. Hoping to escape the dreariness of the wettest Seattle winter on record, we embarked for the warm and artery-clogging bosoms of New Orleans and Miami. The first week of the season is always a cause for celebration in my house but I have to say watching the grand ol’ game with a mouthful of beignets made the start to this season even more special. I think players would be far more receptive to the tobacco ban if MLB replaced tins of Skoal with beignets from Café Du Monde or Morning Call.

I also picked up a pretty rad souvenir for my 8-month old son at the Miami airport. I know that Legos aren’t really age appropriate since he currently feels the need to fit absolutely everything he sees into his mouth so it’ll remain perched far above where his grubby little hands can reach for some time.

But it wasn’t all powdered sugar smiles and medianoches at mediodía. There was plenty of belt-loosening self-loathing, GERD, and of course, fretting over my fantasy teams. You see in my home league, a 14-team keep-6 now in its sixth year as a keeper format, I was the proud owner of both A.J. Pollock and Kyle Schwarber. And while I had tempered expectations for both entering this season, I didn’t expect to have to replace 1/3^rd of my keepers before the first week of April concluded.

So as with my son’s new Lego Ichiro, I’m tasked with piecing together a team from the waiver wire in the hopes that it’ll ultimately prove greater than the sum of its awkwardly shaped plastic brick parts. And with that in mind, I’d like to recommend a few players available in deep leagues to replace the Pollocks, Schwarbers, and Tyson Rosses of the fantasy world.

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