After writing about the biggest value gainers last week, I started pondering Charlie Blackmon and A.J. Pollock. Both are power/speed guys, both are on the way to their best season, and both were kind of obvious in hindsight. That last part is what interests me. If their better-than-expected performances this season were fairly easy to see coming, then why didn’t most fantasy owners notice?

I touted Blackmon in passing, but didn’t blow a trumpet about it because I wasn’t completely confident in him. I had an inkling about Pollock, yet he didn’t make any of my teams and I didn’t write about him. I think so many missed them because they slipped into a sort of value vortex. They aren’t young, they didn’t have much buzz coming up and we’d seen enough games from them to assume we knew what they were.

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(A: Both.)

Disclaimer: I wrote this post about Gerardo Parra yesterday afternoon because that’s how things work over here on the West Coast. Between yesterday and this exact moment, Eno Sarris and Paul Sporer posted their most recent episode of the Sleeper and the Bust during which, at around the 45-minute mark, they coincidentally discuss Parra. (Er, Parra is the coincidence, not the podcast.)

Basically, Sarris and Sporer say pretty much everything I write here but in fewer words. So if you want to hear a couple of smart dudes discuss Parra’s rest-of-season prospects, tune in. If for some reason you’d rather engage in in what will be a more verbose, occasionally visual, absolutely not visceral experience, proceed:

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For this post, I will let my deluded ramblings — what my National League outfield analysis eventually and ostensibly becomes pretty much every time nowadays — devolve into stream of consciousness. Because this is a sentence I actually wrote but deleted: “I want to talk about Gerardo Parra.” An alternative I considered: “Let’s talk about Gerardo Parra.”

Point is, I’ve started thinking too hard about simple things and my brain is grinding to a halt. Whatever — let’s just talk about Parra. Let’s have an open dialogue about the guy who, for all intents and purposes, is having a career year this season from an offensive perspective.

Parra’s 129 wRC+ (weighted runs created) easily vanquishes his previous high (106) set back in 2011. It marks only the second time his bat has rated better than average, so you’d be lying if you told me his production thus far in 2015 hasn’t surprised you. To attest: a man who, for six years, averaged eight home runs per 600 plate appearances has hit nine in almost half the time.

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Our midseason rankings update continues. We have the outfield today, the starting pitchers tomorrow, and then wrapping it up with the reliever on Wednesday.

This is one of the most interesting positions just by the sheer volume of it. The fantasy community at large seems to consistently overrate the depth of the position, confusing the quantity for quality. Most leagues use five outfielders right out of the gate, but then you have to consider the OF-eligibles being used at other fielding positions as well as the UT/DH position. I don’t think there are any easy answers with the slotting of these guys after Trout, Harper, & McCutchen as the top three in some fashion. From there, we all seem to go in different directions creating some interesting totals.

For this update, you will have the rankings from me, Zach Sanders, Jeff Zimmerman, and Dan Schwartz. Mike Podhorzer is currently on vacation. A 121 from me is essentially an unranked, it’s 95 for Zach, 108 for Jeff, and 90 for Dan.

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Before you take a gander at this post regarding Lorenzo Cain from a fantasy, and particularly dynasty or keeper league format, take a look at Neil Weinberg’s post on Cain over at the main site. It is a fascinating piece about what has caused Cain to breakout offensively during his age 29 season.
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I’m always looking for new angles on National League outfielders. There are only so many of them, and only so many things can be said about the same few juggernauts.

For example, I discovered just now that Randal Grichuk has recorded the fourth-highest wins above replacement (WAR) per plate appearance for NL outfielders behind only Bryce Harper, Giancarlo Stanton and Andrew McCutchen. It certainly surprised me, and while that’s a storyline in itself, Karl de Vries assessed Grichuk here last month, highlighting reasons for optimism and concern. (For example, his batted ball profile validates his power display but thinks his batting average deserves to drop around 45 points.)

In this same vein, it may surprise you to know the infrequently discussed David Peralta ranks seventh in WAR per plate appearance among NL outfielders with as many plate appearances as him (275) and 10th in aggregate WAR. Those figures account for his defense that, according to the metrics, rates average at best, so his value is driven primarily by his bat.

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For all intents and purposes, Chris Coghlan is having a pretty good season. Drafted in the supplemental first round of the 2006 June amateur draft, Coghlan earned National League Rookie of the Year honors in 2009, hitting .321/.390/.460 with nine home runs and eight stolen bases.

Then he slid into a prolonged funk, floundering for the Marlins (ha… floundering… because the mascot… is a fish… uhhhhhh) before revitalizing his career with the Cubs. After a relatively successful, but still lackluster, 2014 campaign, it seems Coghlan has finally rounded into form in 2015 at the ripe age of 30. Better later than never.

I planned to investigate Coghlan’s success independently. David Laurila, however, transcribed a recent interview with Coghlan during which they talked hitting and posted it yesterday. In it, Coghlan laid bare his philosophy and approach to hitting with refreshing honesty and transparency, creating a unique opportunity to see if Coghlan practices what he preaches as well as how or why it currently works for him.

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NL OF Tiers: June
NL OF Tiers: May
NL OF Tiers: Preseason

I’ll own up to it: ranking Carlos Gomez first last month was careless of me. I blindly assumed production from him when his peripherals advised otherwise. Josh Shepardson recommended cutting bait in keeper and dynasty leagues. Frankly, the long-term outlook at this moment isn’t great.

Also, I’ll own up to undervaluing Justin Upton. That was also a strangely careless oversight. Frankly, I love five-category contributors, and so should you, so I don’t know why he didn’t excite me more.

I’m going to undertake the impossibly difficult task of creating tiers by Coen Brothers films. This will probably be harder than ranking the outfielders, so go ahead and have your “so the guys in the bottom tier are actually the best?” jokes locked and loaded.

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In my younger (read: teenage angst years), one of my favorite up-and-coming bands was a little known group out of Reno, Nevada called This Calendar Year. While the band never gained much notoriety, despite a couple solid tracks (warning: they’re a bit loud), the name always stuck with me. Today for the American League outfield beat, we’ll be looking at two names that could surprise you with their strong numbers since this time last year (minimum 450 plate appearances).
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I haven’t forgotten about you National League only owners! Because I play in the American League Tout Wars, it’s far easier for me to come up with deep league names in that league. But it’s time to give you NLers some love.

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A month before the season started, I introduced a model that predicts a Minor League hitter’s chances of Major League success based on his statistics during his most recent AAA stint. I will use that same model now to update the list of the National League’s top MLB-ready outfield prospects, the key term here being MLB-ready, not prospect — the goal is to identify players who scouts may not love but stats do.

The model looks at how a hitter once performed in AAA and compares it to his known career outcome, ultimately calculating probabilities that a certain career outcome will occur. These probabilities can then be applied to current Minor League players in order to project their currently unknown career outcomes. I discuss the model’s nitty-gritty, as well as its similarities with and potential shortcomings to Chris Mitchell’s KATOH, in the link provided in this post’s first sentence. Both models share the same goal and their methodologies are almost identical, so their results can be considered comparable; mine simply takes a more subjective approach, as I will explain shortly. This is not a turf war.

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