Allen Craig stunk in 2014. We all saw it. He stunk for the St. Louis Cardinals. He stunk even more for the Boston Red Sox. He stunk all season for fantasy baseball players, for whom he lost money, and ended up in the hundreds among outfielders. A regular. The only guy who accumulated 500-plus plate appearances this past season and finished ranked in the hundreds.

Is that it, then? Does he just stink now? It’s possible. Maybe even likely. Perhaps close to definite. But we don’t know. I don’t think that we can know. At least not yet.

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I remember walking into a Phoenix area bar to meet my FanGraphs colleagues last spring. It was a convergence of baseball nerdery rivaled only by the SABR conference across town. Someone started talking about J.D. Martinez. He had changed his swing over the offseason and could tap into his latent power with a clean, easy stroke. The Astros were going to be pleasantly surprised.

It turned out that the Astros had already moved on internally. They weren’t willing to give Martinez another shot, but they were nice enough to grant his release rather than force him to drown at the bottom of the depth chart. And that’s how he latched on with the Tigers.

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Because I’m apparently a fan of writing about high upside young outfielders whose seasons were marred by injuries, I have to discuss another one in Wil Myers. We all knew about Myers shooting up the prospect lists based on his minor league performances through 2012. But he became much more of a household name after being traded from the Royals to the Rays after the 2012 season in a blockbuster for James Shields. He continued to mash at Triple-A the following year with his new organization, which earned him a promotion to the Majors, debuting in mid-June.

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Despite playing his age-35 season, Jayson Werth posted another strong fantasy season. His .292/.394/.455 line equated to a 141 wRC+ and he posted the fifth highest qualified on-base percentage in the league. Unfortunately his days of 20 steals are probably gone, but Werth did chip in nine steals and was only caught once. Rather than his speed deteriorating, the most alarming issue may be that even though he appeared 147 games, Werth managed just 16 home runs. Even without his normal 20+ dingers Werth managed to finish in the top-20 of Zach Sanders’ 2014 outfield rankings.
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I was wrong about Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Starling Marte. Last December, I wrote up Marte, and determined he “may be in for a precipitous fall next season.” Boy, was I wrong on that. Marte had the finest season of his young career, solidifying himself as one of the better young outfielders in the game. Looking over that article now, I realize that while the research seemed to fit, I let my personal biases color my evaluation of Marte. So, consider this an apology if you avoided Marte on my recommendation. Let’s try to avoid this mistake again.

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Bryce Harper was supposed to be the next superstar. And while 9.5 WAR over his first three seasons is nothing to sneeze at, it’s a bit of a disappointment. For the most part though, he has performed pretty well at the plate, posting a .355 wOBA during his career. Unfortunately, injuries have gotten the best of him in recent years. In 2013, he missed a month with a left knee injury that ultimately required offseason surgery. In 2014, he hurt his left thumb when he dove head-first into third base on a triple and missed about two months of action. So then it’s no surprise that a graph of his plate appearance totals over his first three seasons look like this:

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Think of Matt Kemp and you might have a few different ways to sum up his work to date. Athletic. Oft-injured. Unrefined. These aren’t bad words to use, even if they sometimes seem to be used too often with certain populations. Kemp strikes out a lot, doesn’t walk a lot, doesn’t have a good glove, but hits the ball hard and can run fast. And he’s hurt a lot. The question — after a bounce-back year in his age-29 season — is if these things are always true.

Because Kemp showed up in the top fifteen outfielders this past season, and it would be hard to project him to do anything close to the same again if all those things were true.

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This past season was a pretty productive one for Brandon Moss. The Oakland Athletics’ outfielder-first baseman hit a subpar .234, but his 25 dingers helped to place him in the top 40 outfielders by Zach Sanders’ standards. His $12-plus in earnings would make him a top-15 first baseman, in case he went that way for fantasy baseball players. The recession on offense made Moss’ numbers more valuable in rotisserie leagues.

The 2014 campaign could have been better, perhaps notably so, for Moss, in fact. The slugger went yard for the 23^rd time this season on July 24, yet he finished with a total that tied him for 21^st in the majors in that category. He much more resembled the hitter he was in 2013 (.267 ISO) prior to the All-Star break this year (.268/.349/.530, 21 jacks, and a .262 ISO in 364 PAs) than he did after it (.173/.310/.274, 4 HR, and a .101 ISO in 216 PAs). Moss wasn’t the same by the end of July.

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Writing on the subject of Charlie Blackmon, Carson Cistulli once quipped, he’s “neither black nor Jamaican.” Our own FG+ player cap described him as “unlikely to ever be better than a fourth outfielder in real life.” Fantasy owners agreed and passed on drafting him according to FantasyPros. So how then did he provide a $25 season, ninth best among all outfielders?
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It’s hard not to fall in love with the fantasy potential of Jason Heyward, especially for those of us who can’t forget the can’t-miss hype surrounding his debut and a rookie season that seemed like the precursor to imminent superstardom. So it’s difficult to shake the tinge of disappointment that’s come to hang around Heyward in the past couple of years, not necessarily because he’s done anything wrong — he is, after all, just 25 years old and boasts a career .345 wOBA — but because in him we see fantasy studliness, and can’t help but feel let down each year when he falls short of making good on his immense potential.
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