Alfonso Soriano just posted his best fantasy season since 2006 – the year before he signed his mega-deal with the Chicago Cubs. In 2013, the Cubbies finally managed to shed themselves of an aging Soriano by trading him to the similarly aging Yankees.

Soriano was a four category monster last season, posting 34 home runs, 18 stolen bases, 84 runs, and 108 RBI. His .255 average didn’t hurt too badly either, although those in OBP leagues suffered to the tune of a .302 on base percentage. This is why you’ll find Soriano ranked ninth on Zach Sanders’ list – nestled between Jacoby Ellsbury and Matt Holliday. The performance was worth $26.

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It seems like Michael Saunders has been tantalizing fantasy managers with his annual seven weeks of quality hitting for the better part of this century. Even for a Mariner fan, it’s surprising to look up and realize The Condor really only has two full seasons under his belt, and he is entering his age 27 season, having a birthday just three days ago. When Saunders is going good, he can be a handy fantasy player. The problem is, of course, all of the bad that he mixes in between those stretches.

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Jay Bruce has had a three year stretch of significant consistency. Check out the chart below showing the lack of variance.

The results have been similar, but the way Bruce has gotten there has been a little different. Read the rest of this entry »

Coming into the 2013 season, Aaron Hicks looked like he might have finally put it all together. The former first-round draft pick was coming off a highly productive season in Double-A, where he hit .285/.382/.459 with 13 homers and 32 stolen bases. Then came Spring Training, where Hicks looked like a man amongst boys, hitting an absurd .370/.407/.644 with four dingers and three steals while playing excellent defense in center field. The five-tool player that the Twins had spent so long cultivating was finally bearing fruit. Minnesota handed Hicks the starting job in center field over Darin Mastroianni and set him free to light the world on fire.

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Carl Crawford ranked #64 in our end-of-season outfield rankings, just above A.J. Pollock, who is only valuable for defense, Matt Joyce, who’s a mildly interesting platoon player, and Ichiro Suzuki, who retired in 2009.

Objectively, that’s not that great. In a 12 team league with three starting outfield spots, it’s well below starting-caliber. But in this specific situation, we can put objectivity on hold for just a second to acknowledge that Crawford actually managed to stay on the field long enough to even find a home in the rankings. Victory! A minor victory, perhaps, but a worthwhile one nonetheless. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday was Leonys Martin day. In the introductory paragraph of that article, I noted that Martin was worth roughly the same $12 as Bryce Harper. So for today, let’s talk about Harper.

Let’s tackle the platoon issue first. Harper’s story has the same flow as Martin’s, albeit with massively different expectations. He’s shown substantial platoon splits, but it’s hard to draw any hard conclusions since he’s only seen lefties in 360 plate appearances. Martin is still young which led to the conclusion that he could learn to hit lefties passably. In Harper’s case, he’s incredibly young – he’ll be entering his age 21 season in 2014.

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It was a historically bad year for the Miami Marlins offense. Over the summer, Bradley Woodrum shared with us where the team ranked in history among the weakest attacks of years past. But at that time, the team’s wRC+ was 78. The team actually finished the season with a more pitiful 72 mark, which tied the 1981 Blue Jays for lowest mark in his last graph. Unfortunately, Giancarlo Stanton was part of this offense and this fact hampered his fantasy value. But breathe a sign of relief folks, I will not be using the words “lineup protection” anywhere in this post (besides in this sentence)!

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On the one hand, Leonys Martin represents the kind of tepid, five category production that owners in 12-team leagues can expect to find at some point on the waiver wire. On the other hand, he was worth nearly as much as Bryce Harper in 2013, clocking in at about $12. Which leaves us to ponder: what should we do about Martin?

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A fluke might not be repeatable, but it is nevertheless something that happened. And something that happened in 2013 was Raul Ibanez was pretty good — which not many people outside of the Ibanez family and maybe Jack Zduriencek thought was likely. It was such an oddity, it generated a post titled, “I’m Old and I’m Swinging For the Fences” which should win some kind of post header award in my opinion.

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The 2013 season was a season unlike anything we’ve seen from Coco Crisp. Rather than accrue the majority of his value via his steals, his stolen base numbers were cut nearly in half from his 39 bags in 2012 to just 21 this season. This year Crisp launched a career high 22 home runs, including his 100th career home run (where the present author can be seen celebrating at the 0:38 mark and again at 0:52. And yes, that is a Kurt Suzuki shirsey).

                 
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