Josh Reddick is having an outstanding first season with the A’s after previously playing for Boston. The 25-year-old left handed hitter has an unexpected 25 HRs this season to go with a .253/.325/.500 triple slash line. Did Reddick change much from his time Boston? Was there some possible signs that Reddick had a chance to break out this season?

The main factor affecting his fantasy value in Boston was his playing time. Over 3 MLB season he had only 403 PA’s and hit .248/.290/.416 with 10 HRs (0.025 HR/PA). Not exactly numbers that will win a fantasy title.

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Josh Rutledge has been filling in at shortstop for the injured Troy Tulowitzki and has done quite an admirable job, having posted an impressive .445 wOBA over 84 plate appearances. Unfortunately, we have no projections from any sources for the rookie and fantasy owners are left wondering what to expect from him for the rest of the season. Fear not loyal RotoGraphs reader, the Pod Projections have returned to answer that very question.

I have decided to project him assuming a full season to give you an idea of what he would do on a pro-rated basis. His current statistics are not factored into the final projected stat line. They are only used to help formulate the projected underlying metrics themselves.

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Recently here at Rotographs, we released our rest of season rankings for starting pitchers, I had Tim Lincecum rated as the sixth-highest fantasy pitcher. To say the least, I took a little heat for that ranking. I will try to justify the ranking today.

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Stephen Strasburg is possibly the best starting pitcher so far this season. Here is a quick sampling of his stats:

11.6 K/9, 32% K%
2.6 BB/9, 7% BB%
2.82 ERA, 2.42 FIP, 2.60 xFIP, 2.60 SIERA

These numbers are good enough that I have him ranked as the best fantasy starting pitcher without taking the number of innings he pitches into account. The only knock against him is that he is not a ground ball pitcher with has led to a career BABIP 0.308. When he is on the mound, he is arguably the best fantasy pitcher in the in the game.

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On Saturday, I analyzed the five hitters whose HR/FB ratios have increased the most since last season and using various tools and metrics, tried to determine whether we might see a decline in the second half. Today I will look at the opposite end of the spectrum, those hitters whose HR/FB ratios have declined the most. Will they experience a second half power surge?

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For me personally, it feels like offensive surprises and busts are harder to evaluate during the year because we have fewer tools to analyze. Power is one skill that is difficult to decide how real a spike or drop is, but Jeff Zimmerman has been mentioning a tool at Baseball Heat Maps that gives you the distance of a hitter’s batted balls, which may really help in this type of analysis. In the past, I have used the ESPN Home Run Tracker site to help determine how flukey a change in HR/FB ratio is, but I think looking at the raw average distance is a less flawed method. I looked at the five hitters whose HR/FB ratio has increased the most this year and then added their 2011 and 2012 average home run plus fly ball distances to the table.

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Over the past few days, Eno Sarris has been rolling out our consensus ranking for players at various positions. To create my rankings I used ZiPS rest of season stats to compile my rankings. The only time I changed my ranking was because of expected time lost on the D.L. For some players who are having a good 2012 season (Josh Reddick, Jed Lowrie, Allen Craig, Edwin Encarnacion and Trevor Plouffe), my rankings are lower than most people expected. Today, I am going to look at one cause for a player to be out performing his projections: injuries.

Note: I will be looking at lack of past playing time and a measurable change in talent for the other two causes for a player out performing there projections.

Injuries and how they relate to player performance are one of the few last few frontiers in sabermetric studies. This off season, in two separate studies, Mitchel Litchman (MGL) and myself looked at how injuries affect a hitter’s performance. In MGL’s study, he looked at players who went on the DL and how they performed. He found that hitters under performed their SLG in the year of the injury, but the rest of their traits stayed constant. In my study, I looked at players who played through injuries without going on the D.L. and found the same conclusion. In the year after the injury, the player exceeded their projected power numbers.

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It seems that the newest “Moneyball” craze in the majors this season is the defensive shift. Usually used only against left handed hitters, it is being implemented by more and more teams against more and more players. Today, I am going to look at the fantasy implications of the shift.

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Catcher may be the most frustrating position to fill as you annually prepare for the fantasy baseball season. Realistically, there are only a handful of impact bats who are catcher-eligible in most leagues and unless you are lucky enough to snag one it may be difficult to find a catcher who will positively contribute to your team. Even elite catchers aren’t with out flaws. If one hits a lot of home runs, his average usually suffers (See, Santana, Carlos). A high batting average is usually coupled with middling power, and even superb seasons like Napoli’s 2011 or Posey’s 2010 don’t give your team any steals. Despite playing in PETCO park, Yasmani Grandal projects to be an solid option behind the dish for your fantasy team. Read the rest of this entry »

The folks at Baseball Think Factory are kind enough to supply Fangraphs with projected ZiPS values for each player covering the rest of the season. These values take the player’s preseason projection and how they have produced so far in 2012 and then estimate the player’s stats for the rest of the season.

I used Zach Sander’s formula to rank only 2B for the rest of the season.using z-scores. Here are the rest of season values for 2B order by their current z-score and some thoughts on the rankings:
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