Previous rankings:
July
June
May
March/April (Preseason)

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Last month, I asked what you all wanted from rankings. A few responded with answers I expected: rankings should reflect rest-of-season performance, informed by past performance. It seems almost silly I even asked in the first place. The reason it came up is because I think fantasy owners occasionally underestimate how impactful a month or two of extreme regression can be. It makes it especially difficult to rank someone like Marcell Ozuna circa June 1: he had a monster BABIP (batting average on balls in play) through May, and while he flashed still-legitimate power, we could reasonably expect the batting average to fall.

Like clockwork, it has. Ozuna’s BABIP by month: .281, .459, .284, .280. May was the obvious outlier in which all of Ozuna’s good fortune on balls in play was concentrated. The isolated power has, too, somewhat predictably, dipped since then. Ozuna wasn’t even a top-60 outfielder in July. Such is the nature of small samples. And yes, two months of baseball is still a fairly small sample. Joey Votto was batting only .249 through June 30. Then July happened, and now he’s batting .293 with about 20 more runs and RBI apiece (as well as a dropped foul ball).

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Welcome to the final American League starting pitcher tiers of the season. The trade deadline deals resulted in several pitchers departing to the National League, with precious few arriving. With only about two months left in the season, potential innings limits are going to play a major role in rest of season value.

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Earlier this season I introduced the Prospect Scorecard as a way of better comparing and identifying the best fit prospect value for your specific fantasy league.  Today I’ll get a head start on my own 2017 prospect rankings by using the Scorecard methodology to rank the current top 50 prospects for Ottoneu. Even if you don’t play Ottoneu specifically, the 4 x 4 and FGPTS prospect rankings can serve as a good proxy for most OPS or wOBA-centric fantasy leagues, and the traditional 5 x 5 prospect rankings should cover a large portion of the rest.

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Check out last month’s tiers right here.

TIER ONE
Jose Altuve

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a piece on this very website entitled “Jose Altuve: Fantasy Baseball’s Most Valuable Hitter.” It is a celebratory collection of fun facts about the best position player in fantasy, and I invite you all to partake in its many enjoyable info nuggets. Altuve should claim the No. 1 overall spot soon, which is currently held by the injured Clayton Kershaw. (Kershaw is seriously still the top performer in 2016 in traditional 5×5 formats, despite the fact that he last pitched five weeks ago.)

TIER TWO
Daniel Murphy
Ian Kinsler
Robinson Cano
Dustin Pedroia

The Murphy/Kinsler/Cano trio have held down this tier for months, and now Pedroia moves up to join them. The soon-to-be 33-year-old socked five homers in July, while hitting over .300 for the third time in the season’s four months. Pedroia also has more walks than strikeouts over the last two months. He’s now sitting on a .303/.373/.453 season slash, with 12 homers, 70 runs and 46 RBI. With his prime position in the two-hole of Boston’s powerful lineup, Pedroia’s four-category contributions should continue to pay big dividends for his owners.

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It once again is time for the monthly update for my AL Outfield Tiers! As always, these are my rest of the season ranks for the position and you can check out my previous versions below as well as Alex Chamberlain’s NL versions. Read the rest of this entry »

We haven’t done a good ol’ fashioned rankings since the start of the season, so the All-Star Break seems like the perfect time to re-examine some of the selections that were made in the initial 2016 set. Obviously things have changed, but given that it’s the middle of July, nobody is surprising us anymore. We know largely who is who and what they bring to the table, while others have dropped off due to positional eligibility. While there’s still room for bounce back or decline, we know where we stand at the season’s midway point.

While these rankings still remain somewhat subjective, based on the individual elements I tend to look at, neither Kris Bryant or Jake Lamb ended up no. 1, so the bias may not have shone through as much as it otherwise could have. Enjoy the rest of your break before the stove starts to heat up.

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It is mid-season prospect ranking time and I don’t want to feel left out. This past winter I introduced a stats only based system which ranks prospects by comparing at their position, age at the level, and production at the level. Since that release, I have made a few refinements to which I think make the results even better.

The inspiration behind these rankings is an industry league I compete in with 19 other prospect experts. These guys are good and read every available source possible, so I needed a source others didn’t have so I created these rankings. The rankings worked great this past offseason, especially when pointing out some players with prospect fatigue, namely Cheslor Cuthbert and Albert Almora. Both were highly touted when they first joined their teams but didn’t move as quickly as other prospects through their team’s system. The system pointed out that I should not give up on them yet.

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Check out last month’s tiers right here. I’m in the midst of an intensely busy week, but I’ll try to respond to any questions you might have in the comments section.

TIER ONE
Jose Altuve

Altuve is outperforming his competition to such a degree that I nearly left Tier Two empty, simply to signify how much better the 26-year-old is than any other fantasy 2B option. Altuve somehow managed to outperform his ridiculous April, with an absolutely bonkers .396/.472/.582 slash in June. He launched four more bombs, stole three more bases, walked more than he struck out for the second consecutive month, it just goes on and on.

I’ll cherry-pick one amazing statistic before moving on: Altuve is hitting .302/.362/.395 in plate appearances in which he finds himself down 0-2 in the count. That’s good enough for a wRC+ of 108. In other words, Jose Altuve is a better hitter down 0-2, than a league-average hitter stepping into a 0-0 count.

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The summer is heating up which means the standings are starting to solidify in your league. Big trades are going down and you find yourself uncharacteristically indecisive – do I make this deal or not? Will it actually improve my team enough to matter?

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Previous rankings:
March/April (Preseason)
May

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The more I do this, the harder it gets. Each month I struggle with shedding my preconceived notions of a player’s value and coming to grips with the performance we have actually observed. And then there’s the additional element of teasing out what’s real and what’s not. Occasionally, there’s no change. That makes it easy. But for the guys who have made strides or taken big steps back — that makes it a bit harder. And then there’s accounting for over- and under-performance. Trying to anticipate when regression will occur, if at all, makes my head hur.

Also, there are just so many outfielders. And so many of them seem to be performing at a high level this season. It can be excruciatingly difficult to tease them apart. At a certain point, we’re splitting the microscopic hairs that grows on regular hairs. Full tiers become indecipherable blobs.

You know the rules, but if you don’t: hitters are pretty fluid within tiers. It’s not feasible to talk about every single guy, so feel free to ask questions (or leave criticisms) in the comments. (I know I left off a lot of hitters who make up the shallow side of a platoon or ride the pine. ) If I omitted a legitimate someone, let me know; unless it’s a part-time guy or a prospect, I probably just forgot. It happens from time to time.

I love Bob’s Burgers, so I’m going to name the tiers by my favorite episodes of all time. Because I can! This is off the top of my head, though, so I’ll probably screw up my own list. Oh well. Fight me!

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