With the regular season over and the postseason rumbling along, it’s time to look back at the top performers of 2016. As is usually the case, we’re starting at the catcher position. For those of you who are familiar with this series from previous offseasons, we have a major change to the way we’re calculating values. Let’s talk about that first before diving into the numbers.

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We’ve done a good thing for those of you that still care about fantasy baseball right now. The Auction Calculator now has 2016 stats as an option so that you can look backwards at what has just happened. That’s going to be part of our effort, on the way to the end of the year, to look at last year to learn more for next year.

This is an important part of fantasy that usually gets ignored. Not only does the league itself change year to year, so retrospection is important in that way, but we can learn things about fantasy itself that will improve our ability to value players going forward.

The fourth-best player in the game last year, by this list, has already inspired a possible change to the auction calculator going forward. Let’s see what else it jars loose.

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I will continue to help define how to value a prospect for fantasy purposes. Last week, I examined how major league position players’ production lines up with the standard scouting grades. Today, I go the other way and look at how graded prospects perform in the majors.

I believe I am making this study about two years too soon. I would love for there to be more MLB information after the player received his grades and his 4-5 year production. I don’t have that luxury right now. I feel any answer I come up with will be a nice anchoring point but will need to be adjusted later.

To do this study, I took the grades given by Baseball America (2011 to 2014) and MLB.com (2013 to 2014). With each of these players, I looked at those who had 300 plate appearances in their career. With this fairly encompassing group, I would only able to match of 118 seasons. In some of these cases, the same player was compared. For example, both BA and MLB had their own 2013 grades for Xander Boegaerts. Like I said, a person can shoot about 20 different holes in this study, but I am just working with what I have been given so far.

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I’m in the process of getting ahead of myself. I’ve compiled a Way Too Early Ranking for every position, and those will be released soon. Before that, we need to finish reviewing what happened in 2016. But like I said, I’m ahead of myself so let’s put the 2016 review on hold for another day.

Most of the questions I’m getting from readers are about keepers. Positional scarcity and opportunity cost are important factors in choosing a keeper or deciding to execute a trade. First we need to know how many options we have at each position. Here’s a table. Behold.

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Today it starts. I am going to try to find an easier way to take current prospect evaluations and turn them into usable information for fantasy owners. Since none of the prospect information is far from perfect, the following will be an imperfect science, but hopefully, some of the prospect guesswork can be removed. The hope is to eventually see a prospect’s grade and/or ranking and have an idea of what type of production to expect from the player. Additionally, I plan on having a method of taking prospect grades and comparing it to present major leaguers.

From the little work I have done, I find it is so much easier to work with hitters versus the pitchers. I am going to start with them for a couple of weeks getting a decent groundwork done with them. When I get to the pitchers, the work is going to be a little slower moving as I translate pitch grades to a players value.

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Well, the season is over! This is the second full season of xStats, and they have undergone numerous upgrades over that span. I some of you found them interesting! Perhaps even useful. With this second season under the belt, it feels fitting to throw out a few xStats awards: Best Starting Pitcher, Best Relief Pitcher, and Best Batter. So, without further ado, here we go:

Best Starting Pitcher: Clayton Kershaw.

Not a terribly big surprise. He has the best curve ball in MLB by xOBA, registering only .126 (min 200 thrown). His slider has the 7th highest swinging strike rate, 23.5% (min 200 thrown). You can see all of the pitch stats here.  It will come as no surprise when I say Clayton Kershaw is the best pitcher in baseball, he’s just about the best in every individual category xStats measures. No other pitcher really got anywhere close to his dominance. While Noah Syndergaard and Jose Fernandez got somewhat close to Kershaw scFIP and xOBA respectively, the gap between Kershaw and the second best picture is still impressively wide. There is little more I can say about Kershaw, he needs to get called up to a higher league to face better opponents, MLB is too easy for him. Read the rest of this entry »

2017 Preseason Assessment: Jonathan Villar (Fantasy MVP)

Villar was a generally not sought after in most leagues since many people expected him to struggle and get replaced by Orlando Arcia around the Super 2 deadline. I picked him up in Tout Wars as a fill in for Jung-ho Kang since Kang was expected to miss a couple months after having surgery on his leg. To say Villar filled in just fine is an understatement. He had 19 HR, 62 SB, and a .285 AVG. In the final rankings, he ended up with being the 4th highest ranked hitter.

For next season. I expect some heavy regression from the 25-year-old, but I don’t expect him to fall off a cliff. His batting average has been fairly steady the last two seasons with a .284 value in 2015 and .285 in 2016. With his speed, I could see him continue to post BABIP around .350 so I will go with a .270 AVG. For his walk rate, a 10% value will work so a .345 OBP seems reasonable.

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First, a few words about my offseason writing at Rotographs. Besides reporting any possible relevant fantasy news, I plan on systematically going through two groups of players and work on their 2017 values. I will start at the top of the 2017 rankings and also somewhere in the middle and work my way down each list. I may be able to do a handful of players each article or I might by limited to just the two players. Either way, I will start putting together a 2017 draft ranking.

Additionally, I will try to follow Eno’s schedule for the other writers (e.g. players on playoff teams for the next couple of weeks). If they are looking at outfielders for that specific week, I will also look at outfielders.

The other project I will work through is being able to put a better evaluation on prospects for fantasy purposes. I will use the evaluations of various prospect writers and publications and put their evaluations into something which can be used in fantasy circles. I have some ideas of what I want to accomplish, but I am sure there will be some roadblocks and detours on the way. I will start this series Friday.

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Last week I unveiled my Top 24 Pitchers for 2017 and yes, it was an amazing list, I know, buuuuttt I feel like your appetites weren’t satiated so here’s the next 16 pitchers on my list right now giving you a top 40 to chew on until at least November.

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

* * *

It’s hard for me to feel like these rankings are worthwhile. Something like two-thirds of you are in your respective league’s playoffs or have already been eliminated. For those of you to whom this pertains, now we’re rolling the dice on small sample sizes — something inherently subject to volatility. Also, we’re practically a week into the month already.

So I won’t waste too much breath here. The following rankings reflect classic 5-by-5 rotisserie (“roto”) formats. Just please remember: this is your playoff hunt. If you play in a roto league, you know which categories you need to chase. I can’t answer that for you. But that category (or plural) are inherently more important to you, and you should value National League outfielders who contribute meaningfully to that category (or plural) accordingly. If you play in a points league, find power bats who minimize the split between their strikeouts and walks (assuming you are punished for the former and rewarded for the latter).

With that said, let’s dig in.

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