It’s rankings update time! We’re coming up to the midpoint of the season, which means there are only a couple of months left of baseball to be played ::sad face::.

My usual caveat on how I rank pitchers follows:

It’s essential to remember that ERA is not a skill. It’s just a result. So I don’t really care what a pitcher’s ERA is at the moment. What I’m really interested in is their peripherals and any changes in pitch mix and/or velocity. And even if their peripherals have changed, you then have to ask yourself if its sustainable. Again, more likely is that what we initially forecasted is what is going to be posted the rest of the way, though obviously this is not always the case.

As a reminder, the tiers are named after the best characters from the FXX show, Man Seeking Woman.

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NL OF Tiers: June
NL OF Tiers: May
NL OF Tiers: Preseason

I’ll own up to it: ranking Carlos Gomez first last month was careless of me. I blindly assumed production from him when his peripherals advised otherwise. Josh Shepardson recommended cutting bait in keeper and dynasty leagues. Frankly, the long-term outlook at this moment isn’t great.

Also, I’ll own up to undervaluing Justin Upton. That was also a strangely careless oversight. Frankly, I love five-category contributors, and so should you, so I don’t know why he didn’t excite me more.

I’m going to undertake the impossibly difficult task of creating tiers by Coen Brothers films. This will probably be harder than ranking the outfielders, so go ahead and have your “so the guys in the bottom tier are actually the best?” jokes locked and loaded.

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With July nearly upon us, it’s tier time here at Rotographs. Following up on my previous themes of Kurt Russell movies and vacation destinations, I have decided to assign hard rock bands to this month’s tiers. This idea came to me at about 3am on Friday night, and I haven’t thought of anything better, so here we go.

Before we get into it, please fight off the temptation to flood the comments section with “DUDE YOU DIDN’T RANK [insert band here] WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU” posts. I’ve only got seven tiers to cover the very broad genre of ‘hard rock,’ and I had to save two of them for Creed and Nickelback. Give me a break.

TIER ONE – LED ZEPPELIN
Brian Dozier
Jose Altuve
Jason Kipnis
Dee Gordon

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Fresh off the buzz of excluding Joe Panik from my top 15 second base rankings, I’m doubling down and ranking the top 10 overall.

In late February, I tackled the task of ranking the safest hitter picks in the first round. Here are the safety rankings I came up with: 1. Mike Trout, 2. Andrew McCutchen, 3. Carlos Gomez, 4. Paul Goldschmidt, 5. Edwin Encarnacion, 6. Jose Bautista, 7. Giancarlo Stanton, 8. Miguel Cabrera, 9. Jose Abreu, 10. Anthony Rizzo

It doesn’t look too bad, though Gomez and Encarnacion are the obvious misses. Now I’ll work off of those rankings, but scrap the safety angle since it doesn’t really make sense at this point, and simply rank my top 10 players for the rest of the season. Statistics through June 17.

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If you followed the unveiling of our positional rankings updates then you probably have a good idea of how I feel about the NL pitching landscape, but a straight ranking of all starting pitchers is a little different than tiering the arms in one specific league. We’ve also gotten five or six more days of information since releasing those rankings. In short, I’ve made some changes. Nothing sweeping, just a few moves here and there in comparison to last week’s rankings. If you want to see how things compare to the previous months, they can be found here:

• March/April
• May

As in May, I’ve got 10 tiers, but I’ve bumped the total number of pitchers from 70 to 72. There are 75 guys in rotations at any point in the NL, but they aren’t all rank-worthy and in fact, this isn’t even 72 of the 75 as some of these guys are on the shelf or still in the minors. For the naming of the tiers, I’m choosing 10 of my favorite TV shows right now. They’re all funny, witty, smart shows, at least in my estimation. If you haven’t seen one of them, you should check it out. The shows used for each tier aren’t really related to the pitchers in the tier, but there were some happy accidents after I ranked the shows 1-10.

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We did it! We made it all the way around the diamond. We’re finishing, fittingly, with our closers and middle relievers and for that we brought the Bullpen Report crew aboard. Alan, Darren, Colin, and Benjamin join myself to tackle the bullpens. Here are the other positions and you can also access them via the Positional Rankings in the right sidebar:

• Catchers
• First Basemen
• Second Basemen
• Shortstops
• Third Baseman
• Outfielders
• Starting Pitchers

If a ranker didn’t rank someone that one of the others did, he was given a +1 of their last rank as I’m sure you noticed in the other positions.

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We’re making our way around the diamond with our updated rankings and today we are diving into the starting rotation, a robust fantasy position with plenty of elite-level talent, but maybe a soft middle. Here are the positions we’ve done so far and you can also access them via the Positional Rankings in the right sidebar:

• Catchers
• First Basemen
• Second Basemen
• Shortstops
• Third Baseman
• Outfielders

We probably didn’t miss anyone here. If you think someone is missing, you can definitely mention him in the comments, but chances are he just didn’t make the cut.

I ranked 150, Zach ranked 122, Mike ranked 100, and Eno – yes Eno is here for the SP Ranks!!! – ranked 134. If they didn’t rank someone that one of the others did, he was given a +1 of their last rank as I’m sure you noticed in the other positions, but there’s a lot of different opinions with pitchers so it’s more prevalent here.
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NL OF Tiers: May
NL OF Tiers: Preseason

I love Bob’s Burgers. That love stems from a love of H. Jon Benjamin, which stems from a love of Home Movies. However, I do not find Archer all that funny. It is the lesser show, and that’s that.

I’m sorting the tiers by secondary characters in Bob’s. It’d be too easy to rank Bob’s family. Or would it? Should I? No, I won’t. I’ll stick to the game plan.

Aside from the top tier, the rest of the hitters are ranked loosely in their respective tiers. An argument could be made for all of them to move up or down a couple of spots.

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It’s rankings update time! As you may have consistently noticed as the updated RotoGraphs consensus rankings for hitters have gradually been released, two months of performance is hardly a large enough sample size to move the needle all that much for me. Unless there is a clear explanation for a change in performance and/or underlying skills, then more often than not, the player is going to revert to what you had him projected for in the preseason.

For pitchers, it’s essential to remember that ERA is not a skill. It’s just a result. So I don’t really care what a pitcher’s ERA is at the moment. What I’m really interested in is their peripherals and any changes in pitch mix and/or velocity. And even if their peripherals have changed, you then have to ask yourself if its sustainable. Again, more likely is that what we initially forecasted is what is going to be posted the rest of the way, though obviously this is not always the case.

As a reminder, the tiers are named after the best characters from the FXX show, Man Seeking Woman.

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We’re making our way around the diamond with our updated rankings and today we are diving into the outfield, a robust fantasy position with plenty of elite-level talent. Here are the positions we’ve done so far and you can also access them via the Positional Rankings in the right sidebar:

• Catchers
• First Basemen
• Second Basemen
• Shortstops
• Third Baseman

If you feel we missed someone, please let us know in the comments.

FYI: the table is sortable!
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