The king is dead. Long live the king.

That’s right, we have a new number one. For many of you, it’ll be far too late to move Albert Pujols off the top of the heap. But, given how his season went last year, and the excellence he’s shown his whole career, and his combination of contact and power, and his bad batting average on balls in play, it seemed like the good bet was on him to recapture some magic once he was healthy. Maybe the all-star break will help him, but now the mounting evidence about his decline (three-year declines in ISO and HR/FB in particular) is just too much to ignore.

The replacement top dog is not by consensus, however. It’s a pick em, so my ranking got the extra weight. It’s what the boss does in situations like this. But it is worth noticing that all four rankers had a different number one first baseman. Who’s your number one?

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With all the ups and downs in the catcher position, the coloring on this table might be a surprise to some.

Yeah, until Russell Martin, nobody moves more than two spots in the rankings since our last update. Even Brian McCann only moved two spots by proving he was healthy. Jason Castro’s new batted ball profile, and all that new power? It earns him a few spots.

Evan Gattis won a job, lost it, got hurt and got healthy again, and there he is, almost in the same spot (he was 18th). He’s actually a decent argument for the consensus approach. Others may have undervalued his power, while I definitely over-projected his playing time. But now that we know more about his playing time with a healthy McCann, our rankings are closer — all of us have him around #20 — and the result is the same. Because the consensus reins in any outlier.

Between the tenth-best and twenty-best catcher, there doesn’t seem to be much difference. .260 or something, double-digit home runs… it may not sound exactly like that for each one, but it’s an approximate thing. Maybe a catcher in green in that group is more interesting than the rest just because he’s in green. Maybe it’s Alex Avila or Wilson Ramos, finally getting healthy.

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Because of last week’s July 4th holiday, these rankings are a bit late. So I apologize to all of you who have been spending this last week questioning how you could continue on with your life without this update.

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Today we have the latest batch of American League outfield rankings. There are some prospects climbing in the ranks rapidly as well as some injured veterans plummeting in value.

Tier One
Mike Trout
Chris Davis

No change here, and no real surprise either. An argument could be made that Davis deserves the number one spot, but the steals tip the scale in Trout’s favor. At this point, no one would whine about having either of these guys on their fantasy team.
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I’m taking over the shortstop beat around these parts. You’re welcome…like Staind said, it’s been a while since…there have been tiered rankings done for the position. So you’ve no doubt been running around the waiver wire aimlessly, not knowing your Seguras from your Espinosas.

That ends now, where we try to make heads or tails of the position that, according to Baseball Monster, has only provided four net-positive value players so far this year, two of whom are now injured.

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Young starting pitchers continue to make their presence known this year. Since the last NL pitcher rankings, owners have seen Tyler Skaggs, Michael Wacha, Gerrit Cole and, soon, Zack Wheeler reach fantasy-relevance. And that’s just in the National League. Some of those players will play major roles on championship-winning teams this year. How should they be valued? Let’s turn to the rankings. This month, I’m using Iron Chefs for the tiers. So, please allow me to introduce a veritable pantheon of baseball giants.

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Rankings update week! Since there was the obligatory confusion in the AL OF rankings update, let me remind you — American League. As in not National League. Though, I do have to admit it is amusing to read which random player is asked about not appearing in the rankings, as it’s never the top guy in the other league. Lots of movement this time as the important rates stabilize and become significant.

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With a lot shifting in the American League outfield, let’s get down to business. But this time it isn’t to defeat the Huns.

Tier One
Mike Trout
Chris Davis

For all the struggles that the Los Angeles Angels have been experiencing, it is hard to find any fault with Mike Trout. He already has double digit steals and home runs as well as a 149 wRC+. The surprise here is Chris Davis, of course. with 20(!) home runs already and a reduced strikeout, plus an increased walk rate, it is hard to find any real faults in his approach or his numbers. Davis’ year to date is certainly impressive, however he can’t keep up this pace forever, right? We’ll see, but given what he has done — and more importantly what he projects to end the season with — has earned him a spot in the top tier.
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We’re going to do something a little different here. The Bullpen Report guys — Alan Harrison, Benjamin Pasinkoff and Colin Zarzycki — are knee-deep in every bullpen every night, just to update you. So they’re in a great position to rank relievers when it comes to 5×5 roto leagues.

So they’ve got the keys to the car, and now they get to wreck it.

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We’re coming to an end of the series! We’ve pushed the consensus bullpen ranks over to the Bullpen Report guys, so they’ll have that to you soon. But for these four rankers, this episode is drawing to a halt. You can find all the updated ranks on your right, linked in that helpful little box.

The ranks, and the comments, have provided us with content for the coming weeks. Thank you for communicating which players are the most divisive. That allows us to know exactly which players we should be breaking down, RotoGraphs style. Add to that our timely coverage of players in the news, and we’re set.

Pitching changes on a dime though. While hitters give us their customary four or five plate appearances in a game, pitchers give us roughly five times that information every time they appear. So it’s fair that we break down every appearance for them and weight recent work heavily. And yet, every pitcher has a baseline, and we know how luck, park and weather factors can influence any one matchup. So we have to keep their careers in mind.

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