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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Phew what a bear. Starting pitchers remain on the docket for Monday, but thankfully only catchers tomorrow. Because there seem like there are about a million outfielders.

Of course, not all of them are any good, especially in a mixed league. And we probably ranked about three times as many as we needed to for mixed leaguers. But at least all the relevant names are here. Even if there are too many to recap in any comprehensive way, they’re here.

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These tiers are a bit later than the rest of the crew, as my vacation delayed my writing. All can breathe easily now as they have finally arrived! You can check out my June update here. A quick note: I have removed pitchers who were demoted to the minors since I have no idea when and if they will be returning to the Majors.

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By now, you might have a favorite ranker among the four of us. That’s fine, we’re adults. We’ve gathered to give you four options for a reason. In fact, we’ve gathered these four guys in particular for a reason.

Jeff Zimmerman primarily uses ZiPs rest-of-season projections, with a few tweaks, and so he’s our Sober Suzy. ZiPs does use information from this year, weighted against information from past years, and it does include playing time projections, but it does not get caught up in the excitement of a player in a breakout. Zach Sanders has his own projections, which are more intuitive, and he uses his value calculator to stack the players up against each other. On the other end of the spectrum, you have me and Mike Podhorzer. We are more intuitive, and yet we have different ideas about the players and different levels of cynicism.

Taken as a whole, you should get a reasonable set of rankings that doesn’t get too caught up in a hot month, or too upset about a bad start. That’s the aim.

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A commenter brought up a common refrain on a discussion of the first base ranks yesterday. That commenter asked if I would trade my Mark Teixeira straight up for Adrian Gonzalez, since I had ranked Mark Teixeira one spot ahead of Adrian Gonzalez. It was a simple question, but it brought into focus many of my feelings about these rankings.

First, there’s no such league that I’ve ever been in where I have offered or received an offer of one player at one position for another player at the same position. That doesn’t mean that it never happens, or shouldn’t happen, it just means that the hypothetical doesn’t really match up with reality in a useful way. Then again, if you felt strongly about those two players, perhaps you would make that trade.

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Perhaps I shouldn’t have scheduled the rankings week during a vacation week, but this isn’t a normal vacation. My wife and our three-month-old are visiting her sister, her 18-month-old, and her newborn in Hawaii — it wasn’t going to be a vacation like most vacations. In fact, even though rankings are a grueling, thankless task, they offer a respite (a vacation, perhaps) from my vacation.

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The baseball world is quiet. Only the All-Stars are stirring, and even that action puts many baseball fans to sleep. 90% of the game is on a three-day vacation — but not the gang here at RotoGraphs headquarters. Given the fact that all the teams have played more than half their games, it’s time to update the consensus ranks for the rest of the season. These are built for 12-team mixed leagues with traditional 5×5 stats, but we extended the rankings as far down as we could in order to give managers of all types a reference for the second half.

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With Independence Day in the rear-view mirror and all but two teams (Royals and Nationals) having played their 81st game, it’s time for a midseason update to our first base rankings. Due to popular demand, the catchers (Buster Posey, Mike Napoli, Joe Mauer, Carlos Santana) have been left out of the rankings, ditto the middle infielders (Michael Young and Howie Kendrick). Here are the preseason, May, and June tiers for reference.

Tier One
Joey Votto
Miguel Cabrera
Paul Konerko
Albert Pujols
Prince Fielder

Votto is clearly the better hitter in baseball and at least in the conversation for the best all-around player in the game. Konerko has slowed down a bit since his “minor” wrist procedure but not enough to derail his season or dampened his expected fantasy production. The other three are pretty self-explanatory.

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It’s time again to re-visit the catcher tiers as the calendar flips to July. I’ve taken both current and expected performance into account, some thoughts and expectations of my own and a few comments from you, my very own Peanut Gallery. Things are looking a little different than they did back in June, so without further ado… Read the rest of this entry »

Even though the positional rankings aren;t being updated monthly, the tiers are, so let’s take a look at some of the movement amongst the catchers.  We saw a few things happen with the May tiers but I held back any extreme movement because of sample sizes and questions surrounding performance sustainability.  This month, guys are moving… Read the rest of this entry »