A lot has happened since the May consensus shortstop rankings were published. Those will be updated around the All-Star break, but until then here are my tiered rankings for June.

Tier 1

Starlin Castro
Troy Tulowitzki
Rafael Furcal
Jed Lowrie
Hanley Ramirez

Castro was a pretty valuable player last year when he hit 10 home runs, stole 22 bases and hit .307. We’re through 60 games this season and he already has five homers and 16 steals and is hitting .308. Our ZiPS updated season projections have him swiping 32 bags with 11 homers. He’s being far more aggressive than last season, swinging at 41.6 percent of balls outside the zone, but it’s possible he goes 15/30/.300 with 80 RBI and 80 runs. Not many players, let alone shortstops, are going to have those totals. The biggest surprise in this group is Jed Lowrie. We’ve all been teased by his potential before. He’s getting regular playing time now, and has avoided injury thus far, and the results are speaking for themselves. His 12 homers lead the position, though he’s driven in himself nearly half the time. He’s become more selective this season, swinging less and walking more. I’ve always been a Lowrie believer and it’s paying off right now.

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It’s time to update our first base tiered rankings now that we’re into June and more than one-third of the way through the season. Due to popular demand, I’m leaving the catchers (Mike Napoli, Buster Posey, Joe Mauer, Carlos Santana) and middle infielders (Michael Young, Howie Kendrick) out of the rankings since they’re so obviously more valuable at other positions despite having first base eligibility in most leagues. Here are the preseason and May tiers for reference.

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

Konerko makes the long overdue jump into the top tier thanks to his MLB-best 189 wRC+. That latest minor wrist procedure doesn’t concern me much, the man has gotten better and better with age.

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It is ranking tiers update week and today are the American League starting pitchers. By this time in the season, peripherals are stabilizing and I can now put a lot more stock into skills surges and declines. As a reminder, these rankings are only supposed to reflect how I expect pitchers to perform going forward. How a pitcher has already performed to date bears no weighting here. Refresh your memory with my May update.

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It may be a day late, but I assure it isn’t a dollar short. Today marks the updated tiers for American League outfield eligible players.

Tier One:
Josh Hamilton
Curtis Granderson
Jose Bautista
Adrian Gonzalez

Joey Bats was able to re-enter the upper echelon. Over the past 30 days he’s hit .348 with nine home runs and 23 RBI’s. Combine this past month with what he should project to do the rest of the season and you have yourself a top shelf player. Hamilton and Granderson continue to mash about as well as anyone could expect, so they’ve managed to hang onto the top spots as of right now. Now OF eligible in Yahoo! formats, A-Gon has seen himself debut in the tiered rankings where I think he will be come the end of the season. I think we would all be shocked if he didn’t end up as a top tier player.

Tier Two:
Adam Jones
Mike Trout
Austin Jackson

The biggest jump here is Trout becoming more or less an instant super star level player. This type of offensive production from someone so young truly ranks among the best names in the history of the game. Trout has so far been a solid source for average, OBP, power, steals and he has even chipped in 20 RBI’s already. I assumed he would be a very good player later down the road. I didn’t expect him to be great from the word go. Even while being on the 15-day disabled list, I am optimistic about Jackson for the rest of the season. This may change as soon next week, as he is going take live batting practice for the first time today and be evaluated afterwards. Read the rest of this entry »

The folks at Baseball Think Factory are kind enough to supply Fangraphs with projected ZiPS values for each player covering the rest of the season. These values take the player’s preseason projection and how they have produced so far in 2012 and then estimate the player’s stats for the rest of the season.

I used Zach Sander’s formula to rank only 2B for the rest of the season.using z-scores. Here are the rest of season values for 2B order by their current z-score and some thoughts on the rankings:
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We’ve finally come to the end of this long dance, and it feels good. The hope all along was not to impose our belief system on anyone with these rankings, but to show what a projections-based ranking system would look like: sober and difficult to budge. After all, true talent changes much less often than results do.

As for the major disagreements, they seemed to surround a few issues.

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Fridays used to mean shows and bars and friends, but they still hold the same excitement now that I’m a family man (and to tell the truth, they’ll mean shows and bars and friends again some day). The idea that I might have unstructured, unhurried time with my son, and maybe even time for a nap in the backyard with a beer by my side… that’s pretty exciting these days. When did I get this old.

Age has something to do with these ranks. It’s a double-edged sword. Have some years and a track record on you and we’ll give you more leash when you’re struggling. And yet you’ll have those that question if you’re done before your time. Be a young guy on the come and we’ll be tempted to have you number one with a bullet, but reason says that expectations should be tempered, especially those put upon teenagers.

Let’s look at the outfielder rankings, which have some high-profile movers and shakers and some interesting debuts.

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I’ll be honest with you. Rankings week is a tough week. It seems that everybody zooms in on the rankings of their players and wants them to be better. Most want more reactionary rankings than a site like RotoGraphs is going to give. The difficulty is that it is much more likely that a player’s true talent is the same as it was a month ago, and we do our best to find that true talent.

Of course, there are breakouts. There are role changes. There are injuries. And that’s where most of the movement will come. Third base should provide more movement than most, considering the fact that the position has had more breakouts, role changes and injuries than most. Let’s take a look at them.

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As you no doubt have noticed, this week we have been rolling out our updated positional tiers and consensus rankings. Today is American League starting pitcher day, which means that I have not actually forgotten to rank Lance Lynn, and no, this does not mean I think Tim Lincecum is not roster-worthy. Most importantly, these tiers are based strictly on how I rank the pitchers going forward. What’s done is done, so I don’t care what a pitcher’s results are right now, aside from how it may help me project them going forward. You can check out my pre-season tiers again to compare.

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Shortstops are the red-headed stepchildren of the offense, but this year, catastrophic injury has stayed away. Oops, jinxed. You can blame the next one on me.

Early changes in contact rate and batted ball mix are the first to become reliable, so look there for possible reasoning. Speed is a tricky thing, too — it’s such an athletic skill that sensing a slight decline early in the season might just be enough to worry about their wheels. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet seen a study that points out a harbinger for a speed loss (could Bill James‘ speed score become reliable in a third of a season perhaps?).

Questions for another time. For now, your Updated RotoGraphs Rest-of-Season Consensus Shorstop Rankings ™.

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