Are you desperate for a second baseman or middle infielder in your deep league? Then you’ve come to the right place! I’ve got a pair of possible free agents ripe for the picking just for you.
Here are my updated shortstop tier rankings:
Tier One: Troy Tulowitzki
Tier Two: Everyone else
Tulowitzki has been that damn good, and while Paul Swydan did a great job covering Tulowitzki’s early breakout last week, it’s worth putting the hot start – 236 wRC+ and 3.1 WAR and all – in context for fantasy baseball.
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Really, who isn’t? OK, maybe Zack Cozart.
But, in general, a fastball is what a hitter sees more often than not. And, in general, a hitter hopes to see a fastball in a “fastball count” more often than not. Perhaps the one they want is of the four-seam variety, but any fastball will do if a pitcher isn’t commanding it. Which probably has something to do with how the pitcher arrived at the fastball count in the first place.
Jarrod Saltalamacchia isn’t any different from most hitters in that regard.
The beauty of life as waiver wire fodder is that you don’t need to be great, or good, or heck, even a full-time player to gain entry into the club — you merely need to show up with a job opportunity to take center stage here. In the case of our two contestants this week, their long-term playing time is far from certain, but they’ve been given a chance in the immediate term to contribute in fantasy, and given their past success, that might be enough to make them worthwhile in deeper leagues.
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Yesterday, I discussed the April batted ball distance surgers. So naturally, today I’ll check in on the decliners. Because regression to the mean is such a powerful force, a distance decline sticks more often than a surge does. In other words, I would be more concerned about a decliner than excited about a surger.
Contract year. He got skinny. He’s 27 years old. This will be the Panda’s year. This will be the year Pablo Sandoval puts it all together.
So far, so not good. Sandoval’s power is down, his strikeout rate is up, his swing metrics are all messed up, and his owners are considering dropping him in mixed leagues. What’s up with this skinny sad Panda?
We’re a month through the season, and fantasy owners are already jumping to huge conclusions regarding the 2014 season. These tiered rankings attempt to capture the production from the first month of the season, moving some players up and down where I felt it was necessary, but largely, I attempted to refrain from getting too caught up in the ebbs and flows of single-month performance. There are five months remaining in the 2014 season. Lots will change, and I didn’t want to make the tiered rankings a simple “who is performing well right now,” as that’s not overly useful.
Anyway, here we go.
Now that we’re more than a month into the season, we finally have enough data to start taking batted ball distance numbers seriously. When developing my latest xHR/FB rate equation, I limited the player population to include only those who recorded at least 20 home runs and fly balls. At this point, the majority of the leaderboard sits between 20 and 25, so let’s dig in and start by looking at which hitters have experienced the largest increase since last season.
Yesterday we discussed four players who passed the eye test. In other words, my amateur scouting opinion is in agreement with their early season numbers. In the hands of an amateur, the eye test can only take us so far; data is still going to be king. Even so, there is value in knowing how a player looks on the field. Chris Coste was briefly quite good, but he never passed anybody’s eye test. So when he went from 33-year-old stud to 34-year-old dud, nobody was surprised.
