Check out last month’s tiers right here. I’m in the midst of an intensely busy week, but I’ll try to respond to any questions you might have in the comments section.

TIER ONE
Jose Altuve

Altuve is outperforming his competition to such a degree that I nearly left Tier Two empty, simply to signify how much better the 26-year-old is than any other fantasy 2B option. Altuve somehow managed to outperform his ridiculous April, with an absolutely bonkers .396/.472/.582 slash in June. He launched four more bombs, stole three more bases, walked more than he struck out for the second consecutive month, it just goes on and on.

I’ll cherry-pick one amazing statistic before moving on: Altuve is hitting .302/.362/.395 in plate appearances in which he finds himself down 0-2 in the count. That’s good enough for a wRC+ of 108. In other words, Jose Altuve is a better hitter down 0-2, than a league-average hitter stepping into a 0-0 count.

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In December of 2014, the Royals gave up on Johnny Giavotella, shipping him to the Angels for non-prospect relief pitcher Brian Broderick. Giavotella didn’t exactly set the world on fire after being dealt, but the biggest ramification of this minor transaction was that Omar Infante was basically assured another season as the primary second baseman in Kansas City, despite a thoroughly underwhelming 2014. The Royals temporarily addressed the problem mid-season last year when they acquired Ben Zobrist, but when Zobrist signed with the Cubs in the offseason, the 34-year-old Infante entered this season as the Royals’ default second-sacker yet again.

On the surface, there simply wasn’t any competition. Christian Colon seemed like the only other option on paper, and he’s never looked like more than a utility bench bat. Raul Mondesi — the club’s top infield prospect — clearly needed more seasoning in the minors, and then got suspended in May for taking cold medicine with steroids in it. Infante predictably started 2016 as a de facto everyday player, and continued his quest to keep sticking as a major-league regular, despite refusing to hit baseballs.

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Just straight hitting the ball hard has its value, but there is an ideal angle. Hit the ball a million miles per hour into the ground, and you’re Giancarlo Stanton, grounding out to second base on the hardest hit ball so far in the Statcast era. You gotta hit it square.

People smarter than I am have determined that the ideal launch angle is between ten and thirty degrees. That combines the line drive angle (10-25 degrees) and home run angle (25-30), but in fantasy baseball, we’ll take a line drive or a home run, either’s fine.

So if we want to know who’s hitting the ball harder this year, it’s probably best to ask who’s hitting the ball harder in the right angles for success? That will tell us a little about some hot starts that are more believable because of what’s going on under the hood.

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Last week I wrote about eight players who are under performing their xOBA, so it seems only natural to talk about a few over performers today. There are a bunch of great cases to draw from, including Odubel Herrera and Xander Bogaerts, and below you will find a table that the players with the 15 largest differences between their wOBA and xOBA. Whereas many of the under performers last week were generally slow runners, many of the over performers are fleet of foot.  I have tried to single out the guys who are closer to average runners to talk about today.

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Looking for last month’s tiers? Check them out right here. (Author’s note: This post does not include statistics from Wednesday’s games.)

Two months into the 2016 season, I’m seeing a bit more clarity in the delineations between tiers at second base. That’s why this month has eight tiers, as opposed to last month’s six. Let’s get right to it:

TIER ONE
Jose Altuve

Baseball’s best second baseman just keeps on churning out the numbers. Altuve followed up a blazing hot April with a not-quite-as-hot — but still mighty impressive — month of May. The 26-year-old slashed .345/.406/.500, with nearly twice as many walks (14) as strikeouts (8). He’s now 15-for-16 on stolen-base attempts (no other 2B has more than eight SB), and has nine homers on the season.

Rather incredibly — even by his standards — Altuve is currently a top-five contributor at the position in all five standard categories: No. 1 SB, No. 2 R, No. 4 HR, No. 5 AVG, No. 5 RBI.

TIER TWO
Ian Kinsler
Robinson Cano
Ben Zobrist

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I used 10% Yahoo ownership as the cutoff for these selections. With these players available in nearly all leagues, boosting your middle-infield production isn’t as dire a situation as it may seem.

Derek Dietrich (9% owned) – With Dee Gordon suspended through July, Dietrich’s got a stranglehold on the second-base job in Miami for the next two months. For the most part, he’s been batting leadoff, although he’s hit in the No. 3 spot for the last two days, to accommodate a red-hot Ichiro Suzuki in the leadoff spot. Regardless, he’s hitting in the top third of the lineup, with a .293/.400/.485 slash.

The 26-year-old’s home-run power hasn’t shown up yet this year — with just two in 120 PA — but he’s got seven doubles and three triples. Don’t be fooled by that paltry ‘2’ in the HR column, because Dietrich has plenty of pop to get the ball over the fence. While his .355 BABIP suggests likely regression in his AVG, those of you in OBP leagues can reap the benefits of his 10.0% walk rate — and the fact that he’s strangely adept at being hit by pitches.

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It was suggested that we should celebrate the day that stats stabilize. Today is Grounder Day! Eat a sloppy joe while sitting on a blanket. Drink one of these, or some of this, but I don’t know about having any of this. Grounder Day!

Well, we actually aren’t all the way there. Only about twenty players have officially reached the stabilization point for ground ball rate. But that’s fine. It actually serves as a reminder that stabilization is not something that magically happens at one point. Stabilization happens over a spectrum, and today we know a little more than we did yesterday, and tomorrow we’ll know a little more.

But! Relative to *other* stats on our leaderboards, we know a good deal about a player’s ground ball rate by now. And the beauty of that news is that just knowing a player’s change in ground ball rate can tell us a good deal about what sort of power we should expect from them going forward.

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TIER ONE
Jose Altuve

Altuve isn’t just the best second baseman in fantasy baseball, he’s currently the most valuable overall player regardless of position. The soon-to-be 26-year-old already has seven homers and nine steals on the board, while hitting a robust .306/.404/.633. The power is the truly incredible part, seeing as he launched 36 total bombs in his first 668 major-league games.

Altuve’s walk rate currently sits at 11.4%, which even in a one-month sample is a huge improvement from last year’s 4.8%. Wrap your head around this one: Last year, Altuve earned 25 unintentional walks. Through one month of 2016, he’s already got 13.

Altuve was already the top fantasy 2B, and it’s staggering to see how much better he’s getting. I mean, the guy is about halfway to his HR and BB totals from last year after just 25 games. Oh, and he’s doing all this with a career-low .303 BABIP, despite career-high line-drive (30.1%) and hard-hit (32.5%) rates. Unreal.

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I previously took a look at hot starts at the keystone, so today let’s do the opposite. Last time, I examined three players who were outside the top 15 in our experts’ preseason rankings. Today, I’ll discuss three guys from inside the top 15, who find themselves scuffling at the plate. Obviously, it’s still early and we’re dealing with small samples across the board, but there’s legitimate reasons to worry in certain cases.

Anthony Rendon (preseason No. 9, current No. 40) – SELL

As I wrote last fall, Rendon’s future value is tough to evaluate, due to his extensive injury history. He’s torn ligaments in his right ankle, which he later broke. He also fractured his left ankle, as well as spraining his left MCL and left oblique. Throw in the strained right shoulder that limited him to DH duties for nearly his entire junior season at Rice, and that is one heck of an injury history for a guy who’s still only 25 years old.

At the time, I wrote the following regarding Rendon’s injuries and potential future production:

The optimist in me looks at the list of ailments above and is thankful that his 2015 injuries were not recurrences of prior issues. The pessimist in me sees a 25-year-old whose legs may not be able to support a lengthy career in professional athletics.

Even without a doomsday scenario like that, it’s easy to see Rendon’s skills deteriorating in the next few years. If he suffers another injury or two, he could be in a steep decline by the time he should be reaching his prime. It’s already clear that certain aspects of his game aren’t what they used to be.

This year, the Nats moved Rendon back from second base to third, possibly having realized that it might not be smart to have a player who has broken both of his ankles playing a position where baserunners come diving at your legs. This is a good thing. What isn’t a good thing is his complete lack of offensive production to this point in 2016.

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We are lost in the sea (puddle?) that is the small sample size portion of the season. We’re trying to find a mooring, some stat that we can really use to identify believable results. This is where I link you to the pieces about stabilization of stats, wipe my hands demonstratively and end the piece with a leaderboard.

Wait, I am going to do something like that, but with a few words of caution and analysis as well. For one, it seems to get lost that stabilization is merely the point at which the stat itself is more meaningful going forward than the league average. In other words, league average regression is still meaningful after this point, and the stat itself is still meaningful before that point. It’s all a continuum.

Instead, use the list as a way to judge the relative importance of stats. Easy enough. We’re past the point of stabilization for swing rates — not for reach rates or contact rates — and we’re not at the point where ground ball and fly ball rates stabilize. And yet, we can use swing rates, and ground ball and fly ball numbers, to judge players, because those stats are more meaningful than the others.

There’s also a second level here that shouldn’t be swept aside. Swinging less and hitting more fly balls is not — by itself — the greatest marker for improved performance. Some players should swing more and hit more grounders, of course. But here we’re going to look for guys that could benefit from better plate discipline and who could gain more power from more fly balls.

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