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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We’re just over a week into the 2016 season, and you don’t need me to tell you not to overreact to this tiny sample of game action. What I decided upon for this week is a look at three second basemen — ranked outside the top 15 in our experts’ preseason rankings — who find themselves off to hot starts at the plate. Who should you believe in, and who’s the beneficiary of small-sample flukes?

Starlin Castro (preseason No. 16) – BUY

Sandwiched around his most productive offensive season, Castro spent most of 2013 and 2015 scuffling at the plate:

• 2013 (705 PA) – .245/.284/.347, 4.3% BB, 18.3% K, .102 ISO
• 2014 (569 PA) – .292/.339/.438, 6.2% BB, 17.6% K, .146 ISO
• 2015 (578 PA) – .265/.296/.375, 3.6% BB, 15.7% K, .110 ISO

One of these things is not like the others, and a major question coming into the year was which Castro would show up in New York. The 26-year-old has lit up the scoreboard since debuting with the Yankees, with two homers and two doubles in his 9-for-20 start. Jeff Sullivan recently wrote an excellent article about some slight adjustments Castro’s made at the dish, closing off his stance and improving his plate coverage.

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I always enjoy a quality theme when composing these tiers. From Kurt Russell movies to hard rock bands to vacation destinations, I’ve had a healthy variety of themes. With WrestleMania coming up this weekend, I considered some sort of wrestling theme. However, my writing is frequently littered with wrestling references — both obvious and subtle — on a regular basis, so using it as a tier theme could amount to overkill.

For this first set of tiered rankings, I decided on the theme of Final Four teams. The main reason I settled on this theme is that I’m only splitting the players into four tiers this month. As the season gets underway, more clear delineations will likely develop within the tiers, and I’ll probably add more to reflect that.

As of right now, however, there’s just not much separating most of these guys right now. My second tier stretches all the way from No. 6 to No. 20, with much of the tier separated by extremely small gaps. For example, would it be surprising at all if Josh Harrison (No. 14) outperformed Ben Zobrist (No. 9), despite the fact that I have Zobrist five spots higher? That’s a pretty good illustration of how tightly grouped the players within these tiers are heading into the season.

If I forgot any players who you think should be on this list, please let me know in the comments section below and I’ll update it. For reference, I used Yahoo’s position eligibility requirements.

TIER ONE – NORTH CAROLINA TAR HEELS – (No. 1-5)
Jose Altuve
Dee Gordon
Robinson Cano
Ian Kinsler
Brian Dozier

Being the sole 1-seed remaining, UNC is obviously the favorite to take home the title. Of the Final Four teams, the Tar Heels are the one squad that was largely expected to be here all along, and they’re the total package. They should cruise to the championship game with little resistance. HOT TAKE: When you rank No. 2 out of 351 teams in both offensive efficiency and rebounding, you’re going to win a lot of games.

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Let’s go picking and panning once again, this time at the second base position. The updated RotoGraphs consensus rankings, from which I am comparing mine to the rest of the gang’s, are here.

For the second base position, my Picks will only include those in my top 20 and my Pans will only include those in the Consensus top 20.

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I present to you my ten bold predictions for this upcoming season. I’ve placed these items in order of increasing boldness to give you some sense of how likely I think these things are to occur, in hopes that they’re more actionable. The items toward the top of the list are more likely to happen but perhaps not as bold… But I get pretty far out there by the end.

10. Gerardo Parra finishes the year as a top 25 OF. I feel as though this is cheating. Not bold enough. After all, he finished as the 3oth best OF last year (by my calculations). And yet, he’s being drafted as the 53rd OF this season. The issue here may be the projected platoon role he’s in. But is Ryan Raburn really going to take a lot of playing time from him? And with the possibility of Carlos Gonzalez being traded, there are other paths to a full-time role.

In the days of declining batting averages and diminishing stolen bases, a simple 12 HR, 12 SB, and .290 season (his Steamer projection) really adds up in value. Not to mention the move to Colorado offers hope for even more offense. It seems like Parra is being drafted as the former utility outfielder he was with Arizona. He wasn’t sexy. Nobody wanted him. Hopefully putting him in the top 25 crosses the bold threshold.

9. Jose Altuve finishes the year as a top five hitter. Is that bold? I’m not sure. He finished last year as the 13th highest earning hitter and is being drafted as the tenth hitter heading into 2016. Projecting him to outproduce all of Anthony Rizzo, Giancarlo Stanton, Nolan Arenado, Manny Machado, and Carlos Correa to reach the top five does feel bold-ish. One of my favorite facts about Altuve is that he’s still just 25 years old. I suspect that many believe him to be older than he is because he’s been around for nearly four and a half MLB seasons. Why can’t he have a little more growth in him? Read the rest of this entry »