Three weeks ago I offered three (or four) starting pitchers for your consideration. In it I highlighted three starters who did not exceed various thresholds of ownership in Yahoo! fantasy leagues. Ken Erdedy liked it, and while I can’t tell if his name is real, it seems his sentiment was.

I anticipated returning with three hitters in a similar vein. However, I couldn’t help but highlight a particular hitter owned in an absurdly low percentage of leagues. (Alas, I got distracted, as I am wont to do.)

I’ll retain the format of my original post for kicks, but I have decided to point the spotlight entirely on him.

Sub-20% Ownership: Second Base

Delino DeShields Jr. (17%)

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Ground-ball rate stabilizes fairly quickly. Usually, you’ll hear this factoid in the first month of the season as we look at April stats and try to render prognoses on the rest of the season. Of course, ‘stabilizing’ means that there’s about a 50/50 chance the data is meaningful in that small sample.

Hidden in that fact is the key to today’s look at the player population. Players change. They change their batted ball mixes in season, too, not just in April. And if you look at month-long samples, you’re pretty close to that stabilization point again. You want about 30 games to believe in ground ball numbers, and your qualified batters typically play around 25 games in a month.

And, since we’re now comparing July to June instead of April to all of last year, and we’ve already admitted that players change their mixes, it’s useful to remember that this is not some sort of skeleton key that will figure it all out for us. Still, we need to know which players are altering their batted ball mixes, because it might stick, and it might mean something going forward.

And for Christian Yelich, Adam Eaton, Brandon Crawford and even Jung-ho Kang… we could be seeing the future.

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Every year, there are players who — for whatever reason — go completely overlooked in fantasy leagues, despite providing solid value. This year is no different. For today’s example, take Derek Dietrich.

The 26-year-old has been highly productive since his call-up in mid-June, hitting a robust .261/.368/.504 with seven homers in 136 plate appearances. However, his ownership rates remain miniscule (1% Yahoo, 1.9% ESPN, 4% CBS).

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If you just started following the baseball season right now with no intimate knowledge of how every player’s current numbers were accumulated, you’d think Ian Kinsler was having a perfectly reasonable season. There’s been a power-for-on-base exchange, but he’s actually a point higher in OPS from last year at .728 through 398 PA so far. His 104 wRC+ is very much in line with the 100, 105, and 102 of the previous three years.

Alas, most have you have been following the season closely and know that he went nearly two full months without a home run before snapping the skid on May 30th. It took another 21 games and 90 PA for his second, but then just 11 games for the third and a mere six games separating that one and both his fourth and fifth, which were clubbed in the same game on Monday night. He’s still only on pace for nine homers which would tie his career-low, set in just 103 games, but his last 40 games suggest he’s back to being the teens-level home run hitter of the last three seasons.
Whenever a stark turn comes for a player, the first question is always “what’s different?”

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It’s been a rough year for Ian Kinsler and Neil Walker, in very similar ways. Neither is having trouble getting on base, as both have batting averages in the .270s and on-base percentages around .340. The problem is that both Kinsler and Walker have suffered through season-long power outages, severely diminishing each man’s fantasy value.

On the year, Kinsler is the No. 10 fantasy 2B, with Walker slotting in at 13th. However, both have heated up in the month of July, with Kinsler posting an .843 OPS, and Walker sitting at .885 (neither had even broken the .750 mark in any of the season’s first three months). Walker has launched three of his seven 2015 homers since the calendar turned over from June.

Kinsler only has one long ball this month, but he’s also hit two near-homers that struck the top half of the wall, and has a total of six extra-base hits. With both players finally showing signs of power production, let’s take a look at who you’d rather have on your fantasy team rest-of-season.

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Not only are you getting the keystone rankings today, but the Catchers and First Basemen are also updated with the guys missed the first time around. So Carlos Santana and John Jaso are in with the catchers and guys like Todd Frazier have been fully ranked at 1B by our rankers.

Remember when I ranked Kinsler over Kipnis? That was rich. I’ll take my heat for being wrong there, but I still remain a touch skeptical on trusting Kipnis fully. This upcoming portion of the season – the second half – has long been a problem for Kipnis. He hasn’t been great at holding up in the dog days and delivering the frontline production we expect and have seen in previous first halves.

His career .683 OPS in the second half is well off the All-Star level .816 he’s amassed in the first half over the last four seasons. All that said, I’m still more in on Kipnis than I have been previously and ranked him quite highly, though still came in last among the quartet of rankers. Hilariously, despite feeling better about Kipnis as a player, he’s actually a spot lower than those May rankings where I had Kinsler ahead of him. Don’t worry, Kinsler is well behind him now (though still a starter in all formats). 

For this update, you will have the rankings from me, Zach Sanders, Jeff Zimmerman, and Dan Schwartz. Mike Podhorzer is currently on vacation.

Other positions:

• Catcher
• First Base

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You really can’t start a season much worse than Rougned Odor began 2015. The 21-year-old was so extremely bad that the Rangers sent him back down to Triple-A in early May, hoping he could figure out how to hit baseballs, which is a pretty important part of being a professional baseball player.

I wrote about Odor in late April, discussing how his poor start was really just a continuation of the way he ended 2014. As last season went on, Odor became a highly undisciplined hitter against offspeed pitches, and he began this year in the exact same fashion.

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Our journey to the far reaches of the fantasy dumpster take us to two National Leaguers who have recently come into playing time and are being introduced to owners for the first time. As usual, the players listed in this column are better suited for mono leagues, and the ownership percentages are by way of CBS.
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With July nearly upon us, it’s tier time here at Rotographs. Following up on my previous themes of Kurt Russell movies and vacation destinations, I have decided to assign hard rock bands to this month’s tiers. This idea came to me at about 3am on Friday night, and I haven’t thought of anything better, so here we go.

Before we get into it, please fight off the temptation to flood the comments section with “DUDE YOU DIDN’T RANK [insert band here] WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU” posts. I’ve only got seven tiers to cover the very broad genre of ‘hard rock,’ and I had to save two of them for Creed and Nickelback. Give me a break.

TIER ONE – LED ZEPPELIN
Brian Dozier
Jose Altuve
Jason Kipnis
Dee Gordon

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I haven’t forgotten about you National League only owners! Because I play in the American League Tout Wars, it’s far easier for me to come up with deep league names in that league. But it’s time to give you NLers some love.

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