Josh Harrison was not on anyone’s radar going into last season, yet alone ending up as a top 10 third baseman. The right-hander is now known after hitting .315 with 13 home runs and 18 stolen bases. So what are the chances of him coming close to a repeat season or even showing some improvement?

To say Harrison was not well reguarded coming into his season and any time in the past is an understatement. Here are some of his FG+ reports from the last three seasons

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It was a good year to be a Howie Kendrick owner. The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim second baseman hit for a quality batting average (.293), as usual. That rate stat has kind of come to define him, though. The fact that he accumulated a career-high 617 plate appearances in 2014 is basically why he delighted fantasy baseball players as the sixth-most valuable man at the keystone sack. He belted only seven home runs and stole a modest 14 bases, but those sums and the playing time resulted in 85 runs scored and a career-high-tying 75 RBIs. Kendrick was, practically, an across-the-board money earner, and that was good enough for him to turn a tidy profit for his owners in most leagues.

Mixed-leagued earnings of nearly $20 and a spot in the top six at any position in a particular campaign don’t mean that a player is one of the best options at that position, of course. Kendrick’s 2014 value was a byproduct of auxiliary attrition coupled with his somewhat greater reliability than normal. The depth, perhaps growing, at second base should plant the Halos’ hard hitter right back into the mix of solid middle-infield options, as the RotoGraphs consensus pegged him this past March, next draft season. The 31-year-old has a tried and true skill set, but it’s limited and in decline.

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On the surface, Kolten Wong didn’t have the most exciting 2014. The 24-year-old’s season was a serious rollercoaster, as I discussed in my column on him over the All-Star Break. Sitting here at the end of the season, it’s hard to look at his monthly splits and know what to make of his year on the whole. He finished the season as the No. 13 fantasy second baseman, coming in just behind the likes of Dustin Pedroia and Scooter Gennett, earning a little over $6. Pretty unremarkable, right?

Wong started off so cold that the Cards sent him back down to the minors before the calendar even turned from April to May. He tore it up for a few weeks in Triple-A, Mark Ellis and his .180/.253/.213 slash failed miserably, and Wong was back up by mid-May. His hot hitting carried over from the minors, and Wong became firmly entrenched as the starting second baseman in St. Louis.

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Kipnis ranked 14th among second basemen in Colonel Sanders’ rankings, ahead of Omar Infante and behind Kolten Wong.

Jason Kipnis came into the season as Rotographs’ No. 1 fantasy second baseman, and in that regard the season was a pretty big disappointment. Well, in virtually every regard Kipnis was a disappointment.

Kipnis hit just .240/.310/.330; among qualified second sackers those marks ranked 16th, 12th and 16th. As a side note: there were only 16 qualified second basemen. Only D.J. LeMahieu and Dee Gordon hit fewer home runs than Kipnis’ six. Arguably Kipnis’ only saving grace was his 22 steals. Only Gordon and Jose Altuve swiped more.

An interesting bit of news shot through the wires in the last week as the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Terry Pluto reported Kipnis had bulked up to build his strength and hopefully hit more power. Read the rest of this entry »

After yesterday’s mostly unpopular Chase Utley pun, I’m going to play the old politician’s card and stick to the facts. Right, “facts.” In any case, here we have a guy named Ian Kinsler, one who developed a bit of a injury prone label in Texas but has missed few games from his age 29 through 32 seasons. Last year was his first outside of Texas after he was dealt for Prince Fielder (the Rangers would like that one back!).
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This is an article about Luis Valbuena. What follows might be rendered moot if Kris Bryant wins the Cubs’ third base job out of spring training next year. Even if Bryant doesn’t do so, he’s probably not long for Triple-A ball, and should be up in the big leagues for good by midseason. So, unless something else happens — I suppose there’s an outside shot that Javier Baez tanks in spring training and Valbuena takes over at second base while Baez gets demoted for further seasoning — Valbuena might not have a regular role with the Cubs for much longer. It’s very possible, even probable.

But, despite other caveats, Valbuena has his merits as a hitter, and he’ll be eligible at second base and third base in almost all fantasy formats going into 2015, so let’s discuss—for the enjoyment of said.

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Chase Utley entered the season with two big questions to answer – could he stay healthy and how hard would age related decline bite? The answers turned out to be yes (good!) and pretty hard (not so good). Despite that, Utley turned in $15 of value per Mr. Sandman with an average preseason cost of $10 according to Fantasy Pros. That makes him an uncommon known commodity who turned a profit.

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Since his 2007 semi-breakout performance, Aaron Hill has been an enigma. In fact, he’s run the gamut from being really good, mediocre and bad from a fantasy perspective over those years. Unfortunately, Hill owners got the bad version this year, as he ranked just 17th in earnings among second basemen. Since it would be fun and it’s in the name of this site after all, let’s depict his various performance metrics in graphical form since his 2005 debut.

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In 2013, Dustin Pedroia had what most fantasy baseball enthusiasts considered a down year. Despite hitting .301/.372/.415, Pedroia’s counting stats slipped to single digit home runs, and he failed to break 20 stolen bases for the first time since 2007 (not counting injury-plagued 2010). He did provide plenty of runs and RBI for the World Series champs, and considering he played with a troublesome thumb injury for quite some time, there were many who considered him a good bounceback candidate after getting it fixed in November of last year.

And why not a bounceback? After all, Pedroia had pretty firmly settled himself behind Robinson Cano in the top tier of second basemen for the better part of five seasons going back to 2008. Pedroia was a perennial .300 hitter with 20-20 written all over him, and among league leaders at second base in runs and RBI. With the thumb issue behind him, most prognosticators saw a return to 15 home runs and 20 stolen bases at a minimum, with his typical associated counting stat output to follow.

And then on April 4th, the Red Sox home opener, Carlos Gomez slid into second base to break up a double play. Pedroia went up in the air, and came down on his surgically repaired hand. And Pedroia’s season kind of mirrored that of the Boston Red Sox all season — it just never materialized. And in fact, Pedroia aggravated his hand injury several times over the course of the season, ultimately succumbing to surgery in September when it was clear the Red Sox weren’t going anywhere in 2014 and/or he just couldn’t play with it anymore. He would finish with a .278/.337/.376 slash line with seven home runs, just five stolen bases and the lowest wOBA as a professional by far at .318.

Looking at his 2014 performance is going to be difficult inasmuch as using it as a predictor for future contributions. Because there’s no doubt you need strong hands in order to hit a baseball, and if Pedroia lacked that for the majority of the season, well then maybe his performance was actually miraculous.

If you look at his batted ball data, Pedroia was well within what would be considered normal for his career:

His line drive rate was actually at a career high at nearly 24% while his fly ball rate was at a career low. His HR/FB rate was at its lowest mark since 2007, but if you look at his average distance on fly balls and home runs over the past four seasons, it might signal some bad luck (by his standard):

So after seeing his fly ball and home run distance drop to a pretty paltry 265 feet, it popped back up in 2014 almost to the level it was when he hit a career high 21 home runs. But obviously, the home runs never really materialized in 2014.

Something that might be of concern, and perhaps just a measure of his age, is the steady decline in his pitch values on fastballs:

I include sliders here simply because that’s the second most frequent pitch Pedroia sees, and he’s holding his own there — but on fastballs, which he sees almost 40% of the time, he has been in steady decline for five seasons, although this year was a hair less terrible than last year. I’m not sure we can pin all of this on a bad hand, but it could be part of the explanation.

Pedroia has been a guy who historically has used all fields pretty well, and his scatter plot from the 2014 season demonstrates a pretty decent distribution:

But somewhere around mid-season, Pedroia started to become a very pull-heavy hitter (from July 15 to end of season):

And during that same time span, he became a much heavier ground ball hitter in lieu of line drives:

This data is what makes me lean towards his hand bugging him. He was hitting less like Pedroia than ever, and it just deteriorated over the course of the season. It’s incredibly difficult to predict which Pedroia will show up in 2015, but I’ll certainly be looking for news on his health, specifically that troublesome hand. Because he’s now seen two seasons ostensibly derailed by the same hand injury and prior to that, he was one of the most reliable second baseman in both real and fantasy baseball. He could be a bargain on draft day, but the risk is high — if he turns in another year like 2014, you’ll be kicking yourself all the way to Rickie Weeks.

Scooter Gennett owns a .300 lifetime batting average. To be fair, that line is a bit misleading as his lifetime of major league hitting consists of 704 plate appearances spread out over parts of two seasons. The left-handed hitting second baseman has been used in a platoon fashion with the probable free-agent-to-be Rickie Weeks since Gennett was called up in 2013. Read the rest of this entry »