What will the fantasy baseball market look like for Jose Altuve in 2015? The Houston Astros’ second baseman, as a top-five commodity overall who wasn’t, on average, drafted as a top-five player at his position and barely within the top 100, according to Fantasy Pros’ ADP data, certainly helped some fantasy baseball players win this year. What did Zach Sanders know that all his haters in the comments didn’t?! It’s safe to say that Altuve has changed perception and will cost more next season.

There’ll also be folks who’ll avoid and/or recommend to avoid him because of the scary regression monster. Any player who hits .341 thanks to a .360 BABIP and steals 56 bases in 65 attempts after he finished his previous two seasons nowhere near those marks is due to fall hard, the reasoning might basically go. It’s a pretty simple and safe approach, since regression to mean performance is the smart bet.

But how much will his future performance actually regress? Altuve did some potentially significant things differently in 2014. It seems pretty plausible that he’s begun to establish an entirely new mean performance level. And if that’s true, then there might still be room to profit on a purchase of Altuve next year.

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It’s been a long couple seasons for Milwaukee Brewers second baseman Rickie Weeks. The injuries and ineffectiveness finally took it’s toll in 2014, as Weeks was moved out of a full-time role for the first time since 2005. The move came at an inopportune time for Weeks, as he’s now set to be a free-agent. While Weeks is coming off a fine year, in which he had a .359 wOBA, there are plenty of questions facing the second baseman moving forward. Assuming he can find a team to give him a shot in a full-time role, does Weeks have anything left in the tank?

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Since his 2009 breakout, Ben Zobrist has been a consistent all-around fantasy contributor, with his blend of power and speed. But the first chinks in the armor started to show in 2013. After hitting 20+ homers in three of his previous four seasons, he knocked just 12 out of the park. And after attempting at least 23 steals each season, he made just 14 attempts. Unfortunately, he failed to bounce back this year and posted a nearly identical season, just reaching double digits in both homers and steals. Does this mark the end of the Zorilla’s jungle rein or is there one last rebound in his future?

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The case of Jedd Gyorko, 2014, is a curious one. It’s an ugly one, too, with that .210 batting average and 10 home runs he put up in 443 plate appearances this past season. The San Diego Padres certainly hoped for more given that they signed him to a five-year contract extension, which came with a club option for 2020, in mid-April. Perhaps soon afterward, they began to regret it.

Is this past campaign more of a reflection of Gyorko’s true talent? His production (.249/.301/.444, with 23 home runs, in 525 PAs) in his rookie season more of a fluke? Will more or fewer of his prospective owners in rotisserie, head-to-head, and whatever other types of leagues view them that way? He may be a popular rebound candidate. But how popular?

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Jonathan Schoop recently concluded a rookie season in which he often batted at the bottom of the Orioles lineup and hit the fourth most home runs of pure second baseman (i.e. those listed by Zach Sanders). The 23-year-old was worth a dismal -$2 according to Sanders and generally went undrafted prior to the season. Despite the forgettable campaign, the youngster showed flashes of fantasy viability. He’ll just have to solve some problems first.

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In 2013, Daniel Murphy defied all expectations by vaunting into the top-five tier of fantasy second basemen, making him one of the best bargains at the keystone sack and a tempting draft target back in March. Unfortunately, he couldn’t quite keep up the good vibes, as Murphy, despite making his first all-star team this year, slipped from No. 4 to No. 9 at the position in both Zach Sanders’ rankings and ESPN’s Player Rater.

Depending on your point of view, that’s either disappointing or merely the result of a limited offensive player regressing to his mean. Regardless, Murphy, who long ago established himself as a legitimate major league hitter, continued his steady ways at the dish:
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It’s not often that a player we failed to even rank in the preseason finishes third in overall value at his position. But that’s exactly what Dee Gordon did, earning the third highest dollar value among second basemen this year. If someone told you that Gordon would earn nearly $3 more than Robinson Cano this year before the season began, you would have laughed in his face. But maybe it shouldn’t have been so shocking.

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Generally, everyone expected Robinson Cano home runs, runs batted in and runs scored to be down in 2014 compared to 2013 as he went from the Yankees to the Mariners. The Runs (81 to 77) were about the same and the RBIs dropped a good amount (107 to 82), but it was the home runs which did owners in. They nearly halved going from 27 in 2013 to 14 in 2014. Today, I am going to look at the decline’s  cause and if there is any hope for 2015.

The first key is to see how many home runs Cano lost moving from Yankee Stadium to Safeco Field. Using Inside Edge data*,  I estimated his HRs in 2012 and 2013 if he played half his games in Safeco and half at a league average field. This value would give an estimate on how much his home run total would go down. He hit 60 for the combined two seasons and the estimated home run total was 54.0. On average, he would be down three home runs per season if he was a Mariner those two years. If we move to his 2014 home runs, he would be estimated to hit 14.4 HR. He wasn’t exactly unlucky this past season, he hit almost as many home runs as he deserved.

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You can’t choose your last name. Otherwise, we might have to quibble with Neil Walker’s choice, considering his career walk rate is below league average. His impatience doesn’t come with a poor knowledge of the strike zone, however, and that’s probably what helped fuel a semi-breakout season at 29 years old, despite a four-year low in walk rate.

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In July, I wrote a column detailing my concerns about Brian Dozier. Dozier came into July with 51 walks compared to 65 strikeouts, and that plate discipline was a big part of his move into the top tier of fantasy second-base options. By the time I wrote him up on July 28, the 27-year-old had amassed 21 strikeouts, with just one measly walk, since the calendar turned over to July.

Without regurgitating my entire piece from July, I concluded that Dozier was being far more aggressive at the plate, as the 4.50 pitches he saw per plate appearance in June had dropped to less than four pitches per PA. Additionally, pitchers were throwing Dozier fewer fastballs, and he was swinging at offspeed stuff with nearly zero strike-zone discrimination.

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