I should have known. I was thrilled to have acquired Troy Tulowitzki upon his entrance into the American League at the trade deadline in AL Tout Wars. I crossed my fingers that he would remain healthy, and productive, for the several months on my squad. That wasn’t to be. Naturally, it was a freak injury that has now sidelined him, causing his many fantasy owners to groan and think to themselves “of course this happened to him”.

If you missed the news, Tulowitzki suffered a bruised back and a cracked left shoulder blade, with the best case scenario having him returning in two to three weeks. Since that means there’s a very real chance he’s done for the season, or makes it back for just a couple of games, it’s time to search for a replacement. My American League only options are pathetic. But yours might not be. So here are a couple of shortstop eligible hitters owned in fewer than 50% of leagues that could make up for at least some of the lost production.

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Remember when the Dodgers were so flush with players that they couldn’t regularly find all of them playing time? How many times do we see this same thing play out with starting pitchers? Either situation seems to always play itself out either with underperformance of one or more of those involved or, and this is usually the case, by injury.

The Dodgers have had a cluster of talent vying for playing time on the infield just within their 25-man roster before we even account for Corey Seager knocking on the door in the minors, but a pair of injuries – one a long-term situation – has cleared the path for one of their bench bats to get something of an extended looking. Justin Turner is recovering from a skin infection on his thigh and should return this week (could even be today), but Howie Kendrick’s hamstring strain will leave sidelined for at least three weeks.

Enrique Hernandez (aka Kike, pronounced Key-kay) was essentially a throw-in piece in the Dee Gordon–Andrew Heaney deal. By the way, it is often referenced as the Gordon-Heaney deal, but there were five others players in that trade: Hernandez, Dan Haren, Austin Barnes, Chris Hatcher, and Miguel Rojas. It was the second deal that Hernandez had essentially been thrown into that year. He went with Jarred Cosart and Austin Wates to Miami for Jake Marisnick, Colin Moran, and Francis Martes.

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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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So about Carlos Correa. He looks pretty solid. It’s hard to avoid getting to excited with a player like this. I think it’s been fairly well established that Correa is good. Real good. I’ll try to tackle the fantasy implications of his first 50 games and determine how much weight to give them. Statistics through Aug. 5.

Is Correa the top fantasy shortstop for 2016?

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With two months to go, we’ll do one more reboot of the tiered shortstop rankings. Perhaps next month we’ll do some keeper rankings. The rankings below were derived by running our rest-of-season depth chart projections through the z-score method with a few names getting moved around by moi. Read the rest of this entry »

It might be the start of the second half so far as real baseball is concerned, but for us fantasy folks, we’re deep into the middle of the 2015 stretch run. Whether you’re looking to plug in some spare parts to aid your efforts or just need some warm bodies to fill your roster as you mull a fire sale, here are two players unowned in the vast majority of leagues who could help your cause.

The usual fine print: The players in this column are typically better suited for mono leagues, and the ownership percentages are by way of CBS.
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Continuing the positional rankings, we move over to shortstop. It’s been something of a barren wasteland this year. Thankfully, the unquestioned top two – Tulowitzki and Hanley – have been the unquestioned top two (with Hanley leading the way). but it’s been pretty jumbled from that point on. The landscape has really opened up with a lot of new names emerging as some former stalwarts have sunk further. I wasn’t even sure Correa would be called up in 2015 and now he’s looking like a game-changer at SS.

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Most add/drop questions I get on Twitter ask from the perspective of which player has the highest overall value. My response generally requests additional information, usually about what the team’s categorical needs are. The lack of this information in the original query could sometimes be due to the fact that it’s hard to ask a question and provide background info in 140 characters, but it seems that more often the categorical needs of an owner’s team are not a major consideration.

I’m tasked with writing about shortstops on Mondays, so I wanted to look at the shortstops owned in less than half of ESPN.com leagues who can best help you address categorical needs. I’ll only be addressing home runs, steals and batting average as there would be some overlap were I to discuss runs and RBI separately. I’ll try to list a player owned in less than 50 percent of leagues and one owned in less than 10 percent of leagues to try and help out deeper league players. Read the rest of this entry »

An even-thinner-than-normal shortstop position got some reinforcements in June with Carlos Correa and Francisco Lindor getting the call. If you’re not convinced that shortstop is as shallow as ever, consider the following, which shows that a steadily declining position has seen a big decline this season. Read the rest of this entry »

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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