You’ll hear us talk about statistical stabilization here, and link to pieces like Russell Carleton’s or Derek Carty’s. The basic idea is that there are thresholds at which a stat moves into a decent sample and becomes more meaningful.

Maybe you’ll come away thinking that we’ve said that ‘x stat is stable so that’s what you’ll get the rest of the way,’ and if so, that’s on us. That’s not what stabilization means in this context.

What it means is that the r-squared number that correlates a player’s past stats with his future stats in that category has passed .50. That’s a mouthful, here’s another try: if you were to try and predict future work in a category, you’d regress their current work against the league average. At the stabilization point, you can use half their own number plus half the league average in your calculations.

One more try, in the most colloquial language possible: Stabilization is the point at which a number in a category tells us more about their future work than the league average.

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Today’s edition of the deep league waiver wire is for those with a truly barren free agent pool scrambling for an injury replacement. Even better, both have dual position eligibility, which is extremely helpful when you’re faced with so few pickup options.

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Brad Miller is no longer taking walks or getting hits. That’s obviously a problem, because it means he’s killing your team in average, failing to drive in runs and not getting on base to score runs or steal bases. Entering the seasons as the Fangraphs consensus number nine at shortstop and not ranked by a single person as outside of the top-10, Miller has instead repaid owners with the 24th-best performance at the position, providing net positive value only in home runs (he has three).

The .187-7R-7RBI-3HR-0SB line is obviously troubling. The realities underneath it – specifically, his suddenly-anemic walk rate and sky-high strikeout rate – are even more troubling, though hopefully they represent a short-term issue.
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In an industry league I joined this off-season, I inherited a team with Jean Segura as my starting SS and biggest trade chip. Having never been a Segura fan, I started shopping the Brewer speedster, and found myself relatively flush with offers. In a 20 team league, I think at least eight owners inquired, and deals were pretty solid.

This week, I finally traded Segura, and the return was not what it would have been three or four months ago. So what happened?

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I get it – Dee Gordon probably burned you in 2012, when you took him as the 10th shortstop off the board, expecting 60-plus stolen bases and a Billy Hamilton-esque layup in the steals category.

Coming off a 24-steal performance in just 56 games the year prior, it was easy to look past the fact that Gordon only sporadically showed a good discipline profile in the minors. This guy can run. ZIPS wasn’t quite as friendly as public opinion but still saw a .271 average and a .310 on-base percentage that was good enough to afford Gordon 74 stolen base opportunities.

He failed. He stole you 32 bases, sure, but scored just 38 runs, appeared in only 87 games and had a pathetic .228/.280/.281 slash line.

It’s time to forgive him.
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For the second time in two days, I’m going to build off of Mike Podhorzer’s quick hits about the most added fantasy players through the season’s first week. Hey, this is a shortstop beat, it’s week two, and he touched on two of the buzziest shortstop names going.

One of those names was the second most added fantasy piece last week, vaulting from five percent ownership to 31 percent in CBS leagues. It’s been slower in Yahoo formats, but Adeiny Hechavarria is up to 13 percent ownership there, too.

I’m asking you today to throw him back.
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I had Jonathan Villar late last season in a league I needed some extra speed in (net stolen bases) and he gave me a solid 10 steals over the last third of the season. I had him in a dynasty league as well so I have been monitoring him for some while. The Astros have had a solid core of shortstops in their system with Villar then on the verge of major league play and Carlos Correa and Nolan Fontana further down the minors behind him. Villar got overshadowed due to Correa’s incredible upside, but he is now becoming a more common name among fantasy circles due to his impressive speed.
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With one day in the books, you’ve already got one prediction right when it comes to the shortstop position: Yes, Jose Reyes will get hurt at some point this season. On the first at bat of the season, to be precise.

While Reyes’ injury history was surely priced into his ranking and projections already, his opening-day-uhh-why-did-he-play-on-the-weekend-at-less-than-100-percent injury serves as a reminder that things can change quickly. Chris Owings is a full-time starter, Alex Gonzalez surely earned himself some additional early PAs, and Hanley Ramirez is the bustiest bust to ever bust.

It’s technically a day too late, but here are the moment-in-time shortstop tiers for the 2014 season.
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It’s officially April, and with the dawn of a new fantasy season comes the return of a beloved fantasy pastime: dumpster diving.

These are the players you didn’t read about in the magazines, who didn’t make the final cut in your draft, who would otherwise be nonentities on the fantasy radar were it not for the deepness of our leagues – and the regular necessity of patching up spots when players go down with injuries, lose playing time, and deal with the usual topsy-turviness of fantasy life.

But you didn’t come here to read an intro, you came here to dive. Let’s do this.
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The baseball blogosphere received a late Christmas present this morning when the Detroit Tigers traded Steve Lombardozzi to Baltimore in return for veteran shortstop Alex Gonzalez. Yeah, that’s the same Alex Gonzalez who limped to a .194 wOBA with the Milwaukee Brewers before getting released mid-season with a -1.1 WAR. Amongst non-pitchers with at least 100 plate appearances, Gonzalez compiled the third-worst wOBA in Major League Baseball, ahead of only Casper Wells and Luis Cruz. Tremendous company.

Of course, the Tigers are attempting to replace the injured Jose Iglesias without signing Stephen Drew, which would cost the organization a draft pick, or trading for Nick Franklin, which would involve sacrificing prospects from an already-thin farm system. It appears the organization has opted to compile a handful of fringe internal candidates, hoping one or two sticks enough to bring competent production to the shortstop position.

For fantasy purposes, though, should owners even bother paying attention to this battle?

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