Archive for Shortstops

Andrelton Simmons: The New Jose Altuve?

They both weigh 170 pounds! Okay, one’s a lithe 6-foot-2, quick-twitch shortstop, and the other is a stocky 5-foot-7 second baseman, and actually we’ll get to many more differences as we go, but in the world of fantasy middle infielders, is there room for a comparison? Andrelton Simmons could be the late sleeper we all need at a tough position, just like Jose Altuve was last year.

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Troy Tulowitzki and Evan Longoria: Health as a Skill

In our Ridiculously Early Mock Draft — still ongoing — my first two picks ‘around the turn’ were Troy Tulowitzki and Adrian Beltre. But Evan Longoria went one pick later and I was ready to take the down on their luck pair. A year ago, that duo would have been deemed a coup, most likely — a right side of the infield filled with sixty home runs and twenty-plus stolen bases and a good batting average. This year, the picks were met with critique.

As the “Two Month Tulo” moniker from that comment suggests, most of the problem is health-related. Though the Tulo and Longo are 28 and 27 years old respectively, there’s a sense that perhaps the projections are too plate-appearance heavy for two guys that have succumbed to major injuries in multiple seasons over their young careers to date. Health does seem like a skill, but because of the way projections work, it’s a skill that should be factored into every projection you see.

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Stephen Drew Goes to Beantown

The perennially blah Stephen Drew is packing his bags again, this time heading to Boston after signing with the Red Sox last week. Drew was limited to just about a half season worth of at-bats after a long recovery from an ankle injury that cut his 2011 season short. It ended up being his worst offensive performance, as he mustered just a .291 wOBA. Now taking his craft to New England, let’s find out if park factors will help him at all.

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How Much Bounce is in Stephen Drew’s Pillow?

Stephen Drew signed with Boston for a year and ten mill, hoping to use that pillow contract to bounce back and get a better long-term deal in the future. For a player that sports an above-average career walk rate and some positive fielding years on his ledger, it’s certainly possible that Drew provides good real-life value but remains a fantasy enigma. After all, there’s a decline in many of his numbers that has nothing to do with his horrific injury at the end of the 2011 season.

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Party Hardy? Hardly.

I’m rarely much of a political person — at least publicly — but the hardest I’ve ever campaigned was for the Twins to NOT trade J.J. Hardy after the 2010 season. It wasn’t as though I had any emotional connection to Hardy; the closest I ever came to even speaking to the guy was that I stood a few lockers away from him while I interviewed a few of his teammates.

But what I never really understood was what went wrong in that relationship. Hardy had a very good second half with the Twins. He was finally healthy and started hitting the ball better, and was essentially what the Twins and everyone could have dreamed for: a solid shortstop on both sides of the field. Read the rest of this entry »


Derek Jeter: Volume Isn’t a Bad Thing

Every spring fantasy columns tend to say the same old thing about Derek Jeter. “He’s old. He’s getting older. He can’t keep doing this forever. Let someone else pay the pinstripe tax.” Maybe owners have been taking this more to heart recently, as the days of that one Yankee fan in your league snagging Jeter in round two appear to be rapidly disappearing into the rear-view mirror. This year, using ESPN’s average draft tracker, Jeter actually fell all the way to tenth among shortstops, going around 119th overall — which is right where the Rotographs end of season 2011 FVAR rankings stuck him. But owners who stuck with him this year (be it out of sentimentality or the fact that they suddenly realized they needed a shortstop in round 10) were paid handsomely, as Zach Sanders’ aforementioned FVAR rankings show he not only didn’t fall further but actually climbed four spots (from 2011) to sixth when the dust settled on the 2012 campaign.

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Elvis Andrus: As Good As You Think?

I have to admit, when looking at Zach Sanders’ End of Season Shortstop rankings, I was initially slightly surprised to see that Elvis Andrus didn’t finish in the top 10. After all, Andrus is coming off another solid season, one in which he finished fifth among shortstops in WAR – that’s fourth if you don’t really consider Ben Zobrist a shortstop – and he grabbed the 50th and final spot in Dave Cameron’s 2012 Trade Value series over the summer. With top prospect Jurickson Profar nearly ready to step in for Texas, Andrus’ name has become even more prominent lately as a possible trade solution over a fishing in a weak shortstop market, regularly coming up as a potential fit with Arizona as part of a deal for Justin Upton. At just 24 years old, Andrus would seem to be one of the brightest young shortstops in the game.

Then again, this might be a case where we need to separate things that don’t really matter in fantasy from things that do. The fact that he’s a well-regarded defensive shortstop matters a lot more to the Rangers than it does to fantasy teams, and you could say the same thing about the team-friendly contract that helped to land him in the Trade Value series. For fantasy purposes, what you have here is a durable player with little power (only three homers, better than just four of the thirty-three other shortstops on Sanders’ list), a good but non-elite batting average, and a stolen base total that declined from 32 or more in each of his first three seasons to just 21 in 2012. Read the rest of this entry »


Rafael Furcal: Is This The End?

It all started out so promising. Just when it looked like Rafael Furcal’s career was in jeopardy, he started to turn things around. Furcal got off to a blazing start in 2012, hitting .315/.384/.427 in March and April, and improving that line to .349/.397/.486 in May. People had started to think that the 34-year-old Furcal had found the fountain of youth. It didn’t last, and regression hit pretty hard. If his midseason slump wasn’t bad enough, Furcal injured his elbow at the end of August. The injury kept him out for the rest of the season, including the Cardinals playoff run. Now entering his age-35 season, and coming off an elbow injury, it’s a good time to wonder if Furcal is finished.

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Jhonny Peralta and Yunel Escobar: Scraping Bottom

If there’s one thing that we can take away from reviewing Zach Sanders’ Shortstop End of Season Rankings, it’s that the position, on the whole, is not very strong. The overall drop-off going from Jimmy Rollins at number one with a $22 value to say, J.J. Hardy at number 17 ($8) or even Zack Cozart at number 22 ($1) isn’t that dramatic and Rollins’ numbers really weren’t anything to freak out about. So if you choose to wait on the position in 2013 and not invest big money in one of the top five, you’re not exactly slitting your fantasy throat. In fact, when you start scraping the bottom of the barrel and end up with Jhonny Peralta or Yunel Escobar, you’re not really doing damage to your team, but you’re also not doing much to help it either. Read the rest of this entry »


Ruben Tejada: How Much More Can He Do?

In real life, Ruben Tejada had a decent season, especially at his cost. For a half mill, the Mets got a player that put up average defense at a premium position. He added a stick that was only eight percent worse than league average, and actually above-average for his position (86 wRC+). All of that together added up to a league-average player getting paid just about the league minimum.

Fantasy baseball doesn’t care. Linear weights, 4×4, 5×5 — there’s virtually no format in which Tejada’s offensive contributions last year were above replacement in a mixed league. Even in deeper leagues, his skills just don’t translate. In 5×5 roto leagues, he was the 27th-best shortstop and worth negative four dollars this year.

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