After stumbling last year following his 2009 breakout season, Jason Kubel is quietly having a really strong start to 2011 — bet you didn’t realize he’s currently fifth in batting in the AL — so why, exactly, is he a potential a sell high candidate?
Today, we’ll focus on one National League outfielder instead of the entire class. We know from his twitter feed that 24-year-old Logan Morrison is an excellent young man worth paying attention to, but it’s hard to know exactly how excellent he is with respect to his fantasy value without unpacking his power potential.
Right now, Mr. Morrison has a .313 ISO which would be fourth in baseball if he had played enough to qualify for the batting title. We can’t hold his foot injury against him, but we do know that it means that he’s had fewer PAs than his competitors and his sample is even smaller than average. For a guy that showed a .164 ISO last year, and a .174 ISO in his minor league career, we can remain skeptical that his power will last, and the size of the sample doesn’t help matters.
We do know that isolated power doesn’t even really stabilize over a season, so maybe we don’t really know what his major league power looks like on a reliable level. He’s only played for 366 major league plate appearances. Players don’t usually put up power numbers that trump their minor league work, but certainly young men put on weight and become more powerful as they age. Could Morrison out-do his rest-of-season projections that have him dropping back down to a .177 ISO? That projection would mean only ten more home runs the rest of the season even though he’s managed five in his first 79 plate appearances.
One piece of good news is that Morrison has changed his batted ball profile slightly. After putting up groundball rates over 50% regularly in the minor leagues, Morrison is showing what would be a full-season low in that category right now (40%). Correspondingly, he’s hitting more fly balls (43.6%) than groundballs for the first time in his life. If these changes hold, he could very easily outperform his previous power work.
How far are we from being able to reliable predict that these changes in his batted ball profile will hold? Some might say never because of stringer bias, but Pizza Cutter tells us the ground-ball rate numbers that we have stabilize around 40 PA. So Morrison has shown us that he’s willing to hit the ball on the ground a little more in the major leagues. According to his work, we’ll have to wait another 100 PAs to believe the fly ball rates, but we do know that he’s hitting fewer ground balls.
You have to get the ball in the air to get it out of the park. This is true even if your home park suppresses home runs between one and five percent depending on your handedness. It would be folly to believe a .300 ISO from Logan Morrison, given his minor league career numbers, but a .200 ISO now seems possible with his new ground-ball rate. With the average major league ISO now down to .139, Morrison’s power looks better in comparison even if he doesn’t sustain a .200 ISO, though.
It’s clear that Mr. Morrison is an excellent play even if he doesn’t ever hit 30 home runs a season. His modest power is being boosted by what might turn out to be a real change in approach at the plate.
In this installment of Mining the Minors, we take a look at a pair of high-upside pitchers in Triple-A — one starter and one reliever — who pile up loads of strikeouts. And almost as many walks.
As mentioned in Mining the Minors a couple weeks ago, timing is important when it comes to keeping tabs on minor-leaguers while they’re still, ya know, in the minor leagues. But knowledge was meant to be shared, not withheld. Hence, a second incarnation of this column is born — with the same 2011-or-bust focus for fantasy — only instead of highlighting players in the minors, this iteration will cover those who recently have either made their big-league debut or been recalled.
Similar to the other version of this column, which will still drop on Fridays, the Thursday edition will offer a quick take at lesser-known farmhands and veteran minor leaguers, but will also look at the top-end prospects, too — all with a nod to their fantasy relevance and impact for this season. To help owners, I’ll continue to include a player’s Talent Rating; but just as important is what I’m calling the Cling Factor, which points out the likelihood that a player will remain in the majors (or return, if already sent down) during this season.
In remembrance of the formerly-talented, forever-volatile Milton Bradley, who was designated for assignment yesterday by the Mariners following two ejections and a one-game suspension last week, here are three other American League outfielders rostered in about three-quarters of leagues that owners shouldn’t feel bad about giving the Bradley treatment at this point in the season.
For those of you wondering, yes, go pick up Royals prospect Eric Hosmer, if he’s still available in your league. The first baseman has been called up sooner than expected — leading the minors in average and on-base percentage will do that — and will be in Friday’s lineup. He’s going to take over the starting job, and he’s worth a shot in every league, even 10-team mixed, on the chance that one of baseball’s best prospects translates his talents to the big-league level immediately. If so, we could be looking at this year’s Buster Posey.
Now back to your regularly-scheduled Mining the Minors programming, as we take a look at another minor-leaguer who could soon be making his own way to the majors, even if he’s not quite as highly-regarded.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve been keeping such close watch on my AL outfielders beat, but it seems that no position in fantasy baseball has seen more fluctuation in the first month of the season than this one. There are former studs still hitting sub-.200 (here’s to you, Carl Crawford, Alex Rios and Vernon Wells) while lesser-thought of has-beens are piling up RBIs (hello, Jeff Francoeur, Alex Gordon and Johnny Damon). And that’s to say nothing of a fella named Sam Fuld who’s gone from complete after-thought to straight up legen — wait for it — dary.
How do we make sense of such who-could’ve-seen-this-coming-ness? Why, by updating the RotoGraphs AL outfielders rankings, of course!
With the calendar flipping to May, it’s time to re-visit the 2011 Catcher Rankings and see who has climbed closer to the top and who’s been dropping like a stone. As you may recall, the RotoGraph writers got together before the season began and constructed a composite catcher rankings. However, after gaining some feedback from all of you, I have decided to make my adjustments to the rankings based on the following criteria:
| 1. Current performance level |
| 2. Expected performance for rest of season |
| 3. Value based on standard 5×5 categories (avg over OBP) |
The arrows are used to highlight a player moving up or down in tier, but you’ll also notice some minor tweaks within the tiers as well. Some that will obviously have more impact than others. So without further ado, you may now cue the theme song to The Jeffersons… Read the rest of this entry »
Timing is an important factor in this space. I had been planning to include Alexi Amarista, a second baseman in the Angels org who leads the minors with a .455 batting average. Except Amarista no longer plays in the minors…because the Angels called up the 22-year-old earlier this week to be a part of their middle infield mix in a utility role. Oh well. That just means one of these minor leaguers got some pub instead.
Michael Young had some comments after the recent Colby Lewis implosion project demonstration:
“Colby’s fine,” Young said. “He was cruising the whole game…Colby’s fine. Don’t worry about Colby.”
What you can take away from this are two things. We now know that Michael Young is bad liar and we know that you should be worried about Colby (if you weren’t already).
It’s easy for the Texas Rangers to not be so worried about Lewis since they’re 14-8, most of it without their MVP. But for fantasy owners who drafted Lewis on the expectation that he could re-create the Colby Lewis magic-bus-happy-ride from 2010, you ought to be concerned. When you give up six runs on seven hits over five innings pitched with four walks and three strikeouts and you consider that outing to have included your “best stuff you had all year,” there’s a problem.
