Two weeks ago, I facetiously appended “Deep A.L. West-Only Leagues” to the end of my column’s title since the two players I wrote about both played in the A.L. West, specifically in Oakland. As if there are A.L. West-only leagues. Actually, are there A.L. West-only Leagues? Or any division for that matter? Do any of you play in divisional-only leagues? If so, why? And how’d you settle on your division? Please let me know in the comments because I’m dying to hear what a frustratingly unsatisfying experience that must be.

Well, this week I’m at it again championing two more unheralded and under-owned A.L. West players toiling away in fantasy obscurity, eager for the opportunity to play on a contender. Even one of the digital variety.

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Okay, obviously the headline there is something that has become easily perceivable anytime anyone has watched Manny Machado pick up a bat in the last calendar year or so. One of the more prominent players at the third base position in a number of ways (again, I’m dealing in obvious statements here), one of the elements that folks were watching for early in his career was for that power to develop. Primarily a gap hitter early in his career, with 51 doubles during the 2013 season, it was only a matter of time before balls started leaving the yard. Here we are into Machado’s second completely healthy season in the last three years and that early expectation of more power has absolutely come to fruition.

In his first full season, back in 2013, Machado posted an ISO of just .148. The “just” qualifier is present only because of where he finds himself now. But he found the seats only 14 times across 700+ plate appearances. The 2014 campaign wasn’t completely a wash, but he was limited to appearances in 82 games because of injury. His ISO over that significantly smaller span came in slightly higher, at .153. But last year saw him break out in the power game.

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In fantasy, I generally consider utility players to be more valuable than ever in September, when expanded rosters allow managers to schedule in a few more rest days for their regulars. Throw in the fact that these guys have already played five months of baseball, and the combination of nagging injuries and general fatigue further encourages managers to work in additional rest days.

The last thing you want in the fantasy playoffs is empty lineup slots. Of course, there’s the obvious caveat that it’s difficult to find productive utility players on waivers at this point in the season. In other words, don’t go picking up Cliff Pennington just because he’s eligible at four positions. Let’s not get carried away here.

The three players featured in this piece are all widely available, and capable of producing when they find their way into your lineup.

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With the Chicago Cubs set to wrap up the National League Central in the coming days/weeks, it’s looking more and more difficult for anyone to make a case that will topple that of Kris Bryant for the National League Most Valuable Player Award. That hasn’t stopped some from trying, and there are cases to be made for a small handful of players outside of the Chicago third sacker. One of those potential finalists could be one of Bryant’s third base counterparts, in Colorado Rockies third baseman Nolan Arenado.

Our job here isn’t necessarily to decide that debate. While it does look like Bryant is currently the frontrunner, there are numerous factors to be considered in regard to the MVP beyond the offensive numbers which we will illustrate here. There’s defense to be considered as well as versatility, WAR, etc. That’s almost another debate entirely. Here, we’re only worried about the offense. So let’s delve into some of the numbers for a pair of extraordinary National League players.

Heading into Tuesday’s slate of games, here’s how the two stacked up in a general sense:

The general perspective would certainly seem to favor Bryant in most regards. He reaches base at a far higher rate, while notching an OPS that comes in almost 50 points higher than Arenado. In regard to ISO, the two are tied in home runs, while Bryant leads in doubles. It’s Arenado’s four triples that give him an edge there. But even the higher K rate for Bryant doesn’t make this a win for Arenado, considering everywhere else on the board that Sparkle Eyes has an edge. At the same time, we’re comparing two elite players here. The numbers are going to look great anyway you slice it. While we could certainly make a judgment about which is more valuable based off of this information alone, let’s dig just a bit deeper. Spoiler alert: we’re going to the splits.

Home/road splits tend to always be Arenado’s undoing. Playing at Coors Field is both a blessing and a curse in that regard. While nobody is questioning his offensive potency overall, it’s hard to ignore the disparity in production between his home and road splits:

At Coors, Arenado is predictably off the charts. His ISO is, to use a technical term, stupid when he’s playing in the confines of his home ballpark. But there isn’t a statistic here that doesn’t experience significant decline when he steps out of Denver. In most respects, the road numbers are still impressive, but not so much that they don’t still take away from the total body of work. Hooray for double negatives.

Conversely, Bryant has posted more impressive numbers on the road than at the Friendly Confines:

The favorable road split is something I touched on earlier this season, and it’s a trend that hasn’t exactly dissipated as the season has worn on. Even with that more impressive road split in mind, it’s hard not to look at that home line and still be overwhelmingly impressed. While there’s a clear decline, he still maintains a higher level in almost every single respect above Arenado, strikeout rate notwithstanding. So to this point, the general overview and the splits both seem to favor Bryant.

To some degree, consistency should be taken into account, illustrated below with Arenado’s wRC+ throughout the season, followed by Bryant’s:

And Bryant…

Obviously, with the scope of each graph, there’s going to be the appearance of a great deal of fluctuation. And it’s hard to put too much stock into the day-to-day happenings of the wRC+ world. At the same time, this does provide a nice visual when considering each player’s total offensive value in a more intricate sense. Just as the splits did, this would also appear to favor Kris Bryant, as the actual variation in his wRC+ is not nearly as significant. Perhaps more importantly, Bryant has managed to exclusively stay at or above that 100 mark since the very beginning of the season, something Arenado has not accomplished.

If we were going to take this debate out of the fantasy arena and put it on the MVP plane, then we’re bringing in other factors. Defensively, the edge would probably go to Arenado. But you also have to take defensive versatility into account, as Bryant moves around the diamond and is still an above average defender wherever he is. Sparkles in the eyes? Game: Bryant. It’s a really fascinating debate, and one that will likely continue as the regular season winds down. But for our purpose here of examining that offensive value, and thus assessing their fantasy relevance in a very general sense, the edge has to go to the Chicago Cubs superstar.

And obviously none of this is meant to disparage Nolan Arenado. He’s a supremely talented offensive player and one of Major League Baseball’s elite. But when we’re talking offense and offensive value, there is not a shred of doubt in my mind that the edge, in almost every single respect, goes to Kris Bryant.

The Cleveland Indians have been among the best teams in baseball for the bulk of the year, which may or may not come as a surprise, depending on who you talk to. One of the more fascinating elements of their ballclub has been the recent emergence of Jose Ramirez. A team starved for offensive talent coming into the year has seen Ramirez serve as a catalyst in recent weeks, as they continue to separate themselves from the rest of the pack in the American League Central.

The total body of work paints a solid picture for the Indians’ third sacker, although not necessarily one that screams elite-level performance. He’s slashed .305/.359/.453/.812 for the year, with a 118 wRC+. He’s struck out less than 12% of the time and walks at a decent enough 7.3% clip. The power hasn’t necessarily been a large component of his game, with a .148 ISO that would rank him 20th among 24 qualifying third basemen. Speed is an element of his game that not many third basemen carry with them, as his 20 swipes rank second at the position. He’s certainly been an above average offensive player, in terms of his ability to reach and make things happen out on the basepaths, even if he doesn’t have the power stroke of some of his MLB counterparts.

It’s what he’s done in the past month, though, for a strong American League contender, that really makes him significant among a crowded 3B group.

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Listeners of the podcast should be well familiar with this format. Paul Sporer and I try to come up with a few salient points about each player to help you make your decisions. So This week I thought I’d help as many of you as I possibly could with one article. So let’s take three (okay six) hitters and three pitchers from the twitter mailbag and have us some fun.

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In the interest of transparency, my original goal here was to examine contact rates across the board for third basemen. But given the factors involved a much more intricate study and time overall, something I currently lack as a high school teacher, I elected to focus on one player in particular that really caught my eye out on the contact side of things.

Given my relatively obvious North Side loyalties, it’s often difficult for me to say positive things about the baseball club from St. Louis, Missouri. But what Matt Carpenter has accomplished to this point in the season has become absolutely impossible to ignore, in at least one very specific respect. While he doesn’t necessarily bring the loud home run power that some of his third base counterparts tend to demonstrate on a daily basis, he’s hitting the ball harder than all of them. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a hitter in Major League Baseball that makes hard contact at the rate that Carpenter has turned in this year.

That’s because only two of them exist.

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One of the drawbacks of adjusting to having a weekly column is that there are only so many opportunities for features in general, let alone ones that can avoid being outdated or immediately undermined. Given that we’re still in early August, though, allow me to indulge in some samples from July for this particular column. I tried to steer clear of the big names, largely because their stock tends to remain up throughout the year. And if it doesn’t, it finds a way to right itself in relatively short order. Circumstances for each presented here are different. Some guys have seen increased opportunity for playing time at different positions while others were moving around the field and getting at-bats, only to see their respective club’s lineup solidified and land them on the bench. Either way, here’s a sampling of folks who have their stock up heading into the middle of August and the home stretch of the regular season and a few who face questions moving forward.

Stock Up

Javier Baez – There is virtually nothing that Javy Baez cannot do on a baseball field. He’s hitting for power and average while providing elite defense at a variety of positions. That type of player in invaluable. He’s only logged five games thus far in August, with the Cubs having a couple of off-days mind you, but is coming off of a month of July where he hit .325 and reached base at a .364 clip. The strikeout rate is obviously still high, as it will probably always be, but his improved approach is evident but his ever-slightly-increasing walk rate (up to 4.5% for the month of July). He didn’t hit for quite as much power as he did in June (ISO came in at .157), but he made really solid contact throughout the month, with his 15.0% soft contact rate representing his lowest of the season for any month, and a might impressive 19.3% linedrive rate. He’s not technically a starter anywhere on the depth chart, but there’s a reason that Joe Maddon is finding him at-bats on a near daily basis.

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Maybe it’s because the Tampa Bay Rays are not a particularly good baseball team. Maybe it’s because there are other younger and perhaps more exciting infielders that have burst onto the Major League scene. For whatever reason, it seems that nobody really talks about Evan Longoria anymore. This is true at least from a national perspective. Which is perhaps unsurprising, given his market. At the same time, fantasy owners surely appreciate what Longoria has brought to the table this season. While he hadn’t exactly been a disappointment in recent years, the 2016 season has seen him re-emerge in at least one major facet of his game.

A player routinely selected outside of the top 100 players, Longoria currently finds himself inside of the top 15 in position player WAR (3.9 mark heading into Wednesday). He topped out at 4.2 last season, so he’s definitely on pace to eclipse either figure that he’s posted in each of the last two years. The trends across the board, in a number of different respects, are very interesting for Longoria over the course of the last three years. The good news there is that those trends are largely positive.

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As surprising as it may seem, given his immense success in his less than two years at the Major League level, Kris Bryant has come a long way as an offensive player. He’s cut down on his strikeouts. He’s improved his contact rate. These developments have helped to culminate in his status as the top position player in the National League thus far in 2016, according to WAR. But as we saw against James Shields on Tuesday night, which always seems to be the case when the two players meet, there are still some respects in which Bryant could stand to improve.

Now, given where my Major League sympathies lie and the undeniable success that Bryant has experienced in such a short time, it should remain relatively apparent that none of this is meant to disparage the Chicago Cubs third sacker in any sort of manner. And even if one wanted to do so, it’d be very difficult. He’s cut down on his strikeout rate by about seven percent (down to 23.3%, with a decreased swinging strike rate of 13.9%). His overall contact rate is up about five percent (to 71.4%). He’s sporting a .261 ISO. There’s not much of anything to dislike, and that’s just in regard to his offensive game.

But what was abundantly clear on Tuesday night, as Bryant served as the team’s designated hitter, was that he still struggles against the offspeed stuff. In striking out three times against James Shields, just as he did in his Major League debut, Bryant found himself peppered with changeups from the veteran hurler, as he fell to just 1-for-10 with seven punchouts against him in his short career. The goal here is to simply illustrate Kris Bryant’s battle against the offspeed pitches that Shields registered so much success with on Tuesday.

It isn’t that Bryant’s struggles have been magnified beyond that game on Tuesday on the South Side. But it did help to spark acknowledgement of what he has turned in against offspeed pitches throughout his time at the Major League level. The following represent the distribution of pitches that Bryant has seen, swung, and whiffed, respectively:

As is typically the case, offspeed pitches represent the lowest percentage of pitch type that Bryant has seen. And with the exception of an outlier of a month or two over the course of the last two seasons, his swing trends have been relatively consistent in a general sense, regardless of pitch type. Even with those ideas in mind, offspeed pitches have represented the largest percentage of pitches at which he’s swung and missed on a fairly consistent basis.

An additional trio of graphs helps to further illustrate Bryant’s issues with the offspeed stuff, specifically changeups, based off of Tuesday night:

Again, while the percentage isn’t high, low offspeed does represent the majority where Bryant actually see that stuff, in terms of location. Mainly because if you’re a pitcher leaving offspeed up for a hitter like Bryant, you’re probably looking for that ball in another area code. And while he obviously loves the high offspeed (and what Major League hitter doesn’t?), he’s also demonstrated a pretty high Swing% on those low changeups. And he’s demonstrated a low contact rate on those pitches that he’s shown something of a penchant for swinging at, even if the overall amount of times he actually sees offspeed pitching is relatively low. But, again, the purpose here is to illustrate a potential trend more than anything else.

Obviously, there’s plenty to note here. In summation:

• He demonstrates a lower contact rate vs. offspeed than other pitch types.
• The percentage in which he does see offspeed could be increasing ever so slightly.
• BUT..
• He sees offspeed less than other pitch types.
• AND ULTIMATELY..
• Kris Bryant is still a very, very good hitter of baseballs.

At the end of the day, is the offspeed stuff a cause for concern? Not necessarily in any real regard. Bryant typically has the type of approach that can prevent him from falling into a void like he did on Tuesday, thus largely avoiding offspeed pitches. One thing certainly is worth noting, though, that he’s seen offspeed stuff at an average of 13.33% of the time over these past three months, which represents the highest percentage of his short career over any span. It’ll be interesting to see if Major League pitchers continue to make that adjustment, and if they do, it’ll be equally as interesting to see how Kris Bryant makes his own.