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Prince Fielder is gonna make some serious bacon (er, soy) this winter. The meaty first baseman hits free agency as a 27-year-old boasting the third-highest home run total and tenth-best Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA) among hitters since he became a full-time starter in 2006. Prince will be a premium fantasy pick no matter where he plays in 2012, but some parks are certainly more suited to his all-fields slugging than others.

To determine Fielder’s best landing spots, I identified potential suitors, found StatCorner’s left-handed home run park factors for those clubs’ stadiums and then used Baseball-Reference’s Play Index Tool to find what Fielder’s 2011 batting average, OBP and slugging percentage would have looked like if he had played in those stadiums instead of Miller Park (more details here).

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Back in September, Bill Petti at Beyond the Boxscore took a look at the year-to-year correlations of a set of hitting metrics. Some of the stats you’d expect had no year-to-year staying power (AVG, BABIP); some you would think are skill based turned out to vary greatly (Line Drive Rate); while some metrics proved to be remarkably consistent (Contact Rate, Swinging Strike Rate).

What jumped out to me was that First-Strike Rate had only a .56 year-to-year correlation for batters, while all of the stats I’d expect to directly impact First-Strike Rate (Swing Rate, Contact Rate, etc.) were quite consistent. First-pitch strikes make a huge difference in any at-bat, and the high year-to-year variation in this stat suggests that, over the course of a season, some hitters may have very good or very bad luck in this area. After looking at Petti’s analysis, I looked deeper into the phenomenon of F-Strike% and have three posts coming – starting with this one looking at my methodology and the basic information I found.

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The inaugural season of ottoneu on FanGraphs is over. Let’s take a look at the final standings, dissect the winning moves, and congratulate the winners!

FanGraphs Staff League
Congratulations to Jesse Wolfersberger for winning the first edition of the FanGraphs Staff league. I blame linear weights points (and my infamiliarity with them) for my poor showing, but Jesse didn’t have a problem with it at all. It came down to five points on the last day, and one hit is worth 5.6 points. A photo finish!

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As you’ve seen, we’ve started to roll out our 2012 keeper rankings. Today we look at the top tier of shortstops, which includes two unsurprising names.

Troy Tulowitzki ($22)

It comes as no surprise that Tulowitzki is in the first tier. Over the past three seasons he has the eighth highest wOBA in baseball, behind only Miguel Cabrera, Joey Votto, Albert Pujols, Jose Bautista, Ryan Braun, Prince Fielder and Kevin Youkilis. No shortstop comes within .20 points of Tulowitzki’s mark of .396. We’re talking keeper rankings, though, so what he did three years ago may not be relevant for 2012. Let’s take a look at last season. The 27-year old had another excellent season, hitting 30 home runs while driving in 105 runs. He doesn’t steal bases anymore, going from 20 in ’09 to nine in ’11, but when you have the power he does it’s a non issue. His strikeout rate was down while the walk rate ticked up. He reverted back to hitting more line drives and fewer ground balls, seeing his LD% jump from 15 to 19.

If patience is a virtue then Tulowitzki is one of the most virtuous players in the game. His Swing, O-Swing and Z-Swing percentages are all well below league average while his Contact, O-Contact and Z-Contact percentages are all above league average. When he sees a pitch he likes, he hits it. It truly is hard to find any flaw in his game. The only time he’s seemed human was May of this year when he put up a .196 BABIP and .278 wOBA. Take out that month and his seasonal wOBA jumps from the ~.380’s to .440. He finished the season as the 28th ranked player according to Yahoo!, which isn’t too far off from his 23rd place finish in 2010. I actually think our values have him ranked a tad low at 25th overall and $22. He’s just starting the prime seasons of his career and plays a premium position in a great hitter’s park. He’s going to remain in this top tier for the foreseeable future.

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Now that the 2011 fantasy season is all but over (don’t forget to play ottoneu Pick Six during the postseason!), we have an opportunity to look back and see which players did what, and where each player should have been drafted if we knew exactly what was going to happen this year. With that in mind, it’s time to produce some retrospective values and rankings for you to enjoy and reflect on.

Earlier this morning, I outlined changes made to the FVARz system that I introduced in February, and that system is what was used to produce these rankings. Please be aware that these are retroactive values only, and while you are free to use them for predictive purposes without adjustment, I wouldn’t recommend it. So, without further ado, let’s do this thing.

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You may remember that earlier this year I put together a series of three posts outlining a system for objective fantasy player rankings and valuation. The system was (and still is) titled Fantasy Value Above Replacement, or FVARz for short. Some flaws were pointed out in Februrary, and it’s about time I recognized them and corrected the system to allow it to be even better and more accurate.

The major flaw that was pointed out was the way I was adjusting for position. A players’ raw stats were only being compared to others at his position, instead of the entire player pool as a whole. After the changes to the FVARz system, this is no longer the case. Players raw stats are now compared to the entire player pool, while hitters and pitchers are separated for obvious reasons.

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I have to admit that I’ve been highly suspicious of Ryan Roberts all season long. Maybe it’s his spotty performance history, perhaps it’s my aversion to one-hit-wonders (I’m looking at you, Fernando Tatis), perhaps it’s the neck tattoos (sarcasm). Whatever the case, Roberts was unintentionally shoved under my radar for much of the season relative to his actual value. I concede that I prefer a larger sample size before I start to recommend a player, and perhaps that’s a shortcoming I need to think about.

Whatever the reason, Ryan Roberts was hard for me to like this season. It wasn’t until I started to come around about June that he made the third tier for my third base rankings and I defended his late season struggles as recent as September. But I concede that I kept waiting for him to turn into a pumpkin, and he just refused to do so, to his credit.

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About a year ago, I very happily traded Ian Stewart for Matt Joyce and Reese Havens in an ottoneu league. Joyce was just $3; Stewart was $12 (Havens was also $3 but that isn’t really relevant – this is not a story about my infatuation with MI prospects, which is how I ended up with Stewart in the first place).

I thought this was a steal but the feedback from other owners was basically, “meh.” I was pretty surprised. Sure, Stewart had been a very good player, but he was about to lose 2B eligibility and move to a position where his value was much lower (I also had Ryan Zimmerman and Jose Bautista). I had turned a guy with what I saw as questionable value and a too-high salary into a dirt cheap #2 or #3 OF. But since then, I have heard a ton about every outfielder on the Rays roster (Carl Crawford became a Red Sox, Manny Ramirez and Johnny Damon became Rays, Manny became retired, Sam Fuld became a legend, Desmond Jennings became a star, BJ Upton became trade bait), but Joyce seemed to get lost in the shuffle.

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After a sub-par 2010 and an injury riddled 2009, Jose Reyes burst back onto the scene in a big way this season. The 28-year-old had his best season per wOBA, finishing with a mark of .386, 20 points above his previous career high. He was great in the fantasy world as well, ending the season as the 29th rated player according to Yahoo! after coming in 103rd in 2010. The season likely wasn’t as good compared with his 2006-2008 years when he finished with more home runs, RBI, runs, hits and steals, but relative to league average it was a fine effort. When trying to predict what he’ll do in 2012 there are a few factors you need to consider.

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It’s not news to say that Clayton Kershaw had a fantastic 2011, and we’ll know on November 17th if it was good enough for the Baseball Writers Association to hand him any hardware because of his efforts. What’s been so interesting to research is how Kershaw has evolved over the last four years from a very good 4-win player to an elite 7-win player.

Kershaw has been good pretty much from the moment he arrived Los Angeles, but even throughout very successful 2009 and 2010 campaigns, he had his limitations. His walks were out of control, he struggled against right handed batters, and because he pitched like he was trying to strike out every batter, his pitch counts kept him from going deep into games. It’s almost as if Kershaw systematically addressed every single one of his shortcomings in the off-season to become something of a superhero version of himself.

What follows is a graphical homage to his ability to adapt, and to just be freakishly good.

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