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This year, I was given the opportunity to be in the presitigious Scoresheet BL (short for “Both Leagues”) Kings fantasy league. It’s a mixed league, but with a roster size of 35 players, and competition from 23 of the brightest analysts around, it’s going to get pretty intense.

Scoresheet is a bit of a different animal than your normal fantasy league. Rather than just adding up the stats for your players like most leagues do, Scoresheet allows you to manage your entire roster and plays simulated games based on your roster construction. You can do the obvious things like set your lineup and rotation, but you can also set when starters are pulled, when relievers enter and when to use pinch-hitters. It can be pretty addictive, and ever since I had given up a team a couple of years ago, I had been wanting to get back into a league. Mission accomplished.
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We’ve been over it before, but the concept of “replacement level” is very important in regular old (boring) baseball, and it may be equally important in fantasy baseball. So, in order to better nail down a replacement level, I need your help. But first, some basics on replacement level before we get to the voting.

A replacement level player is defined as “a player who is available on the waiver wire in a majority (50.01%) of leagues.”

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The upcoming season will be pretty exciting at RotoGraphs. We’re bringing on some new faces to mesh with the old and expanding our coverage. This post, however, is about what YOU want.

So, please use the comments section to tell us what you’d like to see more of at RotoGraphs. More in-depth pieces about single players? More rankings information? More mailbags? More work on leagues with different settings? More pro and con?

Less of any of this?

Let us know. We aim to please.

There’s a possibility that Tommy Hanson will be both over- and under-rated this year. There’s strong reasoning on both sides, but perhaps a recent tidbit of news can tip the scales in one direction.

Tommy Hanson is over-rated.
Though he’s now shown strong ERAs over the last two years, his xFIP has remained above four. He only gets ground balls at a league-average rate (41.2% career, 40% is about average), and yet somehow he has kept his home run rate below one per nine (.65 career HR/9).

This isn’t sustainable given the state of research on the subject, and is most likely an artifact of his home park. Except that he’s given up more home runs at home (.71 HR/9) than on the road (.59 HR/9). Still, he doesn’t show Matt Cain’s insane ability to rack up infield flies, and his deflated home run rate is almost all due to a tiny HR/FB rate (6.2% career). That number is closer to 10% across baseball, and he’s likely to give up more home runs in the future.

And, with a strikeout rate that is mostly meh (7.87 K/9), those home runs will hurt.

Tommy Hanson is underrated.
It’s funny that you should mention that strikeout rate, actually. Recent work at Beyond the Box Score showed that his strikeout rates fell late last year (5.17 and 5.84 K/9 in August and September, respectively, down from above one per inning across the rest of the year) – and then linked the fall in strikeout rates to his declining velocity. Though Mr. Apostoleris has some excellent graphs of his own, we can see that the FanGraphs’ pitch f/x charts show that Hanson has had this problem both years.

So, like many young pitchers before him, Hanson has had some issues with stamina in his short career to date. RotoWorld (quoting the Atlanta Journal and Constitution) provides us with a nugget of hope in this regard:

Tommy Hanson-S-Braves Feb. 1 – 9:33 am et
Tommy Hanson gained 10 pounds of muscle this offseason.
Hanson worked out at the Boras Sports Training Institute all winter with a team of trainers. “I felt like I did everything possible to get ready for the season,” he said Monday. “That gives me maybe a mental edge.” The 24-year-old finished with a cool 3.33 ERA and 1.17 WHIP over 34 starts last season for the Braves. He struck out 173 batters in 202 2/3 innings.
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution

It’s bordering on a “Best Shape of His Life” update, but this one has concrete information. He gained 10 pounds of muscle, and perhaps that will help him retain velocity deep into the season. More velocity means more whiffs, which will allow him to mitigate the damage any added home runs might put on his ledger.

Conclusion.
Both the fans and Bil James project Hanson to improve his strikeout rate (8.51 K/9 for James, 8.42 for the fans) while putting up the worst home run rate of his career (.74 and .75 HR/9 respectively). Because his control is solid (2.78 BB/9 career), he will surely be a good pitcher next year.

In order for Hanson to be truly elite, though, he’ll have to show a strikeout rate closer to his minor league rate (10.7 K/9 carer MiLB), or at least over one per inning. Call me an optimist, but beefing up in order to maintain his early-season strikeout rates late into the summer seems like a good way to start. Call him “well-rated but with upside” if you need a moniker.

Joe Mauer (Expected, You)
My Pick: 25, 23
Average Pick: 19.2, 27.4
Median Pick: 20, 25
Pick Deviation: 9.9, 16.4

Interesting. Even after a year in which he was selected around twelfth and failed miserably to meet expectations, you all expect owners to take him less than ten picks later. I think he’ll go a little later at the 2-3 turn, and I’d be okay taking him there. For the most part, we’re arguing over nothing here, so let’s move on to Bautista.

Jose Bautista (Expected, You)
My Pick: 25, 92
Average Pick: 34.1, 41.9
Median Pick: 35, 40
Pick Deviation: 19.6, 24.5
– – –
My Dollar: 30, 15
Average Dollar: 24.5, 20.7
Median Dollar: 25, 20
Dollar Deviation: 7.9, 7.8

Okay, let’s start with the draft picks. As you can see, I’m not willing to take the chance on Bautista this year, and that’s not because I think he’ll be a total bust. I still think he’ll end up hitting at least 35 homers, but a low batting average combined with the strength of this year’s third base class (more on that sometime soon, and by soon I mean sometime before Spring Training) is not a recipe for an extremely valuable player. You are expecting Bautista to go later than I am, but are willing to pull the trigger on Bautista in the middle of the fourth round. Unless you expect him to hit another 50 home runs, this pick is probably going to be an overdraft.

Now onto the dollar amounts. I’m very happy that these dollar amounts correlate with the ADP numbers. A mid fourth-round pick is worth a little more than $20, so the relationship works out beautifully. Kudos to you for your knowledge and presence of mind. It’s strange that a player who hit over 50 homers last season would cost about $25 the following year, but that’s what has happened in the current age of speculation and doubt (you can speculate about what one might speculate about). I don’t think I’d mind spending $20 on Bautista if he wasn’t one of the first people nominated, but he won’t be. In auctions, I’d throw Bautista up there early and watch owners burn their money.

Earlier in the week we showed that you can still get a comparative advantage over your fellow drafters by drafting an elite catcher that will rack up 10-12% more plate appearances than other catchers. But that’s only half the picture – what the catchers do with their plate appearances is the rest of the picture. If you can’t get too much of a comparative advantage in terms of the other statistics, the plate appearances won’t matter much.

In order to do that, we’ll take a look at some of the projections for catchers that should go early and catchers that go later. We’ll use draft picks from the Stupidly Early Mock Draft over at RotoHardball.com to approximate ADP (but there’s more help coming from RG when it comes to rankings and mocks, don’t worry).

First, let’s just take the Bill James projections for the top 12 catchers, grouped not in tiers, but just in groups of four. These jerry-rigged tiers will allow us to compare the top, middle, and bottom catchers without too much discussion about getting them into the correct tiers. A straight average of the groups should put this into focus.

2.10 Joe Mauer .338 BA, 15 HR, 3 SB, 93 R, 87 RBI
4.1 Brian McCann .280 BA, 24 HR, 4 SB, 68 R, 94 RBI
4.2 Victor Martinez .298 BA, 19 HR, 1 SB, 69 R, 88 RBI
4.3 Buster Posey .308 BA, 21 HR, 1 SB, 74 R, 83 RBI

Top-“Tier” Average: .306 BA, 20 HR, 2 SB, 76 R, 88 RBI

7.5 Geovany Soto .276 BA, 20 HR, 0 SB, 56 R, 72 RBI
7.8 Carlos Santana .280 BA, 22 HR, 7 SB, 83 R, 91 RBI
9.4 Matt Wieters .288 BA, 16 HR, 0 SB, 55 R, 74 RBI
12.11 Mike Napoli .246 BA, 24 HR, 4 SB, 62 R, 66 RBI

Mid-“Tier” Average: .273 BA, 21 HR, 3 SB, 64 R, 76 RBI

14.6 Jorge Posada .260 BA, 16 HR, 2 SB, 49 R, 60 RBI
14.7 Miguel Montero .273 BA, 14 HR, 0 SB, 51 R, 58 RBI
15.9 Ryan Hanigan .281 BA, 5 HR, 0 SB, 39 R, 37 RBI
16.12 Kurt Suzuki .266 BA, 13 HR, 4 SB, 65 R, 73 RBI

Bottom-“Tier” Average: .270 BA, 12 HR, 1 SB, 51 R, 57 RBI

It looks like you get what you pay for, but the middle tier might get you the best value. The bottom tier looks pretty bad, but if you replace Hanigan with John Buck, whose projections are a little rosier (.248 BA, 17 HR, 0 SB, 47 R, 60 RBI), then your averages for the bottom tier look a little nicer – .262 BA, 15 HR, 53 R, 63 RBI.

While the top three in plate appearances will show a comparative advantage over the rest of the field, plate appearances can be hard to predict. Going by projected performance, it looks like the best plan may be to wait, but not wait too long.