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Matt Moore didn’t post jaw-dropping numbers in 2016, but the year should be viewed as a success. He had a rocky 2015 season coming back from Tommy John surgery, and he set a new career high with 198.1 innings split between the Rays (130.0 innings) and Giants (68.1 innings) in 2016. Staying healthy enough to knock on the door of 200 innings is a success in its own right. The surface stats and ERA estimators weren’t great, and he finished 60th among starting pitchers, but I’ll once again be firing up the hype machine for the once highly-touted prospect. Read the rest of this entry »

In his first plate appearance he knocked a two run double that short hopped the deepest part of the ballpark on his way to a three hit, four RBI major league debut.  He registered Division, Championship, and World Series starts during his rookie season.  He has a career 3.16 ERA after his sophomore season, a talent for spinning various household objects on his finger, and his grandfather is a baseball meme.  Of course I am talking about Steven Matz, the 25 year old Metropolitan South Paw.

A few weeks ago I claimed Steven Matz ranked 7th among the top starting pitchers using xStats (xOBA, VH%, scFIP, etc).  This may have been a little controversial to some, and I know it brought a smile on a few others.  While that ranking was, more or less, algorithmic, I do stand by the assessment of Matz.  He is good.  He is very good.  He may be one of the most underrated starters right now, and that needs to change.

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On the back end of the top 25 outfielders last year, there’s a trio of young outfielders that found success with very different approaches. Adam Duvall just hit the crap out of the ball. Gregory Polanco was a five-tooler with good patience and contact. Stephen Piscotty was somewhere in between. We all have our favorites when it comes to player types, but let’s be concrete about these things. Let’s filter the players based on a few key statistics and find historical comps that can help us better understand the futures for our three relative youngsters.

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In fantasy baseball we talk a lot about five-category players or performances but we don’t usually define what that actually means. In its most liberal application, the term is a shorthand for a productive player whose worst performance in any one category is still palatable. Sometimes we’ll talk about someone with sneaky five-category potential when describing breadth of upside.

I suspect that most use the term when describing players who provide a positive value in all five standard roto categories. But in most cases, we use the descriptor when “power-speed threat” might be more appropriate. Or that given the dichotomous relationship between the two skills, we lower our standards in one category because a player stands out in the other. If we use the most literal definition, that a five-category player provides at least positive contributions across all five categories, we’re really talking about just seven players, six of whom were drafted in first five rounds.

Imagine your prototypical outfielder. What does he look like? What did he look like in 2010? The numbers say he’s changed a bit. Where he might have been Jermaine Dye or a late-career Moises Alou back then, today’s outfielder looks a little bit more like Ian Desmond or Tyler Naquin. That probably has ramifications on what you expect, generally, from your outfield.

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I swore when I started at RotoGraphs that I’d never write any self-serving articles about my fantasy teams. But I also swore that I’d start bringing in lunch to work, that I’d never pay more than $10 for a bottle of beer, or force my child to root for the A’s while growing up in Seattle. Today, I’m having pho for lunch after paying an unpalatable amount yesterday for a merely palatable beer. And this is my one-year old son’s room.

But 2016 marked my first foray into the world of Ottoneu and, as such, this is my first Ottoneu off-season. Admittedly, a little intimated after a decade of playing only roto and head-to-head leagues on the standard sites, a few friends of mine took the plunge and created an Ottoneu 4×4 league. I can’t really tell you why we decided to go roto instead of the full FanGraphs points experience but it doesn’t really matter. I’m hooked. So, when the opportunity came to adopt a second team, this time in the FanGraphs Staff Two league, I jumped at it. And I’ve got some work to do.

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Asdrubal Cabrera has had a number of up and down seasons in the past few years, and from my outside perspective it seems to be, at least in some part, related to a significant quadriceps injury he suffered in 2013 (view the video). Cabrera entered the 2013 season as a two time All Star shortstop, and during the first two months he was off to a pretty standard Asdrubal Cabrera type season: above average offense and mediocre defense.  After this injury, from which he missed three weeks of playing time, he languished offensively for more than two entire months.  From June 26th, the day he returned, until September 4th, he produced a miserable .221/.276/.329 line with .267 wOBA and 65 wRC+. From September 6th on, he went back to his more standard .272/.330/.519 with .368 wOBA and 134 wRC+.  With the benefit of hindsight, we can all agree he likely came back from his quad injury too soon. 

The struggles of the 2013 season may have prepared Cabrera for his 2016 campaign, as it turned out to be very similar to 2013 in many ways.  During spring training, Cabrera suffered another quadriceps related injury, this time to his patellar tendon, the bit that connects your kneecap to your lower leg.  This injury served to plague him throughout the season, leading him to the disabled list in early August after suffering what, to me anyway, looked like a potentially serious injury (view the video).  Similar to 2013, Cabrera came back from this injury exceptionally quickly, this time missing only 18 games, but, unlike 2013, this time came back with a fury. And a new hair color.

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We all have our Brokeback Mountain players. Not that you have a physical desire for them — more that you “just can’t quit” them. Yes, Brett Lawrie has an eighteen pack and is more yoked than 95% of the players I’ve seen in a clubhouse, but the reasons I couldn’t quit him were more statistical in nature: he was young when he debuted, he had above-average results in terms of contact, power, patience, and speed early on. He had pedigree! And he was yoked.

By now, of course, I’ve managed to ween myself of Mr. FortyHands. Finally. He just got worse as time went on and never lived up to that pedigree. I’m hoping that the script for me and Carlos Correa goes differently.

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Entering 2016, Marcus Semien was shrouded in uncertainty. After a strong offensive start to 2015, his renewed focus on defense in the second half drew acclaim from many around the league, though it appeared to coincide with a massive two-month slump during which he hit .199/.246/.281 and left the yard just twice.  He also stopped running, or at least stopped running well. He stole just two bases during that stretch while being thrown out thrice.

As such, Semien entered 2016 a popular pick by some as a potential power-speed breakout candidate. However, his floor, due in large part to his dilettantish defensive rep and contact woes, felt uncertain and low. Which Semien were fantasy owners going to get? The 20-20 threat we saw through the first two months of the season, the defensively-focused but offensively-hapless work-in-progress, or the well-rounded and powerful young shortstop who put it all together at the end?

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Eugenio Suarez served as the shortstop for the Reds for 96 games in 2015, but an off-season trade of Todd Frazier resulted in Suarez sliding over to the hot corner this year. He earned an awful defensive grade at shortstop, but he was an asset with his glove at the less demanding defensive position. Moving to a corner put greater pressure on his bat, but he did enough — coupled with his positive defensive contributions — to play in 159 games and serve as an everyday player for the duration of the year. The volume (627 plate appearances) helped push Suarez to a double-double (21 homers and 11 steals) with useful run production contributions (78 runs and 70 RBI). In a little over 250 games played with the Reds, the 25-year-old has been remarkably consistent in many ways. Read the rest of this entry »