Alcides Escobar exceeded expectations in 2012 by hitting almost .300 and had 35 steals. In Zach Sander’s end of season SS rankings, Escobar ended up with the 10th highest rating. Going into 2013, he is primed to repeat 2012.
Erick Aybar is a perennial sleeper. You might make a joke about never waking up here, except that just last year he hit ten home runs and stole thirty bases and looked like a reasonable starting shortstop in every fantasy league. This year’s work was a step back — only eight home runs and 20 stolen bases — and left him on the outside of the top twelve in our end-of-season rankings.
Here’s the thing though. He was still a decent starting-level shortstop in most leagues — when he was in the lineup.
Kyle Seager broke the F out this season. He hit 20 home runs, stole 13 bases, and basically cemented himself a starting role going forward. Though it’s also great news that all of this production was in line with the work he did in the minor leagues, that same fact leaves us wondering how much breakout is left for the 25-year-old infielder.
Learning fantasy lessons in the postseason is a tricky affair. By its nature, a postseason series is a small sample. Also by its nature, a postseason series receives greater emphasis, fair (the games are high leverage when compared to a mid-season tilt) or not (they’re still just seven games). Even though the statistics are kept separately and are often out of mind, though, the fact that this is still baseball means that there is something that can be gleaned from it.
In last week’s edition, we saw a couple first basemen who made pretty large jumps when we looked at them through the prism of ottoneu, rather than Zach Sanders’s rankings. Well, ottoneu doesn’t love any second basemen as much as it loves Joey Votto and Paul Konerko, who were ranked 11 and 7 spots higher in ottoneu points than they were in the 5×5 rankings.
In fact, when Sanders posted his 2B rankings yesterday, I was surprised to see that no one was ranked more than five spots lower in 5×5 than in ottoneu, with only a couple relevant players ranked even six spots higher. But a couple of players moved from borderline top-10 to the top-4, while two others dropped from 4th and 6th to 10th and 12th.
Pablo Sandoval at catcher. Josh Willingham at catcher. Trevor Plouffe at shorstop. Allen Craig at second base.
Every once in a while, a young player comes up to the bigs in a unique situation that pumps positional-based fantasy value into their early career numbers. Most of the time, it’s because they’ve been attempting to man a position on their way up, and though it’s been obvious that they wouldn’t continue to hack it at that position, they’ve played enough games during the process of coming to that realization that their rookie season still features that remnant.
So Allen Craig will never be a second baseman again, most likely. According to Zach Sanders’ end-of-season rankings, the 28-year-old put up the fifth-best fantasy season by a second baseman in 2012, so he’ll be missed at the position. In rooting around for that lost eligibility in the bottom of the toolbox, you might notice a few other dings in your Allen Wrench, as well.
Going into this season, it was obvious that Prince Fielder was leaving a park that was friendly to his lefty power and going to one that was less cozy. The difficulty in using that one fact to predict Fielder’s 2012 power was that he’d play half his games in other parks. So Chad Young and I tried to correctly weight the lefty home run power factors for each of the stadiums he’d see. Our answer was that he’d see a 6.7% reduction in home run production on the road. Combined with a 30% drop at home (118-88), he could expect a 18.65% drop overall.
Edit: Nailed it!
Ottoneu is now officially ready to provide you with something baseball-related to do on post-season off-days or less-than-tense games. You may have noticed in the last 24 hours or so that Ottoneu arbitration has begun. Every league homepage has an arbitration tab (some say “Arbitration Allocations” and some say “Arbitration Voting”) and owners are now free to go in and allocate or vote.
I’ve provided some details on these processes in the past (an outline of the new allocation rules, strategies for arbitration voting, a look at the process I used to determine my votes), but there are two things I haven’t covered yet: How the Arbitration Allocations tool works and strategies for how to handle your allocations.
Bright and early Monday morning, Zach Sanders dropped the first of his End of Season Rankings, looking at how first basemen fared during the 2012 fantasy season. The rankings are based on what actually happened on the field and use the traditional 5×5 roto categories to establish values for the production of each player.
While some of you ottoneuvians are playing a 5×5 format, many more are using the FanGraphs Points scoring system, and that type of linear weights scoring (as well as other OBP-based systems, particularly those that lower the weight on stolen bases) does not always value the same players that 5×5 leagues do. So each week, after Zach posts his rankings, I will follow with a look at where ottoneu FanGraphs Points rankings differed.
Freddie Freeman improved almost across the board in his second season. He ended up ranked 15th in our 2012 final first base rankings (with Billy Butler added in), worth about $12. If you expected him to be great, that was a disappointment. Our staff thought he would be 15th, so we nailed it. If you picked him up for a dollar or late in your draft, you were happy with his improvements.
But what did he actually do? If we can figure out if he actually broke out, then we might know a little more about his remaining potential upside.
