Last week I covered the players who went undrafted and finished as some of the top offensive players of the year, as well as those players who were drafted, but who were unable to provide the type of value their owners expected.

The last piece of the puzzle is, of course, the players who added value. Obviously it’s important to get good value out of your top few pick, but these are the players who take a team from good to stacked. The only player in this set who was consistently drafted before pick 100 was Curtis Granderson, who was typically the 91st or 92nd pick, meaning it would absolutely have been possible in a 10-team to draft Miguel Cabrera and Matt Kemp early, then supplement them later with Granderson, Carlos Beltran, and David Ortiz, while using the middle rounds to stock up on pitching.

Obviously we can all construct an ideal draft after the season’s over; hindsight is a harsh mistress that way. If you weren’t able to draft perfectly, these are the players who helped soften the blow of a mistake like Carl Crawford, Joe Mauer, or Kendrys Morales in the early rounds. The number in parentheses is their ADP minus their oRank. Read the rest of this entry »

A slight change of plans from what I said on Tuesday, as — perhaps unsurprisingly — the disappointments and those who failed to qualify for the batting title featured more than a little crossover.

Injury is one of the dominant reasons players ended up here — whether one major blow like the one Buster Posey suffered, or a seemingly endless cavalcade of issues that hit Joe Mauer or Shin-Soo Choo — but some simply just couldn’t produce this year.

This is a value ranking of position players only, produced by taking their average draft position according to ESPN and subtracting the oRank I introduced on Tuesday. The more negative the number in parentheses is, the worse the value the player provided. Not everyone here was objectively bad, but all were overdrafted.

15. Martin Prado (-32)
14. Ryan Howard (-33)
13. Buster Posey (-33)
12. Nelson Cruz (-35)
11. Ryan Zimmerman (-36)

Howard may not have had a great year, but he’s hard done to be listed among this lot. A -9 in baserunning does him no favors, but even if that’s generously reduced to 0, he still struggles to make the top 40 in batting runs alone. You could have gotten just slightly worse production from Nick Swisher, who was drafted about 125 picks later in most drafts.

Posey, Cruz, and Zimmerman all spent more than a month of the season on the DL, so it’s not surprising that they failed to reach expectations for this year. I’ll draft both Posey and Zimmerman without hesitation next year, but Cruz, who had the most playing time of the three, turned in an uncharacteristically poor year. I have concerns about his ability to avoid this list again next year.

10. David Wright (-39)
09. Jason Heyward (-40)
08. Shin-Soo Choo (-44)
07. Justin Morneau (-52)
06. Joe Mauer (-57)

If you didn’t watch much of the AL Central this year and are wondering what happened to the Twins, well, here’s a pretty good clue. Once Mauer was healthy, he was more productive than fans seem to remember — an .810 OPS in the second half isn’t stunningly good, but it’s nearly 200 points better than his first half — but pneumonia made his resurgence short-lived. Morneau had so many injuries and issues this year, it was hard to keep track of them all. Even when he was on the field, he wasn’t right; his best month was May when he had a .723 OPS, his next best was his .612 in August.

Heyward is an interesting case. This season was a big disappointment for him and he has been told that he is not guaranteed the right field job next year. If an MRI on his shoulder shows damage, that could go a long way towards explaining his poor year, but this could just be a case of a player and new manager not gelling well.

05. Ichiro Suzuki (-61)
04. Alex Rios (-65)
03. Adam Dunn (-85)
02. Hanley Ramirez (-86)

Before mock draft season started, I was deadset on drafting Dunn, but he consistently went just a little higher than I wanted. Consider that a bullet dodged. Dunn’s issues versus left-handers got plenty of press — going 6-for-94 against them will do that — but Dunn just flat out didn’t hit anyone this year. I refuse to believe this is the sudden and permanent end to Dunn’s career, so perhaps he’s worth targeting in the late rounds of next year’s drafts. Just a thought.

Like Morneau above, Ramirez was alternately hurt and profoundly disappointing, which was a kick in the teeth to owners that took him second overall, or worse, above Pujols with the first pick in the draft. One of the most compelling storylines for the early part of the 2012 season will be how he and new manager Ozzie Guillen get along. Keeper owners are surely hoping for a good bond between the two.

01. Carl Crawford (-102)

There’s nothing like kicking a man while he’s down. 2011 was an immensely disappointing year from Crawford, who would have provided owners good value if he had been taken some 100 picks lower than he was. For redraft owners, there’s not much beyond the old Ron Washington quote “that’s the way baseball go,” hopefully you traded Crawford to some sap early in the season and weren’t forced to watch him stumble his way through. You have my condolences, for whatever that’s worth.

For keeper owners however, there’s some good news. Crawford last swooned like this in 2008, when he hit .273/.319/.400 with 8 HR and 25 SB — better than this year’s line of .255/.289/.405, 11 HR, 18 HR, but still disappointing. He rebounded in 2009 to .305/.364/.452 with 15 HR and 60 SB. While this doesn’t mean he’s a lock to swipe 60 bases in 2012, it’s at least a glimmer of hope after a regrettable year for Crawford.

Over the next week or two, I’ll be using my normal Waiver Wire slots to look back at the 2011 fantasy season from beginning to end by looking at how the top 200 drafted players performed over the course of the full season.

There is no one metric that correlates perfectly to fantasy value, in large part because there’s no one definition of fantasy value. WAR is commonly cited, but that’s a better measure of traditional value than fantasy-specific value. Very few leagues count defense and positional considerations are often made apart from generalized value, especially with players like Michael Cuddyer and Michael Young, who accrued most of their production in a corner, but had middle-infield eligibility.

With that in mind, the value calculations I’ve done for this series is simply the batting and base running components of WAR, which I’ll refer to as oRank for short — pitchers, of course, will have their own stat. It should capture at least a sense of what makes players valuable in a majority of leagues, though the individual slot-by-slot rankings will, of course, vary with your league’s idiosyncrasies. Read the rest of this entry »

Prior to the All-Star break, four RotoGraphs writers — Eno Sarris, Jeff Zimmerman, Howard Bender and me — engaged in the just-for-fun activity of drafting Pick Six-style teams, with the pool of players limited to those available in 10% or less in ESPN leagues (at the time of the draft).

Given those parameters, the exercise proved to be challenging, but if you paid attention to our picks, you may have managed to snag a useful fantasy player or three off the waiver wire — no matter what kind of league you play in.

I took the temperature of our picks back in August, but now that the season is finished, let’s tally up the scoring to get the final results. And while we’re at it, we’ll rank the players based on their fantasy impact in 2012.

Read the rest of this entry »

Doug Fister

Back in the halcyon days of 2009, the Detroit Tigers — endeavoring to protect their narrow lead in the AL Central — made a deadline deal for one of the Seattle Mariners’ top performing players, and so began the ill-fated Jarrod Washburn era in Motown.

Washburn’s performance after the move was Hobbesian: Nasty, brutish, and short. In his eight starts after the trade, everything went in the wrong direction: his BB/9, H/9, and HR/9 all rose sharply, while his K/9 dropped like a counterweight. While Washburn isn’t solely to blame for the Tigers’ poor finish, he didn’t help matters much.

Snap back to reality.

The Tigers’ lead was a bit larger when they added Doug Fister from Seattle this July, but the impetus was the same, and fortunately for Detroit, the result was the polar opposite. Fister’s work for the Mariners had been solid: 3.33 ERA, 1.17 WHIP, and a 2.78 K/BB ratio, but he has been downright unhittable since the move. His 0.91 WHIP since the All-Star break is the third lowest in baseball (min 50 IP) with the biggest difference coming in his walk rate.

His BB/9 of 2 with the Mariners was hardly bloated, but he’s been exceedingly stingy with the free passes since coming to the Tigers, having allowed just five walks in his 70.1 innings of work. His HR rate did tick upwards, but when he allows so few runners to reach base, they haven’t been particularly damaging. In fact, the four home runs he’s allowed with the Tigers have produced just five runs; of the 11 he’s allowed all year, nine have been solo home runs and the other two were just two-run home runs.

Just like Washburn wasn’t to blame for the ‘09 failure, Fister can’t take too much of the credit for the current team’s success — that credit lies as much with the rest of an atrocious AL Central as it does with the Tigers themselves — but there is certainly a correlation between Fister’s success and the team’s.

Justin Verlander will deservedly take the ball in Game One of the ALDS, matching up against CC Sabathia if current standings hold, which is a tough ask, even for the presumptive AL Cy Young award winner. Fister will get a much more favorable mound opponent, likely Ivan Nova, though it’s possible that Joe Girardi will give the ball to a veteran instead. In reality, it affects Fister very little, since he’ll be a better option than Nova, Bartolo Colon, A.J. Burnett, Freddy Garcia, or anyone else Girardi has at his disposal.

For those in playoff leagues, Fister could be an excellent sleeper option in the middle or late rounds. The NL still boasts the best SP2 options in Cliff Lee and either Yovani Gallardo or Zack Greinke, but if the Phillies and Brewers end up paired in the NLDS, Fister may be a more reliable option to sneak out a win. The biggest weakness in Fister’s game is a relatively low strikeout rate, just 6.1 per nine this season. Objectively, it isn’t terribly low, but when the talent level is as high as it is in these playoffs, fine distinctions must be made.

While I’d still rather have a top starter like Verlander, Sabathia, or Halladay, targeting Fister as a secondary option could set up a great playoff draft.

Brent Morel (Yahoo:  7 percent owned, ESPN: 12 percent owned)

Brett Lawrie’s season is done after breaking a finger on Wednesday, which isn’t a terrible loss for the Blue Jays, who are simply playing out the string, and close the season with six games away from Rogers Centre. Lawrie’s injury may, however, leave a few AL-only and mixed owners in the lurch. Morel may not be the most exciting replacement option, but he’s widely available and playing well of late. Read the rest of this entry »

RotoGraphs asked me to post my first-ever column for the site with six days left in the season. That’s right, six days.

This can only mean one thing, of course – they firmly believe that I will bring such brilliant and insightful advice that I can swing a full season of fantasy baseball with 500 words, less than a week before the season ends.

Well, maybe that isn’t what they had in mind, but I am going to give it a shot anyway. So here are six guys who are a) available in at least 90% of leagues (according to Yahoo) and b) will give you a chance to pick up those last couple points to break into the money or take the title.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the final week of our look-ahead to the 2012 fantasy baseball season by highlighting potential impact rookies at each position. Because it’s never too early to begin thinking about next year, even if you’re trying to win your league right now. And for those of you in keeper leagues, particularly deeper ones, these primers will be especially helpful, because you’ll find out which young players may be worth snatching up now — before other owners get a clue — so you can hang onto them next season, when their value kicks in. Think of it like an investment requiring only a little up-front cost that could pay off big in the near future.

Much like my Mining the Minors columns on this site, which focus on current-season impact more than long-term upside, these 2012 rookie primers are meant for players who will fulfill or are expected to fulfill their rookiedom next year. Also much like my MTM work, the point here is to find the right mix of opportunity and talent, so that you’re picking up a player who can contribute, either in a starting role or as a reserve, from Day 1 or soon thereafter. Chances are, I’ll hit on many of these same players in depth at some point in future Mining the Minors columns, but for now, it’s good to get ahead of the curve with a snapshot of the talent at each position.

To give you a brief idea of just how this sort of thing can be worthwhile, I’m in two deep keeper leagues, one AL-only and one NL-only, and around this time last year, I picked up Mark Trumbo, Jordan Walden and Brandon Beachy. Worked out pretty well, if I do say so myself.

Click on the position to see previous primers: Catchers, First Base, Second Base, Third Base, Shortstop, Outfielders

Here are the starting pitchers.

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I’m not sure which would make for a better intro here:  From Rookie of the Year, John Candy flipping out and saying how this is for all the marbles, the whole magilla, the whole enchilada, etc. or from The Waterboy, Dan Fouts adamantly repeating, “last game of the year, can’t hold anything back.  Either way, I’m sure you get the gist of it.  There are eight games left in the regular season and if you can grab someone now who is hotter than someone you have in your lineup, it might be time to make a change.  You want to play the hot hand here and finish strong.  These guys may help if you’re in an AL-only or deep mixed league… Read the rest of this entry »

Our own Erik Hahmann pointed out some great stolen-base options earlier this week, but there are enough teams desperate for stolen bases out there that we can try a different tact here. Did you know that the easiest team to steal on is the Boston Red Sox? And the hardest is in Arizona? And that the Red Sox have allowed more than twice as many stolen bases as the Diamondbacks?

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