Archive for Waiver Wire

As a long-time ottoneu player, I have come to realize that the traditional waiver wire columns are great for leagues with 23-27 man rosters, but don’t quite hold up when you teams all go 40-deep. So from time to time this year, I will try to offer up names of players who are free agents in more than 90% of ottoneu leagues, but are worth keeping an eye on.

To differentiate from waivers, I’ll call them Watchlist Wonders — guys who are worth adding to your ottoneu watchlist and, depending on your team needs, worth starting an auction for.

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Almost all fantasy leagues have a few spots to place players that are on the DL. Fantasy owners should look at filling these available roster spots with players currently on the DL. I will look at a few players that can be used in these slots.

Victor Martinez – C, DH (1.4% owned in ESPN, 13% in Yahoo) – Victor will not be playing in 2012, so if an owner is in a 1-year league, ignore him. In a keeper league, he has some definate value. Good hitting qualified catchers are hard to find. While an owner may not be able to stash him for a season, why not try hold onto him until the end of the season. If there is a point when he must be dropped to the waiver wire, try to trade him off. Attempt to turn the release into a bidding war. State that owner A, the owner with the best waiver wire ranking and an open DL slot, will get him up unless another owner offers up a trade.

Salvador Perez – C (6.4% ESPN, 11% Yahoo) – Sal is expected to miss 12 to 14 weeks. His return should be in late July at the earliest. All catchers wear down and are generally bad offensively. Sal will be a decent C option when he returns in all but the shallowest of leagues.

Brett Anderson – P (0.4% ESPN, 4% Yahoo) – Brett has been a decent fantasy option when healthy. The problem is that he is rarely healthy. He will not be the same pitcher that he was when he came up in 2009. Since 2009, he has lost 1.5 MPH to his fastball and his strikeout and gone down (7.7 K/9 in 2009 to 6.6 K/9 in 2011). This last injury will degrade his talent even more. Brett looks to return in August when many pitchers may be getting shutdown. He could step in for some innings late in the season.

Rubby de la Rosa – P (0% ESPN, 1% Yahoo) – I like Rubby potential fantasy value more than Brett Anderson. He threw hard (96 MPH) and averaged 8.9 K/9 in 13 games last season. The main problem holding him down in 2011 was his 4.6 BB/9. He could be a great pitcher if he could get the walks under control. He looks to be ready to return from TJS late in the season.

One of the keys to winning at fantasy baseball, especially in deep leagues, is to have players that will actually, you know, spend time on the field. No matter how much ability a player possesses, they are useless if they aren’t getting playing time. I am going to look during this preseason for possible changes in playtime for various players.

Todd Helton –- The Rockies plan on playing Helton in only 100 to 110 games in 2012 even if he is healthy.

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Fantasy owners usually feel good about their rosters after a draft or auction. They got most of the players they wanted and/or needed. All is good. A nice core lineup is set. A couple of players with several qualified positions are waiting on the bench to fill in for a starter’s off day. Rookies were selected that should be called up soon. A pitching staff that is second to none is ready. The first waiver period expires and the guy that auto-drafted then places a player on the waiver wire you desire. Now, a owner must figure out which player they should drop to pick up the desired player.

Once a fantasy manager has completed their draft or auction, a owner needs to immediately designate the first player to be dropped. Finding a player to drop for a better player should be easy, but many owners struggle with it. It should be known at all times which player is the first to go on the team if an opportunity arises. It gives an owner flexibility to make moves while others are holding onto their preciously drafted team.

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For those of you in a hurry, the likely answer is to this question is, ahem, no.

But this is such a curiously confounding signing for the Houston Astros that I feel rather compelled to give it a little digital ink.

So — yes, Jack Cust has just signed a one year deal with a club option for 2013, which happens to be the year the Astros will be moving to the American League West. Yes, this is the very Jack Cust who turned in the .213/.344/.329 line with three home runs over 270 plate appearances in Seattle. The same Jack Cust who was picked up by the Phillies and summarily released after six games. The same Jack Cust who historically has been a particularly terrible outfielder, so you have to wonder exactly how he’s going to be used in Houston.

Houston clearly sees some potential in him. Should you and your fantasy squad see the same?

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My colleagues Michael Barr and Howard Bender did a very thorough job this year outlining the relatively weak crop of third baseman, but here’s the Reader’s Digest version: Just 13 teams had their 3B get enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title, nearly a quarter were more than 10 percent below league average in terms of wRC+ at what is typically considered a premium position for offense.

Casey McGehee’s wRC+ of 68 was the worst of the qualifiers at 32 percent below league average, but he was not the worst at the position — take a bow, Chone Figgins and your wRC+ of 34 — though that’s a fairly low bar by which to judge success. McGehee wasn’t even the worst of the remaining four third baseman, that would be Brandon Inge, who posted a wRC+ of 48. But while Inge is hitting .333/.444/.600 in the playoffs, McGehee has been relegated to a pinch-hitting role and is just 1-for-5 in his limited opportunities.

Jerry Hairston Jr. may have unseated McGehee in the short term, but it’s unlikely that the Brewers will go into 2012 banking on 140-150 games out of Hairston, meaning that they’ll either give McGehee another look or they’ll dig into the free agent market. There are some interesting names in that bunch — Aramis Ramirez chiefly among them — but not many of them stand out as definite upgrades over McGehee, especially since he’s just in his first year of arbitration and therefore likely to be cheaper than a free agent. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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