Corey Kluber & Jimmy Paredes: Deep League Wire
Tiptoe along the deep league waiver wire,
Search for a player you want to hire,
With the hope that he catches fire,
Gives you a performance in which you won’t tire,
And is featured in a story by Rob Neyer
::takes a bow:: Thank you, thank you very much. That was my practice round as an aspiring poet. How does my RARP (rhyming above replacement poet) rank?
Corey Kluber | CLE SP | 6% Owned
Kluber is getting an opportunity in the Indians rotation while Brett Myers is sidelined and he’s somebody I mentioned several times last year. Of course, he didn’t exactly work out with that 5.14 ERA, but his SIERA was a much more respectable 3.87. His SwStk% has remained above the 10% mark, which is excellent and suggests he should maintain a strikeout rate around 8.0. While he won’t continue to walk just two batters per nine, he should be around league average, which still gives him a good K/BB ratio.
The 27-year-old is no hot prospect and has a rather unimpressive minor league career for the most part, especially if you’re just focusing on ERA. But his skills in recent years have been pretty good and his stuff so far has obviously been difficult to make contact with. As expected, the Indians have an excellent defense, ranking fifth in UZR/150, so Kluber should eventually experience better luck on his balls in play. He is currently sporting a .327 mark, after finishing with a .342 last season. However, his line drive rate is below the league average and IFFB% above the average, both of which should more than offset the extra ground balls he’s allowing that go for hits more often than fly balls. Though it’s anyone’s guess how long he’ll remain in the rotation, for the time being he makes a worthwhile pickup for pitching starved deep league owners.
Jimmy Paredes | HOU OF | 1% Owned
You wanted deep, you got deep. He’s owned in just 1% of leagues! This is a guy I actually drafted in last year’s LABR league in the reserve round, but he didn’t make it on my roster through the beginning of the season after failing to win the Astros third base job. Throughout his minor league career, he has played at every position on the diamond except for pitcher and catcher. That gives him a boatload of opportunities to get into the Astros lineup. In his 2013 debut yesterday, he batted second and played right field.
Paredes possesses a strong power/speed combination of skills. He posted a .160 ISO at Triple-A last year, and his power spiked during his short stint there this year, as his ISO jumped to .214. A full season’s worth of at-bats would probably yield mid-teen homer totals. Even more intriguing though is his speed. He stole 39 combined bases last year when you include his time with the Astros, and he swiped 7 bases before being recalled this season. He would potentially flirt with the 30 steal plateau playing a full season.
So a reasonable projection given full season at-bats might yield 15 homers and 30 steals and he could be had for peanuts in probably 100% of leagues! He makes solid enough contact and his walk rate surged during his time at Triple-A this year. Houston is just cycling through players until it finds a group that could stick, so Paredes should get an extended look and offers exciting upside for deep leaguers at little cost.
Mike Podhorzer is the founder of ProjectingX IQ, an advanced fantasy baseball analytics platform that transforms projection data and in-season performance signals into actionable intelligence. He is the 2015 Fantasy Sports Writers Association Baseball Writer of the Year and three-time Tout Wars champion. He is the author of the eBook Projecting X 2.0: How to Forecast Baseball Player Performance, which teaches you how to project players yourself. Follow Mike on X@MikePodhorzer and contact him via email.
Paredes or Grossman the rest of the way?
Paredes
What about Trevor Crowe, what do you think he will do with regular playing time?
Thanks for providing true deep sleepers. In my 14 team dynasty league (which has existed since the mid 80’s) with 14 starting hitters, 9 starting pitchers and a bench that ends up at 10 players after our rosters expand, anyone who is owned in 10% of leagues is never available. Definitely will check these out, and may consider dropping an Xavier Paul or Jordan Schaffer for these guys (I said it was deep!).
D’oh, by sleepers I of course meant waiver wire guys.
agreed, this is the kind of depth i need to read about. In my deep league (16 team 25 man rosters with 20 man minor reserves for any player under 2 years service time) i have had to consider things like “would i rather trade for marwin gonzalez, tyler greene, or jimmy paredes”.
Give me the tired, the poor, the wretched refuse with >2% ownership
How do you know if someone is in a deep, deep fantasy league? Wait thirty seconds, and they’ll tell you twice.
Mike, I wouldn’t say your rhyme is poor
But using RARP, the closest comp’s Francoeur
Well that can’t be a compliment! Is Francoeur’s rhyming skills as poor as his plate discipline? He has to be good at something right?
Another worthy consideration for deep leagues in the A’s Sonny Gray, whose prospect pedigree and scouting reviews place him higher than Kluber or Paredes.
Oakland considered taking Parker out of the rotation this week and beat reporters have reported Gray as the likely replacement. Marc Hulet raved about him in naming Gray the A’s second-ranked prospect this year. And pitching in Oakland always helps — its easy enough to stream A’s pitchers for home games and on the road against Seattle and Houston while skipping visits to Arlington.
Thanks Mike for the deep league suggestions.
Mike,
RARP is an interesting stat. It’s main problem is that bad poets as a group tend to lean heavily on the trick of rhyme to forge ahead where talent, ideas, and writing ability are lacking. I think we should morph RARP into “RBRP” (rhymes below replacement poet), which when paired with PPP (“pith per paragraph”) could help show which great poets rely on rhyme the least. But RBRP sounds too much like “R-Burp!” Our “Our-burp!” as if a duet of burpers were taking ownership of their sonic creation. However, RARP is more fun to say, as it reminds me of Simon Pegg’s film “Hot Fuzz” where the Trolley boy expresses agreement with a “Yarp!” Regardless, I appreciate your take on Corey Kluber and will probably try to nab him in my Scoresheet league given the fact that I took a chance on Myers, who’s rotting away on my farm until he can prove the elbow is serviceable sans surgery. Sometimes there’s just no joy in Mudville.
Is there a PoemGraphs in our future? You’d be my first hire.
I think you’re on to something with PoemGraphs.
I can almost see its “Regular Features” menu, with content options gleaming like dazzling gemstones in the omnipresent sun-like LED rays of thousands of computer monitors across the globe, beckoning thousands of flickering eyes to entice intrigued minds to click on such slick links as:
(1) “Roto Riteup:” this becomes “Odo Write-up” because we hire the guy who played Constable Odo on Star Trek Deep Space Mall 9 to write this column;
(2) “Bullpen Report:” This evolves into “Open Report” because there’s nothing more anathema to poetry than closed minds;
(3) “Prospect Coverage:” This stays the same because poetry has rookies just like baseball;
(4) “MASH Report:” This morphs into “The Johnny Cash Report” to satisfy that large contingent of poetry lovers who believe true poetry lives only in the oiled and wrinkled hide of cowboy songs; and
(5) “The Sleeper and The Bust:” This one slims down simply to “The Sleeper” in honor of that great American poet, E.A. Poe.
Still, I’m insistently hoping that Corey Kluber can consistently manage his “control” and thereby manage to control persistently.