Duda now Demoted, Demonstrates Directives

Lucas Duda has now been demoted to Triple-A Buffalo. His work so far can still demonstrate some lessons for all of us.

1) Long-shot sleepers are meant to be treated as long-shot sleepers.
Do you know who my long-shot tout was for 2011? Will Venable. I liked his athletic talents and thought he would do enough away from home to show his lefty power, stolen-base skills, and (what I thought were) improving contact skills. When Venable hit .246 with 9 home runs and 29 stolen bases, many thought that was a bust, but I owned him in deep leagues and used him at center field against righties and away from home and enjoyed his .256/.319/.423 work against right-handers, plus a little extra on the road. And, in any case, I had spent only a few deep-league late-draft bucks on him, so when I dropped him in other leagues it didn’t hurt.

Fast forward to this year, when I put forth the idea that Duda might outperform Logan Morrison in all relevant fantasy categories. The hint here was that it came in the same collection of outrageous predictions that had Jimmy Paredes as the new Emilio Bonifacio. But I’ll admit to having Duda on many of teams and understand that he was one of my touts — even if I usually spent a last-round pick or a dollar or two on him. (That $15 for him in the Experts League on ottoneu was a thing that I knew was bad as it was happening, so please don’t hate me too hard for that.) Most of my teams will drop him, maybe my linear weights ottoneu team will hold him at a dollar, but most of my teams would drop him if he was demoted and would’t feel the pain too hard. He has been a .250/.366/.429 vs. RHP bench bat for me in the meantime.

Hopefully you guys realized that Duda was my long-shot sleeper. And that you’ve got to take those shots every year, even if they don’t work out all the time.

2) Defense matters.
Defense and non-stolen-base baserunning doesn’t show up in the fantasy box scores. But if the Mets pick Jordany Valdespin over Duda for a roster spot at any time this year, it won’t be because of Valdespins’ superior patience or power. The Jordan-like former infielder has never walked at a league-average rate, and has only rarely managed league-average power. But JV does have some speed — he stole 33 bases in Double-A last season — and he does have some glove. Duda might be the worst defensive outfielder in the league right now, or he might just be really bad at defense. And this isn’t to slight him unnecessarily — dude laughed when I asked him about defense, and he knows it’s an issue that he has to work on. In any case, defense might matter here, and in real-life baseball, it could keep Duda from getting all the chances he can to show his true-talent power.

3) Power takes a really long time to stabilize.
Most research on the subject suggests that power takes almost a full year before it stabilizes. And that means that almost a full season of power only predicts future power at a 70% success rate. So it takes a while to know a player’s power. It makes sense intuitively — you can see balls and strikes way before you can discern a fat pitch and put a good swing on it — and the numbers agree. On June 1, Jose Bautista was hitting .223/.332/.447 and everyone was wondering about his power. I said in a chat that “he could hit three home runs this weekend” and all his power peripherals would look better. He hit three home runs that weekend, and his power peripherals looked better.

Point is, whether you’re waiting on Bautista, Morrison, Duda, Albert Pujols or Adrian Gonzalez, power comes last. You never know if it’s not coming until you’ve spent all year waiting.

Maybe this is an argument that you should take no chances with your power, and spend your sleeper picks trying to find speedsters — that’s something worth debating — but when it comes to Lucas Duda’s true-talent power, we may still not now what the Ox can do. Good thing he has a little while longer to figure it out.. in the minor leagues.