Jean Segura, Fantasy MVP

Jean Segura wasn’t the best fantasy baseball player in 2013. He might not have even been the best shortstop for fantasy teams this year. But given the context of projections with the overall production, Segura pretty much destroyed any reasonable expectation from the preseason.

In fantasy baseball, value is an elusive commodity, and Segura provided piles of it. With an ADP somewhere in the mid to high 200’s Segura was a flyer pick in most leagues, if he was drafted at all. Then all he did was run out there and post a .294/.329/.423 slash line with 12 home runs, 74 runs scored, and 44 stolen bases. As far as standard categories go, here’s how Segura stacked up against the rest of his shortstop peers:

Not too shabby for a player scarce few figured they would ever use.

There are a couple scenarios where Segura probably saved many managerial bacon. For many owners with stable shortstop options already, Segura became the worlds greatest solution at the troublesome middle infield slot, where production typically lacks. But I played in multiple leagues where Segura was drafted by managers looking for insurance on injury prone guys like Jose Reyes and Troy Tulowitzki where Segura aptly plugged the leak. Not only did managers not have to turn to a Pete Kozma or Mike Aviles, they saw Segura put up all-star caliber counting stats.

By midseason, Segura was hitting .327/.360/508 with 11 home runs and 27 stolen bases and it appeared we had another budding star. Many astute managers flipped Segura at this point looking to sell high, and if you did — boy howdy did you look like a whiz kid. His final line is certainly nothing to thumb your nose at, but I’ll revive a chart used in a previous post about Segura just in case you missed it:

If you want some conspiracy theories relative to that decline, go ahead and read the whole post but there’s certainly plenty of concern about what kind of player Segura will be in 2014. In the second half, his power vanished, his walks declined, his strikeouts increased, and his success rate on steals tanked. One obvious thought is since he’s still such a pup, he wasn’t quite prepared for the living hell of playing stickball in a luxurious park-like setting for 162 games, and yeah, that’s probably some the issue. I imagine we’ll hear a lot of this kind of narrative with all sorts of focus on his off season “conditioning”. Maybe even references to eating healthy. Yawn.

Regardless, his ranking is most definitely going to be quite high, so unless you’re in a keeper, you’ll have to pay a premium for his services going forward. But regardless of his second half stinker and whether he’ll provide great value going forward, from my seat, Jean Segura was certainly a most valuable player in 2013.