Muscular Boys

There is no stronger or more unpleasant current in the emotional maelstrom that is Fantasy Baseball than Dumper’s Desolation. This is the feeling you get when you are forced to give up on a player and jettison him, whereupon one of your opponents rescues him, and he (the player, but also the opponent) prospers. As an example, if one is needed: It’s Memorial Day, 2014. You paid good money for Jedd Gyorko at the start of the season ($14, if you happened to buy him in the Tout Wars mixed auction). He’s rewarded you by hitting about .170, and it’s not a subtly-potent .170. You’ve long since banished him to your reserve roster, and replaced him with a second baseman who’s not hurting you as badly but also not helping you—Gordon Beckham, let’s say. As far as you know, there’s nothing wrong with Gyorko physically; he’s just performing poorly. Now someone else on your roster is coming off the DL, and you need to free a spot. So you bitterly but confidently mutter “good riddance” and put Gyorko on waivers. Someone else grabs him and stashes him. A week or two later, Gyorko goes on the DL. He’s got severe plantar fasciitis, which is news to you and everyone else besides Gyorko and his podiatrist. A month or so after that, Gyorko, much refreshed, returns, and you watch helplessly as he posts a .260/.347/.398 slash line for the last two months.

An experience to be shunned at all costs, right? Yet in most leagues, dumping is a way of life; in fact, the better and more sophisticated the owner, the likelier (s)he is to have a roster that forces a difficult choice. And in Fantasyland as in the rest of the universe, Newton’s Third Law applies, and you’re going to have to control the equal and opposite reaction when it’s time to upgrade.

We talked about this a little last week, and even suggested that you might dump Mat Latos with impunity. You’d have been better off just dumping impunity, because Latos, perhaps annoyed by our sniping, proceeded to have his first good outing of the season. Despite this inglorious beginning, we realized–thanks to the encouraging comments of alert readers MG and Tony TuTone (much obliged, dudes and/or dudees)—that this is a relatively fresh patch in otherwise exhausted soil. Plenty of people (including us) are sharing their thoughts about whom to pick up and whom to activate. But as far as we know, no one’s identifying candidates for a kiss-off.

So here we are again, and now we have a name for this feature. Last week, you’ll perhaps recall, we inaugurated our Pick Hit, in homage to Robert Christgau (see last week’s installment; we won’t explain again), whose term that was for his favorite recording among the ones he graded in a given Consumer Guide. His CGs also had a designation for least-favorite: Must to Avoid. This phrase derives, etymologists have determined, from the 1965 hit record by Herman’s Hermits (we’re not going to explain that one, either), the earworm chorus of which went “She’s a must to avoid, a complete impossibility.” Through misapprehension or misprision, this became, in middle school cafeterias throughout the land, “She’s a muscular boy….” Sort of like “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy.” (Or that one.)

Thus: henceforth complementing our Pick Hits will be our Muscular Boys: the guys you can dump if you’ve got to dump somebody. We want to be clear about what we’re doing here. We’re not suggesting you get rid of these guys if you don’t have to. Nor, usually, will we be suggesting that you obtain our Pick Hit and get rid of our Muscular Boy. We’re not going to urge you to dispose of someone that you probably had enough sense, as we didn’t, to avoid drafting in the first place. (That’s you we’re talking about, Trevor Cahill.) And we’re not going to tell you to dump somebody when what we really mean is “sell high [or buy low] now.” If there are owners in your league who think that Julio Iglesias is a .380 hitter, or that Chris Carter is as bad as he’s looked so far—it’s Jonathan Singleton who’s as bad as Chris Carter has looked so far–you know what to do. If not, you might as well hang on to them. And, finally, we’re not making any recommendations about the 2015-model Jedd Gyorko and his .149/.231/.191 slash line; we’re completely baffled.

No, a Muscular Boy is someone you might well have and we think you won’t miss. And the inaugural Birchwood Brothers Muscular Boy—unless you count Latos, which we should but don’t—is Anthony Gose. People took him seriously at the start of the season: he went in the 17th round of our NFBC Main Event draft and the 21st round of the Tout Wars Mixed Draft. Gose is young (24), He’s fast, he’s got a good arm, and he can play center field. What he can’t do is hit. We’re not sure why Tigers manager Brad Ausmus—who’s a smart guy, even though he went to Dartmouth—thought Gose, with a career OBP of .302, was not just a starter but a leadoff hitter, but he did. Gose had a torrid start this season, and is still hitting .319, thanks to a BABIP of .519, which couldn’t be sustained by Babe Ruth on steroids playing in the Polo Grounds. Despite that BA, he’s managed to score only two runs, and if you have an RBI this season, you’ve got one more than Gose does. He’s struck out 19 times, walked only three, and has managed to make contact in only 62% of his plate appearances, which is dismal but comports with his contact rate in the rest of his 600-plus PA career.

When you strike out 30% of the time and your BABIP, historically, is about .330, you’re going to hit about .230, and that’s what ZIPs projects for Gose. OK: maybe you’ve budgeted for that, but you like the 34 steals that ZIPs projects for him. But that’s based on a projected 575 ABs, and Gose isn’t close to that playing-time pace now. Just wait until he comes back to earth and has a long stretch of sub-.200 performance. If all he gets is 20 or even 25 steals, it won’t compensate for his lack of counting stats and his drag on batting average. And defensive replacement/pinch-runner looks to us like Gose’s upside. We think not only that he’ll lose his starting job to Rajai Davis by the end of May, but also that he may even be replaced on the roster by minor-leaguer Tyler Collins (although Collins isn’t a center fielder). Gose’s downside is as the everyday center fielder for Toledo, which does you no good unless you happen to have an International League fantasy team, in which case stop reading and have someone escort you to an emergency room immediately.

As to Team Birchwood in the Main Event: Things are a bit better. We’re 4th in our 15-team league, and 155th of 450 teams overall. Our hitting remains strong, thanks largely to A-Rod, who’s still got as much power as anyone this side of Anthony Kennedy, though, like Kennedy, he’s a guess hitter. And our pitching has gotten better, though our starting pitchers aren’t getting wins, one of our closers (Aroldis Chapman) isn’t getting saves, and the other one (that would be Steve Cishek) isn’t even getting outs. After a short, unhappy union, we annulled our marriage with Trevor Cahill and replaced him with Tony Cingrani, who seems to be the best bet to get saves if Chapman goes down, though (we hadn’t thought of this before) if Chapman goes down, we’re finished anyway. We also banished the uninspiring Gregor Blanco and acquired Scott Van Slyke. This was before Carl Crawford’s injury, and we’re kind of pleased with ourselves. Indeed, Van Slyke would have been our Pick Hit this week, except you, the cognoscenti whose approval we crave, have now already started chasing him, what with the attrition in the Dodger outfield. One reminder, more for Don Mattingly than for you: Van Slyke can hit right-handers, too.

And finally: please indulge us as we offer a brief shout-out in loving memory of the Birchwood Father, whose 93rd birthday is, or would have been, this week. He was no particular baseball fan, but once a year we could drag him to the Bronx, and he’d sit indulgently, if not altogether patiently, through the entire game, including all 12 innings and 4 hours of the very first one: A’s 6, Yankees 4; July 19, 1958, and you could look it up. And while we’re at it: if perfect foreknowledge of all future events isn’t part of the retirement package in heaven, then surely there’s at least an OTB with zero percent takeout. In that case, Dad, go with Frosted in the Kentucky Derby.