Should a Top 20 Pick Only Be a Platoon Option?
Here are the 2011 triple slash lines for 4 outfielders and the career split for another player:
0.262/0.309/0.423
0.264/0.323/0.393
0.262/0.336/0.429
0.271/0.327/0.438
0.263/0.312/0.509
All the players are similar. The first player went 14th over all in a recent Fangraphs Dynasty league draft and the others were taken at the following picks: 112th, 234th, 163rd, 62nd.
Here are the players with their stats:
Carlos Gonzalez (career road split): 0.262/0.309/0.423
Cameron Maybin 0.264/0.323/0.393
Torii Hunter 0.262/0.336/0.429
Peter Bourjos 0.271/0.327/0.438
Nelson Cruz 0.263/0.312/0.509
While he is on the road, Carlos Gonzalez hits about as well as Torii Hunter. He gets most of his fantasy value from hitting at home as seen here:
Coors Field: 786 PA, 0.347/0.404/0.653
All other parks: 1025 PA, 0.262/0.309/0.423
A difference of 0.300 OPS is fairly substantial and can not be explained away by just park factors. Here are the home and away OPS splits for some other players for the Rockies:
Name, Home OPS, Away OPS, Difference
Troy Tulowitzki, 0.931, 0.808, 0.123
Todd Helton, 1.027, 0.868, 0.159
Chris Iannetta, 0.869, 0.707, 0.162
Dexter Fowler, 0.845, 0.691, 0.154
CarGo’s difference between his home and away OPS is twice that of the other 4 players.
This home-road split have existed all three season he has been with Colorado:
Year, Home OPS, Away OPS
2009, 0.943, 0.811
2010, 1.161, 0.775
2011, 0.999, 0.757
With the large split, he is probably due for a bit of regression. The problem is determining which direction does his stats regress. Does his ability in Colorado decline? Does his ability to hit on the road improve? Do both of the splits get closer to one another (my bet is here)? Right now, we don’t have enough plate appearances to make sure that he is unique to the park.
Dealing with this split is a difficult issue. In most larger leagues, players of the Hunter, Maybin and Bourjos caliber are starters, so subbing for CarGo makes no sense in these cases. If an owner has a decent OFer on the bench and Gonzalez is facing a tough pitcher on the road, I would look at subbing for him though. If in a shallower league, an owner may have good enough OFers that CarGo sits all the games on the road. One other solution is to ignore the headache all together and do not pick him up in an auction or draft.
Cargo has an extreme home and away split. His owners should be cognizant of it when they draft for and play him.
Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.
Matt Holliday had similar splits his first 3 years at Coors in more PA (although he was on an upward slope in his road splits) OPS Home ~1.050 vs OPS Road ~0.748 (>.300 difference). If people would have used this against him in his 4th season and started him only in home games they would have missed out of an .860 road OPS that year.
Is 681 PA outside of Coors in the past 3 season with a .778 OPS enough to make you think you have better options?
You missed a major point…
In Roto leagues this is fine. We have an expectation on where he’s going to finish and we can use a bench option to avoid particularly bad road matchups.
In head to head leagues, this can be a serious problem. Cargo is one of several players that I advise to subtly devalue in a head to head league. We’re talking picks 18-25 instead of 10-16, so it’s small fries in the end.
Other players on that list:
Maybin- .294/.349/.457/.806 away from Petco and .231/.294/.324/.618 at Petco in 2011.
Nelson Cruz – .306/.367/.576/.943 at Home (Arlington) and .236/.293/.432/.726 away for his career.
the first problem with this article is that the author is using triple slash home/road splits to analyze fantasy value.
obviously BA is important, and OBP and SLG might correlate to runs and rbi, but he completely neglected one of the most valuable aspects of Cargo’s fantasy game – his SB’s.
and Gonzalez actually runs more and has stolen more bases on the road in his career. (38 road vs 28 home)
another thing this article overlooks is that in 2010 (when all the talk of Cargo’s home/road splits first began) he still hit .289 with 16 SB, 41 RBI, and 8 HR in just 287 PA’s.
Benching any player that has that kind of upside for his “bad” split is just completely absurd.
also the author failed to account for the fact that the group of comparison players also suffered their own rather severe splits.
for example:
–Maybin hit 65 pts higher on the road than at home. he OPS’d 200 pts higher on the road. He scored 35% more runs on the road.
–Hunter hit twice as many HR’s at home in 2011 as he did away. He hit 40 pts higher at home, etc etc.
–Cruz is a career 70 point better hitter at home. His OBP at home is 75 pts higher.
–Same goes for Bourjos.
and the most important fact is that you cannot just pick and choose when your “platoon partner” is home or away.
just because Cargo is playing on the road doesnt mean the guy you want to platoon for him is automatically playing in his favorable environment.
so not only is platooning Cargo a pretty huge tactical mistake, but its also highly impractical.
and even if it WAS practical, its highly unlikely that the average team/league allows enough roster spots to have a bench option that even matches worst case road performance.
Completely agree with points made, but the author’s intention was to shed light on the fact that you are mostly paying a top-20 selection on a platoon-only option. And while you would still start him away from Coors, his production therein is comparable to options found many picks later. So it begs the question of whether or not you should spend a top draft choice largely on a platoon player. Whether the other players display a split as well is irrelevant.
it IS relevant because if the backup has a platoon split then you cannot start him every time your #1 choice (Cargo) is away as the article suggests.
who has room to carry 2-3 backups for 1 player?
if the guy is clearly a top 3-5 hitter at home, and even average on the road, he is fully deserving of a top 20 pick.
the fact is, nearly every single player has some kind of platoon split.
you cant, and shouldnt, try to account for them all.
also did you miss the SB issue i pointed out?
and seriously, what kind of leagues have players like Cruz as bench fillers? certainly not any that Fangraphers play in.
I did the legwork and crunched the numbers. The results are as follows (not including HBP): *Prorated numbers (2nd line of stats) are adjusting the stats to fit Cargo’s 481 AB so as to compare easily
Baseline:
Cargo: 481 AB 92-26-92-20-.295-.363 fantasy line
A
-If Cargo is at home, start him
-If Cargo is away, then start Maybin away.
-If Maybin is home, start none.
407 AB 89-20-75-24-.314-.374 fantasy line
481 AB 105-24-89-28-.314-.374 fantasy line
B
-If Cruz is at home, start him
-If Cruz is away, then start Maybin away.
-If Maybin is home, start none.
391 AB 71-24-72-17-.304-.354 fantasy line
481 AB 87-30-89-21-.304-.354 fantasy line
C
-If Cruz is at home, start him
-If Cruz is away, then start Maybin away.
-If Maybin is home, start Cruz away.
-If Cruz doesn’t play, start none
558 AB 91-33-96-20-.285-.332 fantasy line
481 AB 78-28-83-17-.285-.332 fantasy line
Bottom-line is that if you platoon Cargo with the 112th pick, you obviously increase the stat-line. But even more surprising is that if you combine Cruz/Maybin (example B), you can get as good a player as Cargo if not slightly better. The downside is less AB. But in roto, it may go a long way.
Large platoon splits actually make a player MORE valuable, given a certain production level. Because then a fantasy owner can platoon this player if the roster space allows.
Agree with this, especially outfielders. If you just have ONE backup outfielder, then you can sub him in whenever one of your three outfielders is against a bad platoon type matchup. I wouldn’t bench Cargo on the road anyway, although against an ace maybe. I used to have an outfield 2 or 3 years ago of Ethier-Granderson-Hamilton and benched them against lefties (well Hamilton only against tough ones). Worked out great mostly.
He wasn’t saying those guys would *be* the backup or relpacement players, so stop trying to math out the delta.
What he’s saying is, when you take a guy in the 1st round instead of the 4th round (which is where you could have gotten any of those “other” guys), you’re paying a premium (3 rounds) for “more” stats. Then he points out that, in CarGo’s case, you’re only *getting* a premium half of the time (when he’s at home).
That said, I agree that this argument has several holes, because those players also have splits. And while not everyone is at home or on the road at the same time, whatever guy you would have got in the 4th round has some subset of situation that he probably does worse in than Cargo’s “bad” road split. They may not line up at the same times (anyone who has ever tried to play a fantasy “platoon” knows the futility of this – both guys in their bad split at the same time, both guys day off at the same time, etc.).
Bottom line, you plug your best guy in day in and day out and you take his totals at the end of the year. Yes, you can get punished brutally in head to head since short-framed results are so important, but at the same time, you get equally punished when you put a great hitter on the bench because of your gut feelings or an awkward split and he busts out a 3-homer game instead.
Is CarGo one of the top outfielders in the game today? Yes. Would he be if he were traded away from Coors? Ask me when it happens…