Archive for A. J. Pollock

Now that the All-Star break is behind us, it’s time to check in once again on lineup trends in the National League. The Dodgers have made a bevy of lineup moves over the break, and the Cubs may have a position battle on their hands. The details on these and other situations are just below.

Arizona

It appears that Christian Walker will lose the most playing time as a result of Jake Lamb’s activation, being relegated to the lesser side of a first base platoon. Jarrod Dyson sat when Walker made starts against a pair of lefties (Drew Pomeranz and Madison Bumgarner) on June 29 and 30, but that’s been fairly close to the status quo. Even prior to Lamb’s activation, Dyson would frequently sit against left-handed starters in order to accommodate Ildemaro Vargas (with Ketel Marte playing center field) or Tim Locastro.
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A.J. Pollock is going to be a tough player to project for this season. For the purposes of forecasting, we like our hitters to have consistent skill sets, and when healthy, Pollock had been that sort of player. In 2018, he made several changes, though they were ones we have seen many hitters make in recent years. For his swan song with the Diamondbacks, Pollock hit more flyballs and became pull-heavier. He also became much more aggressive, increasing his Swing% from 42.3 percent to a career-high 48.1 percent. This, in combination, with a higher whiff rate, gave Pollock his highest-ever strikeout rate (21.7 percent) and lowest Avg (.257) for a season with at least 200 plate appearances.
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Average Draft Position or ADP is very valuable. I weighed NFBC’s ADP into my personal NFBC Draft Champion rankings equally to my position-adjusted composite projections (Baseball HQ combined with RotoChamp composites (Steamer, ZIP’s, etc.)) and the results were great. I used this, our pitcher arsenal scores and these hitter analytics  as my three main draft tools.

I wanted to take evaluating draft position one step further. I want to understand how consistent each player is drafted near their ADP.

Howard Bender, who manages Mock Draft Army provided me with the raw draft results of 19 expert drafts (NFBC format: 2c-1b-2b-3b-ss-ci-mi-5of-9p). It’s not the largest sample, but they are expert drafts, and the drafts that I have taken part in definitely provided great references.

The Approach:

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Our Mock Draft is complete.

Team Schwartz/rounds drafted:

C: Travis d’Arnaud/17 1B: Victor Martinez/4 2B: Arismendy Alcantara/18 3B: Josh Donaldson/3 SS: Hanley Ramirez/2 MI: Jean Segura/19 CI: Prince Fielder/6 OF: Mike Trout/1; Mookie Betts/7; Ryan Zimmerman/10; A.J. Pollock/14; Steven Souza/20; Carl Crawford/24 U: Pedro Alvarez/21

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The Arizona Diamondbacks shocked much of the baseball community when they parted with a pair of promising young players — Tyler Skaggs and Adam Eaton — to acquire a legitimate home run threat in Mark Trumbo. Thus, the remaining trio of Gerardo Parra, A.J. Pollock and Cody Ross will now jockey for regular playing time in center and right fields instead of splitting major time in all three positions.

Home run power doesn’t solely define an outfielder’s overall value. On-base skills, contact skills, speed and defense are vitally important, but when it comes to the Trumbo addition, it’s not difficult to understand why Kevin Towers and the Diamondbacks felt they needed to upgrade their power at the outfield position. Last season, their collective outfield finished dead last in home runs and ISO.
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Whether you like it or not, it’s time again for me to throw a tantrum reminiscent of a nine-year old sore loser, stomp my feet, and threaten to take my ball home as the real baseball world, once again, ignores my fantasy needs this season. It is the savvy fantasy player that does the necessary research and scouting to put together a strong list of potential September call-ups to supplement their fantasy roster in an effort to either stave off challengers for first place or to make a strong late-season push for a championship run. You not only look for talent but opportunity as well and assuming it’s the MLB bottom-feeders that will likely turn to their youth late in the year, you select a strong group of young up-and-comers. But apparently an organization’s desire to win a minor-league championship trumps their desire to see their youth face big-league competition and now my bench is littered with promising names that may never see any action at the major league level this year, thus rendering my list of September stashes useless to me in a fight for a title. Read the rest of this entry »

Injury and ineffectiveness have a way of creating opportunity for players many of us have never even heard of. Or at least if we’ve heard of them, we never thought we’d actually consider putting them on our fantasy baseball squad. Enter Matt Carpenter, A.J. Pollock, and Kirk Nieuwenhuis.

All three are either short-term or speculative grabs at the moment, but it wouldn’t take a whole lot for each of them to fall into regular playing time – and given than none of them have ownership rates north of 5% (alright, Matt Carpenter broke 5% overnight), they’re at the right price. Call it “extreme” deep league waiver wire if you like.

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When the Diamondbacks went out and signed Jason Kubel to play left field last December, many observers were aghast, arguing that even if he was a small improvement on offense over Gerardo Parra, the enormous gap in their defensive skills would make the transaction a net downgrade at a position Arizona already had depth at. For a team attempting to defend their NL West title, it certainly seemed like they could have found a better use for the 15 million dollars they gave to Kubel.

Two weeks into the season, Chris Young is on the disabled list with a shoulder injury, Justin Upton is doing his best to avoid joining him with a thumb injury, and the previously overstuffed Arizona outfield is suddenly an area of deep concern in the desert. While neither injury is expected to be a long-term issue, the Diamondbacks won’t have both players back in the lineup together until early May at the soonest. Young’s injury is a particularly tough blow, since the center fielder was off to a fantastic (if completely unsustainable) .410/.500/.897 start with five homers in the early going. As for Upton, he’s off to a horrendous start, still seeking his first home run and RBI, though the fact that he did pinch-run in the 9th against Pittsburgh on Wednesday does indicate that the Diamondbacks intend to keep him off the disabled list for now. Even if that’s the case, his thumb has clearly affected his play, so expect additional time off, diminished performance, or both until he is fully healed.

For fantasy players also suddenly down an outfielder – and you shouldn’t need me to tell you that Upton & Young are each owned in just about every league imaginable – the immediate action is to look internally, because Parra should now see daily playing time. He started in left with Kubel moved over to right yesterday, though expect him to see time at all three positions. In addition, 24-year-old A.J. Pollock was recalled from Triple-A Reno to make his major league debut. (For exceptionally deep leaguers, Pollock is a 2009 first-round pick who stole 36 bases in Double-A last year, though without much power. The chain reaction there is that 23-year-old outfielder Adam Eaton, who has done nothing but hit since being drafted in 2010, has now been pushed to Triple-A to take Pollock’s spot.)

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