Archive for Adam Eaton

It’s time for our Depth Chart Discussions to begin. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, bullpen, and rotation) and will begin breaking them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find them gathered here.

The White Sox had an aggressive offseason, adding plenty of fantasy-relevant talent to an interesting core. Two-thirds of their outfield was already drawing attention as mid-round guys with breakout potential. They added another mid-rounder – though he is of the established variety – this offseason making their starting outfield one of the more alluring fantasy units in the game.

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Unless I’m just missing it, I don’t believe you can create a custom leaderboard of the day’s probable starters here on the site. Other sites might have some data on the day’s starters, but I’m not aware of it. But every time I pick a lineup I want to look at how each pitcher fares against hitters of each handedness and how homer prone they are. So below you’ll see a screenshot of a custom leaderboard I created to help me pick hitters today.

If some other site is already providing something like this, please let me know and I’ll avoid posting something similar in the future. But if this is something you’d like to see again, let me know. And if you have any suggestions about different or additional stats you would find helpful if included, let me know that as well.

After the jump is the chart, and we’ll use it to pick some hitters.

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It seems so long ago now, but Diamondbacks outfielder Adam Eaton was hyped as a pretty nice sleeper headed into the season. Eaton collected 198 hits and 44 steals to go with a .456 OBP between Double-A and Triple-A in 2012, then made a solid impression with a .382 OBP in just over 100 plate appearances for the big club. Though he didn’t add a lot of pop, that kind of potential for on-base skills, steals, and enough speed to stretch singles into doubles set him up to be a nice under-the-radar choice. With Justin Upton & Chris Young traded, Eaton would man center while Kubel & Cody Ross would handle the corners, and Gerardo Parra would spot all over.

But that situation never really came to fruition, since Eaton injured his left elbow in the spring. He didn’t get into minor league games until May, suffered a setback, and finally returned to the Diamondbacks in July. Now Kubel has been DFA’d, Ross is out for the season, and Eaton finds himself playing left field as much as center, with Tony Campana & A.J. Pollock filling in up the middle.

He’s also hitting .306/.372/.459 in August, and it’s time to see if he can be the asset that everyone hoped he’d might be entering the season. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s unlikely any 2013 rookie will have the impact in fantasy that Mike Trout did last season. Actually, it’s kind of unlikely any rookie will have the kind of fantasy impact that Trout did last season again in our lifetimes. Sure, prospects are generally speaking poor bets for consistent production. Yet, every year a few of these long shot bets come through and pay off big. Over the last decade names such as Trout, Craig Kimbrel, Albert Pujols and Rocco Baldelli all helped bring home fantasy titles to their many delighted owners. You don’t even need to find a Trout – which is good because, again, that’s really unlikely! Sometimes a Todd Frazier fills a need perfectly for a team lacking a third baseman. Hitting on a useful prospect or two like that can really make the difference for your fantasy team.

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This offseason, as transactions unfold and news breaks on the big league level, we’ll take a look at how the ripple effects shake out on the prospect side, focusing primarily on 2013 fantasy impact, with an eye toward the future, too.

This week: The Orioles put a pebble in the way of their top prospect’s path while creating some competition with a back-end arm; the Mets have a new reason not to rush their best young pitcher; and the Cubs might not be counting on much from an outfielder with cataclysmic contact concerns.

But first, a quick take on the prospects who were affected by the Justin Upton trade, which is being covered aplenty by my fellow RotoGraphers.

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On Thursday, the Diamondbacks finally managed to find a new home for Justin Upton, shipping him along with third baseman Chris Johnson to Atlanta for Martin Prado and four prospects. That’s a loss for AL-only fantasy players who were hoping the talented young outfielder might end up in Seattle or Texas, though he remains a must-own in all formats. (Well, most formats; if your league counts “grit”, he might be merely fodder for the waiver wire.)

While most of the attention is on Upton joining brother B.J. and incumbent Jason Heyward in what’s suddenly a star-studded Braves outfield, his former mates in Arizona suddenly find themselves with a very different squad than the one that ended last year including Upton, Johnson, & Chris Young – and a lot of questions just got answered in the desert. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »