Archive for Alex Rodriguez

In 2015, just 41 players hit 25 homers or more. Lowering the cut line to 20 homers bumps the total of players to reach that threshold up to 64. As one of the standard scoring categories, homers are desired, but there are only so many dingers to go around. Getting top-shelf power is usually attached to a premium draft selection, but the following three players hit 24 or more homers in 2015 and are being selected after pick 265 on average in NFBC drafts as of March 24th.

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The days of highway robbery early-season trades are a thing of the past, but it’s rarely too early to kick the tires on making trades. I’ve identified a five players who make for strong trade targets — depending on league type and settings, obviously. A pair of sluggers who could be had at a discount are joined by a white-hot hitting veteran and a couple of right-handed pitchers with varying degrees of success thus far. Read the rest of this entry »

In an effort to help you sniff out third base options should you still be waiting for David Freese to find his contacts, Jeff Keppinger to draw a walk, or Placido Polanco to do… anything — I’ve got a few ideas for you. They may not be good ideas, but they are ideas nonetheless, and third base has kind of necessitated the use of hairbrained thinking.

You might have already noticed this because it happened weeks ago, but Jose Bautista has three appearances at third base. Eligibility rules vary, but in Yahoo and Ottoneu formats, he only needs three more starts to qualify at third. In ESPN, he will need seven additional appearances.

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The Yankee lineup is a bit of a mess. And that’s being nice. With Mark Teixeira, Curtis Granderson and Alex Rodriguez all ailing, guys like Juan Rivera and Brennan Boesch will start the season in a lineup that is usually one of the most formidable in the league. With Travis Hafner and Chris Stewart also figuring to see regular at-bats, this lineup is anything but formidable.

But this post is just about the infield, not the whole lineup.

Let’s start with the Teixeira injury. Teixeira was originally reported to be out with a strained wrist injury until sometime between the first and middle of May. But it now appears that Teixeira has a partially torn tendon sheath. This is the same injury Jose Bautista had last year that ended his season early. Teixeira’s injury is supposedly a bit different in that the tendon under the sheath is stable whereas Bautista had an unstable tendon, which is the reason Bautista’s injury required season-ending surgery.

If we could be sure Teixeira would be back sometime in May, he might still be worth drafting as your corner infielder. But with so much uncertainty about the timeline after this latest development concerning his injury, there’s probably too much risk to take on. However, if you play in a league with more than one DL slot, he might be worth stashing if he falls to the last couple rounds of your draft.

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We’re having more fun with third basemen here as we continue to roll through Zach Sander’s Third Base End of Season Rankings. For today, I thought I’d take this opportunity to actually say goodbye to a couple of former stalwarts who have been an integral part of a number of fantasy championships over the last two decades. Chipper Jones, Alex Rodriguez, it was, without a doubt, our pleasure to have you on our rosters. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re about a third of the way through the season, and while the proverbial gloves aren’t going to come off, I think I’ll stop coddling some and for others, I’ll be giving credit where credit is due. I wouldn’t say this is a “if the draft were held today” kind of list, but perhaps some amalgam of ranking based on current performance and anticipated performance for the rest of the season. I’ll do my best to tease out a rationale for the higher tiers.

The top tier of third basemen has historically been quite small, in large part due to the dearth of real superstars at the position. But since Jose Bautista has been acting like he might actually be mortal, it’s left room for some others to join him at the top.

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Just a month in and we’ve seen players like Danny Valencia and Lonnie Chisenhall lose their jobs, kids like Kyle Seager and William Middlebrooks defy expectations, and we’ve seen big guns like Evan Longoria and Pablo Sandoval go down to injury, among others. Third base has had a degree of volatility that has made it a particularly difficult position to manage.

While I’ve typically been more conservative in May in the past, there are definitely some movers early on. I wouldn’t say this is a list that represents “if the draft were held today” kind of a sentiment, it’s more a melding of injuries, expected future performance, but also performance to date.

Tier one is pretty unsurprising.

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It seems every team I’m running this year has a glaring issue. I have some with issues at catcher, others with some pitching issues, but there’s one in particular where I have just no solution at third base. We’re just a handful of games deep into the season, but there might already be fertile ground for trying to cherry pick brutal starts to the season by few old dogs. Yes, the small sample size applies throughout, but I like these guys as fantasy targets early on since there were enough question marks about age, health, and/or production before the season began which likely gave their current managers pause when they ultimately selected them. Now that the stats count, you might find a second-guesser willing to listen.

Aramis Ramirez

Ramirez has been a slow starter for the last few seasons, but he’s taken it to new levels so far. His .114/.179/.182 line is so bad it makes it hard to see beyond the fact that it’s just 39 plate appearances. He’s hit no home runs, two doubles, and he’s struck out eight times and generally been useless on the real and the fake field. He’s had little fortune from the bouncing ball with a paltry .143 BABIP, his swinging strike rate isn’t completely out of control at 11%, his contact rate is down a tick, but not overwhelmingly so. Aside from having a detached retina or something, I’d fully expect the proverbial pendulum to swing the other direction and he’s either going to start getting a little luckier, he’s going to start driving the ball, or both. It has typically taken him until June to really put things together — and that has been exacerbated in the last couple of seasons — but another week of falling on his face and you might have a real opportunity on your hands.

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Tiers seem to unearth the mighty wrath of fantasy baseball enthusiasts, but since we’ve already seen the third base consensus rankings and my general reactions to them thereafter, it’s time to categorize the gentlemen at the five into tidy little compartments of descending desirability.

As you well know, the tiers are not hard and fast — they change (sometimes dramatically) over the course of the first few months of the season. In fact, there’s been movement in these tiers even before I had a chance to publish them! It’s important to remember that these are not keeper tiers — they simply attempt to arrange rough approximations of value in standard 5×5 leagues as you prepare for what might be your final draft(s).

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We rely on mock drafts to help guide us on trends without necessarily acting as the definitive voice. They’re somewhat like exit polls in politics — we’re just trying to get a pulse on public opinion before we see the actual results, with the exception that in mock baseball drafts, we can’t be entirely assured that a human being actually made the pick.

The problem being of course, is that mock drafts across formats is a lot like exit polls in Wyoming versus New York. So much depends on context. For instance – if you’re targeting Ian Stewart for any particular reason, Yahoo would suggest that you should expect to see him taken in the 20th round. If you trust Mock Draft Central, he is drafted at roughly 442, should anyone ever get to that round awake.

Stewart is an extreme case but it’s worth pointing out the differences in systems. As you well know, how a player is ranked in the draft room almost inevitably impacts where they are ultimately drafted — and some of the differences are so big that it could dramatically alter your draft approach.

Focusing solely on third base — here are some of the players that have a pretty major difference between Mock Draft Central and Yahoo’s current ADP. For the heck of it, I threw in any notable percentage changes in trend at MDC in case recent news has them moving up or down, and I tossed in the rankings of Eric Karabell over at ESPN (those that made his top 100 anyway).

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