Archive for Brandon Phillips

This far out from the start of the season, most of the average draft position data we have available is largely speculative, and understandably so. Still, I find value in analyzing the returns from this uncertain period, as it helps us develop some early trends going into our own draft/auction preparation. Second base is my usual beat here at RotoGraphs, so the other day I found myself examining the NFBC ADP for the position.

There’s other surprises in that data to save for another day, but today I’d like to discuss Jose Peraza’s position as the 12th 2B drafted. Peraza is currently going ahead of Dustin Pedroia, Ben Zobrist, Jonathan Schoop, Devon Travis, Jedd Gyorko, Starlin Castro, Logan Forsythe and Neil Walker. I’m sure we all have our own arguments about which of those eight names should slot in above Peraza, but I’m also fairly confident most of us prefer at least one or two of them to Peraza. Right?

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Check out last month’s rankings here.

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No more bland, rote tiers from this guy! Thanks to the urging of commenter “Urban Shocker,” my eyes are now open to the fun that can be had with ridiculously labeled tiers. You see, I used to just write these monthly second-base columns with boring old numbered tiers. That is, until Urban Shocker convinced me in the comments section of my April rankings to name my tiers from then on.

To be perfectly honest, the task of doing these monthly rankings can get rather stale — for both me and you — as the season wears on. Eventually, it gets to the point where the rankings barely change, because 30-day samples don’t substantially change the way I/we think about a certain player.

Furthermore, there’s only so many ways I can say “Jose Altuve had a good month again,” or “Dee Gordon steals lots of bases,” or “Holy crap, Dan Uggla is so incredibly terrible!” (Actually, never mind on that last one. I will never get sick of making jokes about Uggla, who got paid $13 million last year to post a weighted offense 72% below league-average.)

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*Updated 10/23/2014 with Position Tiers ($5.00 USD).

The 2015 Steamer projections are up on FanGraphs! “Steamer” uses playing time projections from our depth charts, but right now there are important players (Dustin Pedroia and Jon Lester for examples) missing actual projected playing time. I therefore went into mensch-mode and manually updated Plate Appearance and Innings Pitched projections – very manually, but at least somewhat rational. What I did for these players was go into their “Steamer 600” projections and took their HR, R, RBI and SB per Plate Appearance projected rates (W, SV, SO per Inning Pitched for pitchers) and outputted associated counting stats connected to the quantity of Plate Appearances/Innings Pitched.

*To see which players I manipulated, go into the “P” and “H” tabs in the below embedded file: click on the “…” tab to the left of the current depicted tab. I highlighted all names and counting stats per plate appearance or innings pitched that I edited in Yellow so that I can associate some accountability with the end-rankings. I edited a few catchers’ PA totals even though Steamer already had totals for them (Lucroy, Mesoraco, etc.). I also edited Troy Tulowitzki‘s and Carlos Gonzalez’s PA totals, because…well, you know. I could spend all month editing the PA totals, but I’m not that much of a mensch.

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Occasionally, the collective fantasy baseball community reflects on a productive single-season performance and sees a top-10 value that doesn’t really fit the underlying skills. The title of this column belies the vagueness of that opening line, but the upshot is something many people said last year and repeated ad nauseum over the winter. While Brandon Phillips was the sixth-ranked fantasy second baseman in 2013, many people were concerned with the declined skill set that lurked below the surface — a surface that was largely buoyed by his 103 RBI.

In 2013, his ISO dropped to .135, which was a career low. He only stole single-digit bases for the first time since 2005, when he only had nine plate appearances with the Cleveland Indians. He continued swinging at more pitches outside the strike zone, and his swinging-strike rate eclipsed 10.0% for the first time since the 2008 season.

Phillips essentially experienced a drop-off in many major peripheral statistics, and he people suddenly became concerned that he was on the wrong side of 30 and about to experience a precipitous decline. I ranked him as a fourth-tier second baseman coming into the season and noted significant concerns throughout the offseason.

Of course, the overarching point of this article is to illustrate that those concerns were fully justified. Brandon Phillips has been brutal throughout the month of April, and if we pull back the veil and peak at the underlying numbers, the picture becomes even more bleak and troublesome. Things aren’t getting better. They’re getting much worse, and as the title suggests, I’m turning my back and sprinting away from him as much as possible.

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The discussion below does not involve bizarre predictions. In fact, it doesn’t even include bold predictions. Essentially, the discussion is just the opposite of my bold predictions post last week. Or opposite in that I’ll be discussing players I dislike compared to the average as opposed to players I like. As for what ‘the average is,’ I’m using the expert consensus rank (ECR) from FantasyPros.com. If you’re still confused on the premise of this post, maybe the image below will help.

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I did this on Monday as well, but below you’ll find a chart showing how today’s probable starters have fared against hitters of each handedness this year. This chart is something I create in the leaderboard section of the site, and it’s extremely helpful when picking hitters for the day. Unfortunately, the list must be created manually as there isn’t a filter for the day’s probable starters. Because inputting all the names takes a little time, I figure I’ll just do that work for you. After the jump we’ll use the chart to pick some hitters for the day. And we’ll pick a couple of starters, too.

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We’re roughly one month into the season, which means it’s time to update the tiered rankings for each position. Though I wanted to be conservative and not alter too many rankings based on data from only one month, some changes seemed warranted.

Here are the tiers:

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Breaking news out of Cincinnati: Joey Votto is awesome. He was awesome in each of his four full seasons leading up to 2012. He was awesome before he injured his knee last year, taking a ridiculous .354/.476/.639 line into the June 30 game in San Francisco that saw him leave after five innings due to the injury. He was a different kind of awesome in 25 September games after returning from surgery, failing to hit a homer but still managing to compile a .316/.505/.421 line. That’s not a typo; Votto had 105 September plate appearances, and despite being on the shelf for two months, he reached 57 times.

I’ll take your standard disclaimers about small sample size and varying September competition and I will reply with, simply, Joey Votto is awesome. That’s not to say he’s infallible, because there’s a conversation to be had about the fact that he never did hit another homer after taking Scott Diamond deep on June 24, which led to his somewhat disappointing total of 14 on the season. That’s fair, but his powerless September showed that he’s more than capable of being a very dangerous hitter even if he’s not going deep; that is, even if he never matches his career-high mark of 37 from 2010, he’s still going to be contributing in the other main offensive categories. It would sure be nice to see him showing some of that past power in the spring, now that he’s so much further from surgery, but at a first base position that is no longer as strong as it used to be, Votto belongs in an elite trio along with Albert Pujols & Prince Fielder. Read the rest of this entry »

So we’ve done a pretty thorough bludgeoning of the recent reader mock draft, looking at almost every round except for the fliers, and covering several of the positions along the way as well. Second base has me particularly concerned headed into 2012, so let’s break down how the readers handled the challenge of staffing their squads at that position.

The following chart is pretty self explanatory – where the player was selected in the reader mock, what their average draft position is over at Mock Draft Central, and the difference between the two to the right:

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Perhaps to my detriment, I read the comments on my posts. I feel it keeps me on my toes and makes me a better analyst, but you might just call it some sort of sadomasochism (especially with some comments). In any case, a comment on a shortstop rankings post engendered this Jimmy Rollins post, so it can’t all be bad. Now some comments on my latest second base rankings post have me wanting to revisit a second baseman and his place in the rankings so far this season.

Some of the sentiment seems that Martin Prado should be in the first tier of second basemen. At first blush, this doesn’t pass the sniff test for me. For example, Brandon Phillips beats Prado in every traditional fantasy category but RBI (by about ten) and batting average (by about 25 points). Even going forward, you’d expect Phillips to have more power and speed, so this is no fluke thing.

Another second baseman mentioned was Ben Zobrist. The difference between Prado (top of fourth tier) and Zobrist at the bottom of the second tier is actually much closer than it might appear. The tier in between (with Brian Roberts, Chase Utley, and Chone Figgins) was titled “Will They Ever Get it Together” for a reason. Obviously, those guys – at their peak – offer more upside than Prado in fantasy baseball. They are also performing at levels that are far from their peaks this year, but that upside is still remains. Prado will never hit 30 home runs, nor will he steal more than 30. Those are fantasy numbers worth pursuing.

But I digress. Back to Zobrist. It doesn’t look like Zobrist’s power is on its way back, and Prado doubles him in the home run category, but Zobrist still gets on base at almost exactly the same rate if OBP is a fantasy category for you, and he steals many more bags than Prado. Unfortunately for me, the batting average is just not there for Zobrist, as his .251 average is not even projected to improve by much (.291 BABIP currently, .253 ZiPs RoS batting average projection). Thusly, Prado also beats Zobrist in runs by a hefty margin. Prado should probably be above Zobrist in the rankings it seems.

It is strange that a man with a .094 ISO in the minor leagues has put up an ever-improving ISO in the major leagues (.155 overall, .171 this yer), but we have to go with what he’s currently doing, especially since that improved ISO has now come in 1416 plate appearances. Perhaps the added juice on the pitches coming in is aiding the power of a line-drive hitter, or perhaps it’s just been a superlative development process. Prado is, at least, hitting the ball in the air a little more in the major leagues. His last two stops in the minors produced 27.3% and 23.8% flyball rates respectively, compared to 34.1% overall in the major leagues. In either case, his slightly-above-average power plays very well at second base, a tough position.

While Prado probably won’t hit 20 home runs, or steal ten bases, or be in the top three at his position in any category but batting average, he provides value in all five fantasy categories and is, in all likelihood, a top second-tier fantasy option at second base. Given all the qualifiers in that last sentence, perhaps I can be forgiven for not putting him in the top tier among players that do show great power and speed. But he should have been in the second.