Archive for Emilio Bonifacio

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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I covered matchups last week for some players who run often and aren’t full-timers but aren’t purely pinch runners. For fantasy baseball players who are lagging in the SB category but could gain substantial ground in it in the season’s final few weeks, such possibilities may be appealing. The return on this kind of investment is probably not great, as mentioned, but the forecasts can be pretty simple. Again, the greater challenge for a batter is to reach base, not to steal one.

First, there might be some players in your league’s free-agent pool who are more appealing than the streaming plays, however. (Ownership percentages are in parentheses.)

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We’re a month through the season, and fantasy owners are already jumping to huge conclusions regarding the 2014 season. These tiered rankings attempt to capture the production from the first month of the season, moving some players up and down where I felt it was necessary, but largely, I attempted to refrain from getting too caught up in the ebbs and flows of single-month performance. There are five months remaining in the 2014 season. Lots will change, and I didn’t want to make the tiered rankings a simple “who is performing well right now,” as that’s not overly useful.

Anyway, here we go.

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On Mondays during the season, I generally focus on the second base position, whether that’s highlighting a specific player or breaking down my tiered rankings for the position. The tiered rankings ran last week and it’s too early in the season to meaningfully analyze individual player performance; however, I have noticed a couple things I wanted to touch on as we begin the second week of the season.

One of the more interesting aspects of the 2013 fantasy baseball season was the realization that the second base position was actually quite bad. It didn’t dip below the anemic level of shortstops, but its collective .305 wOBA wasn’t far behind and was worse than the league-average catcher. When discussing position scarcity and the shortstop position, fantasy owners should lump second base into the same group. In deeper leagues, the second base position can get ugly rather quickly.

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Your opinions of Dayton Moore and Ned Yost aside, one of the biggest problems with the Kansas City Royals over the last few years has been that glaring hole at second base. While waiting for prospect Johnny Giavotella to develop, they’ve tried to plug the hole with names like Chris Getz and Yuniesky Betancourt and surprisingly (insert sarcastic eye roll here), it just hasn’t worked. Betancourt is usually capable of playing well for about a month, though the 30 days aren’t necessarily right in a row, Getz is incapable of staying healthy, and Johnny G just hasn’t developed past being a mediocre fielder and all-around lousy hitter at the major league level. When the prospect of making a run at the playoffs in 2013 became more than just a pipe dream, the team made a few minor deals to tweak the roster, one of which was bringing in an underachieving Emilio Bonifacio from Toronto to fill a super-utility role. There was nothing terribly exciting about the move at first and the Royals just seemed to be spinning their wheels, but once they finally handed the second base job over to the diminutive speedster full-time, Bonifacio took off and literally ran away with the job. Read the rest of this entry »

This is it. We’re getting real close to the end here. August is nearly finished and then we’re into the home stretch. The waiver wire will start to fill up a little more once we hit September and MLB rosters expand, but for right now it’s a matter of sifting through the rubble and seeing if there’s anyone out there who can help you in some way. There’s really no more time to sit and wait for someone to turn things around. They’re either producing or they’re not and if they aren’t, you need to make a switch fast. Time is running out. Maybe these two can be of some help… Read the rest of this entry »

Not a whole lot of doubt as to who we’ll be seeing in the Toronto outfield, is there? Melky Cabrera, Colby Rasmus, & Jose Bautista are the pretty obvious starting trio — with one potentially intriguing twist that we’ll get to in a second. Read the rest of this entry »

A week from tomorrow, the season officially begins. It will begin and end while I’m likely still asleep as first pitch is 3:10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, but it will be fun to awaken to statistics that actually matter.

But with still a week to go, things can go right and wrong in a hurry, and while the news below may not be anything new to you, dedicated sports reader, it affects the third base landscape and thus I present it to you with my brief commentary.

Miguel Cabrera has indeed been playing third base despite the consensus opinion that it may very well make Doug Fister have a hissy fit. On Monday, Cabrera decided to try and field a hot grounder off the bat of Hunter Pence not with his glove, but with his face. The video is worth watching if only to see Max Scherzer get a bona fide case of the heebee-jeebees upon seeing the wound.

The news this morning is he has a small fracture under the eye and he received several stitches and will be re-evaluated in a week. At first blush, I can’t see this derailing the third base experiment heading into the season. But, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again here – he does not qualify at third base yet – and strange things can happen in Spring Training. Another liner off the noodle, and perhaps the Tigers decide to protect their slugger and let him DH the majority of the time? If you draft him as your every day third baseman and he doesn’t gain eligibility until June, you’re probably going to grow weary of having to watch Josh Donaldson man third for two months.

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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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Monday featured the third base version of the ongoing consensus rankings project and the results actually did reveal a pretty good amount of consensus from our four great minds, but there were some details and departures in opinions worth pointing out.

First of all, and this was teased out in the comments, it’s fairly likely we’re going to see names like Miguel Cabrera, Hanley Ramirez, and Mark Trumbo on the list of the third base eligible come May (for most league formats, probably much earlier). In the case of the former two, it would shake up the rankings in the top five considerably, and there’s a good chance many of you are targeting Cabrera as the overall #1 pick given his new digs in the infield.

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