We are now three full weeks into the season, and managers are starting to respond to players’ hot and cold starts. That gives the fantasy owners of players like Brian Dozier, Kyle Schwarber, and Ender Inciarte something more to think about, and owners of Yasmani Grandal and Manuel Margot something to feel good about.
Here are the lineup and batting order trends of note for each of the 15 teams in the senior circuit.
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Even if you don’t own a turntable, it’s time to shop for some 33s.
Each Thursday, I’ll be recommending hitters to pick up who are owned in 33 percent of leagues or fewer on CBSSports.com and Fantrax. I’ve chosen to use these sites’ ownership rates as a guide, as they tend to be higher than those on ESPN or Yahoo. If I were to use the latter two sites as a guide for identifying players who are available in at least two-thirds of leagues, in reality, some of those players would be unavailable to many owners who play on CBS and Fantrax.
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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.)
It was a good year to be a Howie Kendrick owner. The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim second baseman hit for a quality batting average (.293), as usual. That rate stat has kind of come to define him, though. The fact that he accumulated a career-high 617 plate appearances in 2014 is basically why he delighted fantasy baseball players as the sixth-most valuable man at the keystone sack. He belted only seven home runs and stole a modest 14 bases, but those sums and the playing time resulted in 85 runs scored and a career-high-tying 75 RBIs. Kendrick was, practically, an across-the-board money earner, and that was good enough for him to turn a tidy profit for his owners in most leagues.
Mixed-leagued earnings of nearly $20 and a spot in the top six at any position in a particular campaign don’t mean that a player is one of the best options at that position, of course. Kendrick’s 2014 value was a byproduct of auxiliary attrition coupled with his somewhat greater reliability than normal. The depth, perhaps growing, at second base should plant the Halos’ hard hitter right back into the mix of solid middle-infield options, as the RotoGraphs consensus pegged him this past March, next draft season. The 31-year-old has a tried and true skill set, but it’s limited and in decline.
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.
If Howie Kendrick is anything, he’s a case study for how batting average doesn’t really tell the entire story. Here’s his batting average over the last five years:
Pretty static, right? A few bloops here & there and a little bit of BABIP luck or not slightly changes the numbers, but Kendrick has been essentially the exact same guy for five years in a row, if you only worry about batting average.
Now let’s look at that same chart, but with wOBA included: Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re in a league that allows daily roster adjustments, whether it’s head to head or roto, then streaming is probably what you’re all about here at the end. With four more days of games, every little bit helps and picking up the right player could mean the difference between a win and a “if only I had another week to play.” While Mike Podhorzer covers the recommended streamer candidates for pitchers over the next two days, I’ll throw you a few hitters who could give you that one final push. Some may be available, some might not, but all are swinging a hot bat right now and if you can use them…use them. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week I wrote about hitters who might be undervalued because of poor recent performance that was being caused by something other than a decrease in skill. Today I’d like to take a quick look at the pitchers whose xFIPs were the farthest below their ERAs over the last thirty days. The idea again is that recent performance seems to be weighted too heavily in pricing, and these guys might have a little extra value in the immediate future. Read the rest of this entry »
In ESPN leagues, the top three performers at second base shouldn’t surprise anyone. Dustin Pedroia, Jason Kipnis and Robinson Cano were expected to be the top three or four fantasy options at the position, and although each of them have experienced some hiccups in different ways, they’re still producing better than their counterparts.
Who’s fourth, though?
Despite his .383 wOBA and 148 wRC+, it’s not Matt Carpenter. Despite his double-digit home runs and 56 RBI, it’s not Brandon Phillips. The fourth-best fantasy second baseman this year has been 29-year-old Howie Kendrick.
With two months under our collective belts in the fantasy baseball season, guys are really starting to move in the rankings. Some slow beginnings have lingered longer than expected, and some scorching starts have surprisingly possessed staying power. As with most rankings lists, there will be some (read: a lot) of disagreement, so without any further ado, here are the tiers: