Archive for Jean Segura

I find early season performances fascinating (or perhaps it’s our responses to these performances that’s fascinating.) With every owner competitive and paying attention in April – maybe for the only time all year – league wide perception of talent levels can be unrealistically altered. For example, Trevor Story hits 7 home runs in his first 8 games, then precedes to hit .200 over his next 60 plate appearances. That’s about as stark a difference as you can find in a player’s performances this early in the season. Given this, how do your league-mates value him? My wager is that they value him more as the 7 HR guy that the .200 hitter, but that’s just a guess. Would the view of Story be different if those 7 HR in 8 games occurred in July?

This is all hypothetical conjecture on my part, but it does help to show the crazy swings in performance that occur over small samples. If a player (especially a prospect) has a hot start, their trade value can be boosted by that helium all year. However, some hot starts still fall through the cracks, and many players who have performed well can still be bought relatively cheaply. Hopefully this will help you consider buying some of the players who’ve had great starts to 2016. Some of them appear to have made core improvements thus far.

One of the updates I run weekly is to look at the plate discipline and batted ball leaderboards here on Fangraphs. I look for players who are swinging less than last year, while also making more contact. Eno covered some of this in his post last week, but this early in the season it can be difficult to have enough data to make any concrete conclusions about player performances. A disclaimer – at the time I wrote this I didn’t realize how similar it was to Eno’s analysis. His piece goes into more detail and you should definitely read it.

The general premise: I want to find players who are being more patient than last year, but are also making contact at a higher rate. I also track changes in hard hit percentage, but admit that I don’t focus on this nearly as much. I plan to start incorporating exit velocity and launch angle, but have not been able to at this point. This is far from a full proof method or some statistical wizardry, but it’s a quick sniff test. Given that swing% becomes reliable around 50 PAs, and contact rate around 100 PAs, I would put a little more weight on those numbers at this time. I use this to help me bid in the early season Ottoneu FA auctions, or to help target players in trades. The last thing I want to do is waste precious dollars or trade assets on what is likely to be a mirage. (This is probably more important in Ottoneu than other formats where cap penalties can hamstring you if you aren’t careful). Anyways, here’s the list of all players swinging less, making more contact, and hitting the ball with a higher hard hit frequency in 2016. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve started our annual Depth Chart Discussions, re-branded as Playing Time Battles for 2016. You can catch up on every team we’ve covered in the Playing Time Battles Summary post or following along using the Depth Chart Discussions tag.

The big news in Arizona this offseason was on the pitching side, which Mike Podhorzer broke down in detail on Wednesday. While the team’s splashy moves regarded the acquisitions of big arms Zack Greinke and Shelby Miller, there’s plenty to talk about on the offensive side as well.

Saturday’s head-scratching trade brought in Jean Segura from the Brewers, in an effort to provide “a little bit more offense” to the middle infield, according to general manager Dave Stewart. That’s an awfully strange statement to make about a guy with a .615 on-base plus slugging over his last two full seasons.

MIDDLE INFIELD

For reasons I don’t claim to understand, Arizona paid an unreasonably high price for Segura, an okay defensive shortstop who — despite Dave Stewart’s comments — is not a good major-league hitter. Segura was great with the stick in April (.985 OPS) and May (.911 OPS) of 2013, but objectively terrible ever since. In his following 16 months of major-league action, he produced just two more months of weighted offense above league-average.

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As I write this, Mike Trout is sporting a .556 batting average in Spring Training. I also had the pleasure of drafting him first overall in my NFBC Draft Champions league. To celebrate his feat and my luck, I am shooting for at least five of nine of the following bold predictions.

Here goes (extra ballsy right from the start):

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Our Mock Draft is complete.

Team Schwartz/rounds drafted:

C: Travis d’Arnaud/17 1B: Victor Martinez/4 2B: Arismendy Alcantara/18 3B: Josh Donaldson/3 SS: Hanley Ramirez/2 MI: Jean Segura/19 CI: Prince Fielder/6 OF: Mike Trout/1; Mookie Betts/7; Ryan Zimmerman/10; A.J. Pollock/14; Steven Souza/20; Carl Crawford/24 U: Pedro Alvarez/21

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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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Jean Segura wasn’t the best fantasy baseball player in 2013. He might not have even been the best shortstop for fantasy teams this year. But given the context of projections with the overall production, Segura pretty much destroyed any reasonable expectation from the preseason.

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The only thing Jean Segura and Mike Moustakas have in common is that they’re both professional baseball players and they happen to be featured in the title of this post. Other than that, their on-field performances are in different area codes. Different time zones. Galaxies even.

Obviously, Segura has been holy hell awesome and Moustakas has been my God-awful. But we’re getting to a point in the season now where a couple weeks of trending in either direction can be masked pretty well by their current accumulation of at bats. Perhaps for good reason — it keeps the smaller sample monster at bay. Regardless, there are some recent developments with these two that merit attention.

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Whatever happened to the power of positive thinking? Obviously it’s a lost art form when you’re talking about a certain percentage of fantasy baseballers. If you recall a Kicking Rocks piece I did  during the spring called Draft Characters, you’ll remember the outline I provided of the different types of people you’ll likely face in the war room on Draft Day. The first “person” discussed was the Know-It-All — the guy loaded with information and always willing to endow you with his wisdom. Well, what I didn’t tell you is what happens to this person once the season begins. The best way to describe it is to equate him to a petulant child who just learned the word ‘no.’ No player you like, does he like. No trade that you make, would he make, and heaven forbid you play with him in a league where you vote on trades. The transformation takes place shortly after the start of the season and your league know-it-all sadly becomes The Naysayer. Read the rest of this entry »

The Milwaukee Brewers return an offense that scored the third-most runs in Major League Baseball. Their team .329 wOBA ranked second in the National League behind the Colorado Rockies, their 202 home runs topped in the NL, and their 158 stolen bases were the best in baseball last season.

Combine that prolific offense with minimal personnel turnover, and it’s not difficult to see why the Brewers have very few positional battles in camp this spring. That extends to the infield, which has entrenched starters around the diamond. A preseason injury to Corey Hart throws a wrench into the depth chart to begin the year, but he’s only expected to miss approximately a month. After his return, the Brewers will feature the same infield they trotted out throughout the final two months last season.

Missing Opening Day is nothing new for Corey Hart, who will miss the start of the season for the third time in the past four years. His absence creates a void at first base for the Brewers for the first month, and perhaps longer. The organization wants to focus on internal options this spring, and the leading candidates for playing time at first base with Hart on the DL appear to be veteran Alex Gonzalez and 26-year-old Taylor Green.

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As you are no doubt aware, a venerable group of fantasy baseball zealots enthusiasts participated recently in the self-titled Ridiculously Early Mock Draft, selecting a range of players to both laud and lambaste by you all. We presented you with the first five rounds last week, and I subsequently looked at the potential for third baseman among (and omitted from) that group. Now that we have rounds six through ten, I’ll present to you a similar analysis of their swifter counterparts to the left, the shortstops.

But first, the official list:

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