Archive for John Jaso

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.

Fresh off 98 wins and a third consecutive post-season appearance, the Pirates enter 2016 with an elite outfield and one of baseball’s preeminent pitch framers behind the dish. But the infield, like the Allegheny that flows just beyond PNC’s walls, is both murky and shallow.

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It’s not unusual to find several unexpected names among the top fantasy producers at a position nearly a quarter of the way into a particular season. Because they’re unforeseen, they aren’t necessarily among your league’s most owned players.

At some point, though, some antsy owner will have begun to question his loyalty to a player he drafted when the season-to-date performance of a player he didn’t is still rated higher in his league’s free-agent list. Even though at some point in the near future, regression to the means of both players would seem likelier than not to benefit him, ignoring signs of changes in their baseline performance and reliability.

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Joe Mauer just hit the 7-day concussion DL, joining the likes of Alex Avila, John Jaso, Miguel Montero, and even Carlos Corporan as the list of injured catchers grows in seemingly exponential fashion. With a little more than a month to go in roto league and the playoffs coming in head to head play, you’re going to need to start filling in the blanks on your roster in order to press ahead and try to win your league. There’s probably not a whole heck of a lot left sitting on your waiver wire and what’s there probably doesn’t conjure up images of champagne corks popping and ticker-tape parades. But you need to make a move. You can’t go without a catcher even though the improvement you get might not be all that much. But at this point in time, something is better than nothing, so here are a few names to consider… Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve seen the news no doubt. The Mariners made, in language that I would use with my three year old when he smears macaroni and cheese goo all over my wool work pants, “a bad choice.” They jettisoned John Jaso and brought in Ryan Langerhans Mike Michael Morse. The fantasy impact has already been documented in these Rotographing pages. But I’d like to expand a little on Jaso.

First of all, the title has two meanings. One real, one fake (but alas, real to us nerds). It’s not breaking news to tell you that John Jaso was unappreciated in Seattle. He’s now going to a place where, if you believe the lip service, he’s going to be appreciated. One would have to assume that appreciation, coupled with expected on-field performance, will result in playing time. So John Jaso is freed from the Eric Wedge shackles, and chances are he’s just barely north of free in your fantasy leagues. For these two reasons, you should sit up a little more straight in your chair and push your glasses up off the end of your nose.

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On Wednesday evening, Oakland, Seattle, & Washington came together for a three-way trade that seems like it could be a win for all parties involved. That’s perhaps intentionally misleading – the Mariners are getting killed on this trade, and rightfully so – but this is RotoGraphs, and so we need to look at this deal with an eye on fantasy. Seen in that light, all of the moving pieces here leave us with a few players who might get a slight boost in their fantasy value. Read the rest of this entry »

After seven seasons spent meticulously climbing the Tampa organizational ladder, John Jaso finally got his first chance to play regularly in the bigs in 2010, and the then-26-year-old rookie catcher quickly made a splash. A .372 OBP! A 14.6% walk percentage! The luck to be with an organization that appreciated those numbers, enough to hit him leadoff 45 times!

That made Jaso a trendy fantasy sleeper pick headed into 2011, and… *thud*. That OBP dropped all the way to .298, thanks in no small part to a BB% that fell five points and a K% that rose nearly four, and it’s not like we weren’t already seeing this declining performance before he missed six weeks late in the season with an oblique injury. Oh, and to top it all off: in November, he was traded to Seattle for an alleged felon. Coming off a poor year, headed to a bad team in a ballpark that kills offense, and with competition from Miguel Olivo & Jesus Montero to deal with, Jaso was a complete afterthought headed into 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

During the spring of 2011, John Jaso was near the top of a number of sleeper lists for fantasy catchers. His outstanding walk rate won him a place both in the heart of Rays manager Joe Maddon and at the top of the Tampa lineup in 2010. The general consensus was that this potential late-round selection was going to be a beast in the ways on-base percentage, runs scored and maybe even swipe a few more bases than the average backstop. But after posting a .224/.296/.449 slash line with a barely-average 5.8-percent walk rate during the first month of the 2011 season, as well as showing almost no improvement the month after, the experiment quickly came to an end. It was back to the bottom of the order and on several occasions, the bench. Read the rest of this entry »

Even though the positional rankings aren;t being updated monthly, the tiers are, so let’s take a look at some of the movement amongst the catchers.  We saw a few things happen with the May tiers but I held back any extreme movement because of sample sizes and questions surrounding performance sustainability.  This month, guys are moving… Read the rest of this entry »

Talk about your run of bad luck…

Wilson Ramos signs with the Twins, forever to be blocked from a starting gig with Joe Mauer already in-house.  He gets traded to the Nationals who then decide that they’d rather have a marquee name like Ivan Rodriguez behind the plate.  So Ramos bides his time, earns more and more PT as the season progresses, and heads into the offseason, knowing that he will be the full-time catcher in 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

In contrast to what we did last season, this year we’re doing monthly updates for our positional rankings as laid out by Eno Sarris and his minions.  In addition to that, we’re doing our monthly positional tier updates as well which should aid you in your waiver pick-ups and trade negotiations when you’re comparing values.  The rankings can be found over here and below is how I see them by tier… Read the rest of this entry »