Archive for jonathan schoop

Wilmer Difo seems to be taking the Daniel Murphy trade in stride.

He received starts at second base in the first two games of the post-Murphy era in D.C., and he went 3 for 8 with each hit being for extra bases. (He also started for a third straight day on Thursday, though as of this writing, he is taking an 0-fer.) Difo has speed and can spray line drives, but power has not shown up as a key part of his skill set over his time in the majors. The flyball revolution is not for everyone, and Davey Martinez made sure to remind his 26-year-old infielder of that.
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Jonathan Schoop is having one heck of a season, with a breakout that’s produced some gaudy numbers. He’s hitting over .300, he’s already hit 21 bombs, he’s tied for 8th in the league in RBI with 70 — basically, he’s doing everything you want as a fantasy owner, except stealing bases. It’s no surprise that he’s currently the No. 6 second baseman in standard leagues, even in a year that’s seen incredible production at the keystone.

With a career .192 isolated power, the 25-year-old already had good power production in the majors, but this year he’s upped that mark to a .246 ISO, supplementing his 21 homers with 26 doubles. Even more impressively, Schoop is hitting .307, a significant jump from his .261 career average.

Of course, with marked improvements like this come questions of sustainability, and justifiably so. With this in mind, let’s try and figure out what to expect from young Mr. Schoop moving forward.

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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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The Baltimore infield gave us quite a few fantasy relevant options last year. They had a player finish inside the top 12 at every position other than second base, and Chris Davis emerged as a complete stud. Their four fantasy relevant guys will return to their positions, but there are some questions about whether they’ll be able to repeat their value from last year.

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