Archive for Jose Bautista

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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Each year, there’s always one pick in the draft that always seems to cause the biggest stir amongst the fantasy community and leads to the greatest number of emails seeking added opinions.  It used to be closer to the tail end of the first round when an owner was deciding between whichever offensive treat was left or the number one overall starting pitcher.  This year, I’ve received a number of emails from people with the 4th pick.  People with the 8th and 9th picks are rolling their eyes right now, but truly, the 4th pick can cause quite the conundrum.

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As you well know by now, some dutiful readers of RotoGraphs took it upon themselves to virtually duke it out in an online mock draft, putting to test what we have repeatedly analyzed in the past several weeks — that is, just exactly where should we expect some of our favorite players to be taken?

There is of course a great deal of risk in relying solely on one source for your average draft positions, and while the draft was conducted in Mock Draft Central, having some well informed individuals making the selections instead of what could be third graders and well trained monkeys for all we know, provides us with a nice window for analysis.

For today, third base will be under the microscope.

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Platoon.  As a movie — phenomenal.  But in fantasy baseball, it’s a dirty word.  No one goes into their draft hoping to walk away with a bunch of part-time players, so when doing your prep work, it’s always important to know which situations out there may cause playing time issues throughout the season. In some case, a player may shine enough to take over the position entirely, but in many cases, the manager feels better served by playing matchups, riding the hot bat and using a committee approach to get the most productivity out of a particular spot.  The Blue Jays left field situation appears to be one of those cases. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve probably noticed by now that some of the gentlemen of Rotographs got together in their virtual forum to pull off a 12-team keeper draft over the weekend. Due to other obligations, the lists of participating managers didn’t include yours truly, so hopefully that will give me a bit more objectivity as I make a few observations.

I’ve been the resident third base scribe for the past year, so I’ll dedicate this short post to some of the more interesting picks involving the hot corner.

It didn’t take long for the debate to get brewing as Evan Longoria was selected as the overall #4 pick followed by Jose Bautista, overall #6. Longoria, coming off an injury-shortened season had an usually low batting average at .244, no doubt dragged down by miserable fortune (.239 BABIP). He has been a pretty remarkably consistent player, demonstrating the ability to hit for good average with a take-it-to-the-bank 30 HR’s and 100 RBI profile, assuming you toss out his career low 11% HR/FB from 2010. Bill James currently projects a .275/.370/.535, 35 HR, 116 RBI, 101 run season for Longoria, which probably earns him a #4 overall slot.

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I have a bit of an undesirable task of trying to make some kind of sense out of the third base mess from the past season. On the one hand, we have guys like Ryan Zimmerman and David Wright who are typically top shelf third basemen heading into the season. However, if you’ve looked over the FVARz database, you’ll notice their actual fantasy value relative to on-field performance was keeping company with Danny Valencia and Daniel Murphy. So what a top tier at third base for keeper value looks like is probably open to a great deal of debate.

Fortunately, what’s not debatable is who leads off the first tier, and that’s quite obviously Jose Bautista – who ranks a country mile (or should I say country click to honor our friends to the North) ahead of the rest of the pack. The big question after Bautista’s breakout 2010 is what he would provide as an encore, and to my surprise, he was every bit as good in 2011 (in fact, he was better if you count WAR at night to put you to sleep like I do). Bautista improved his batting average, his walk rate, and lowered his strikeout rate and while he was a little dinged up, he still managed to be the only player to hit better than .300, record 40 or more home runs and drive in and score more than 100 runs. He is one of the no-doubters in terms of keepers, certainly considering the dearth of talent at third base.

And now it gets interesting.

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Sniff, sniff… the last full month of the season, and the final installment of the updated in-season rankings is upon us. Third base has been a bit of a roller-coaster this season, starting out devoid of virtually any worthwhile candidates to plug in at the hot corner until today, when many players have resurrected their seasons and others have quite frankly resuscitated their entire careers. It’s not the deepest position to be sure, but it’s not quite the mess that it started out to be.

I want to be clear that this is not third base rankings should a draft be held today for 2012. This is a reflection of the slow, methodical meander which is a 162 game baseball season and where these gentlemen currently belong, give or take a few slots depending on your format.

Tier 1

Jose Bautista

There’s simply little to substantiate Bautista having room up here in the penthouse. His wOBA is .448 — the next closest is Aramis Ramirez at .375 (edit – Alex Gordon at .382). He hit as many home runs in July and August as Alex Rodriguez has hit all season. You could come up with dozens of these examples, but I’ll spare you.

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The trading deadline is behind us and we’re knocking on the door of the stretch run. Somehow, it’s already August. And it was just a few short months ago that Evan Longoria was the consensus #1 third baseman and just a couple months ago that Aramis Ramirez appeared to have lost his eyesight. It’s been said more than once on this platform that the one constant is change, so with that in mind, I give you the updated third base rankings for August.

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There’s a new development at third base as we head into the All-Star Break: optimism. Third base surely isn’t considered a deep position but there have been some recent performances that make third base not such a hold-your-nose proposition as it used to be. We have had several third basemen come off the disabled list recently as well as a number of guys sustaining performance that smelled a little fishy just a month ago. On to the rankings!

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The All-Star Game voting discussion is topical in real life, so why not talk about it in fantasy?  I’m of the philosophy that All Star Games should be about the best players, not just the players off to a hot start over the first few months.  In this case, I’ll define “best player” as the players that offered the most production over the past calendar year (i.e. June 2010 through May 2011).  Below, the point values are FanGraphs Points, and the $ shown are the player’s average cost.  Without further delay, here are your American League (fantasy) All-Stars!

Catcher: Victor Martinez (746.5 pts, .368 wOBA, $25)
Alternates: Carlos Santana (571 pts, .352 wOBA, $31) and Mike Napoli (565 pts, .343 wOBA, $12)

Now primarily a DH, Martinez continues to be an excellent fantasy producer.  The guy can hit, and with catcher eligibility he’s just a terrific player–probably more so in fantasy than in real life, given his fielding issues.  Santana is back after missing time with injury, and has largely picked up where he left off last year.  Napoli might surprise some folks, but he got a lot of playing time after the first few months last year and produced very well.  If only he could actually catch, he’d get more PT…

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