Archive for Keon Broxton

In my most recent post, I lamented that I waited too long to take Greg Allen in my TGFBI draft, even though his ADP is well outside the top 300. It was as crushing a blow as one can have in Round 18 of a 15-team draft, as players with the potential to steal 20-plus bases are hard to come by, even in the earlier rounds. THE BAT projects 22 players to steal at least 20 bases this season, and Steamer projects only 19 players to reach that threshold. (ATC is more optimistic, admitting 29 players into the 20-plus projected steals club.)

Worse yet, a number of those players are across-the-board contributors (most notably Mookie Betts, Jose Ramirez, Ronald Acuna Jr., Trea Turner and Francisco Lindor) who will be long gone before the time you realize you need to catch up on steals. The reality is that it’s hard to make up for lost ground in stolen bases in the final rounds of your drafts, but that’s precisely the time you can toss up a Hail Mary. There are a handful of players who not only could give you 15 steals, but some moderate power as well, making it more worth your while to target them.
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Playing time can make or break a baseball player’s fantasy value. An elite player may not finish above replacement level if he suffers an injury and plays only half the season, and a lackluster player could finish above replacement level simply by playing every single day. This is all intuitive, and the fantasy community generally approaches these kinds of things rationally. In other words, most players are appropriately valued, outside of the market inefficiencies that inevitably warp player values.

One-dimensional speedsters — dudes who steal a bunch of bases and do little else — are much harder to peg. Their value is tied up primarily in one category, as stolen bases (SBs) do not directly correlate with other categories the way home runs would with runs and RBI, for example. The issue becomes all the more confounding when one considers the contemporaneous scarcity of SBs relative to home runs. There’s more to value than just SBs and plate appearances (PAs), but the fact of the matter is the two statistics by themselves correlate very strongly with a player’s end-of-season (EOS) value (which, here, are informed by Razzball’s Player Rater).

In the last five years, baseball has seen 75 player-seasons of 30-plus SBs — 15 steals a year on average, a trend that didn’t fundamentally change in 2016 (although that doesn’t mean SBs aren’t scarce). A simple linear regression of SBs and PAs, the latter of which serves as a proxy for other counting stats such as runs and RBI, against EOS value produces a remarkable 0.71 adjusted R²:

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I’m always reluctant to discuss a player whom we have recently featured at FanGraphs. Indeed, Rylan Edwards noted that, unlike swimming, Keon Broxton is not boring. Jeff Sullivan also recently covered Keon Broxton, ushering everyone on board his respective bandwagon (Broxton’s, not Sullivan’s). It’s a good feature, and its biggest takeaway is the following: Keon Broxton is hitting the ball pretty damn hard.

Broxton has slipped a bit — he no longer holds the top spot, ceding it to Nelson Cruz, Giancarlo Stanton, and some kid named Gary Sanchez. Stanton hasn’t played in two-plus weeks, so it stands to reason that Broxton’s exit velocity has slipped in the last week. That’s fine. As is, it’s still elite.

Except, woah, the strikeouts. Right? That’s alarming. It’s not so alarming that it’s a dealbreaker. Sullivan even brought up the idea of Broxton being a center-fielding Chris Carter. For a team like the Milwaukee Brewers, that would work just fine.

It’s the composition of the strikeouts — in other words, the way Broxton gets to those strikeouts — that kind of blows my mind.

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Last week, I wrote about two players straddling the borderline between deep and standard league relevance. But my beat is the Deep League Waiver Wire. So this week we take a look at one Mr. Keon Broxton and how he can address your need for speed and perhaps even mix in a little power while he’s at it.

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