Kevin Youkilis has had himself quite a start to the 2013 season. After flirting with the abyss and then teasing us with a return to relevance in Chicago, Youkilis has been hitting the snot out of the ball for the New York Yankees, and it couldn’t be at a better time for the club. With injuries up and down the lineup, the Yankees are 3-4 and without Youkilis in the middle of that order, it could look a lot uglier.
The Yankee lineup is a bit of a mess. And that’s being nice. With Mark Teixeira, Curtis Granderson and Alex Rodriguez all ailing, guys like Juan Rivera and Brennan Boesch will start the season in a lineup that is usually one of the most formidable in the league. With Travis Hafner and Chris Stewart also figuring to see regular at-bats, this lineup is anything but formidable.
But this post is just about the infield, not the whole lineup.
Let’s start with the Teixeira injury. Teixeira was originally reported to be out with a strained wrist injury until sometime between the first and middle of May. But it now appears that Teixeira has a partially torn tendon sheath. This is the same injury Jose Bautista had last year that ended his season early. Teixeira’s injury is supposedly a bit different in that the tendon under the sheath is stable whereas Bautista had an unstable tendon, which is the reason Bautista’s injury required season-ending surgery.
If we could be sure Teixeira would be back sometime in May, he might still be worth drafting as your corner infielder. But with so much uncertainty about the timeline after this latest development concerning his injury, there’s probably too much risk to take on. However, if you play in a league with more than one DL slot, he might be worth stashing if he falls to the last couple rounds of your draft.
It was largely a forgettable season for Kevin Youkilis in 2012, and certainly forgettable for fantasy owners who expected anything close to his typical performance. He was frequently injured, run out of Boston by a rookie, and ultimately never resembled the Youkilis of old. Looking at his end of season value, Zach Sanders puts him basically at replacement level with a zero dollar value, and ranked 36th overall. Yeeks.
What went wrong? Pretty much everything.
Trading deadlines loom across most of fantasy baseball, and let’s just assume your squad is still sniffing contention — or better yet, looking to pull away from the pack. Should third base be one of your glaring problems over these last seven weeks of baseball, I’ve got a few ideas for you. These are almost exclusively ideas for standard 5×5 leagues that are non-keepers.
We’ve posted several articles hypothesizing whether certain players might be had on the cheap or if you might be able to sell high on others. Typically, comments are mixed inasmuch as actually believing you could buy low/sell high on Players X, Y, or Z. This is pretty standard fare for fantasy baseball in April. But the uncertainty of what opposing managers might think about particular players got me wondering what the actual value of players might be if the draft were held today.
Enter Yahoo! and their rather archaic in-season drafts. Drafting at the tail end of April always seemed like a pretty silly notion to me. But with their new pay leagues, I thought the results of a draft where other managers are actually competing for cash prizes might provide a bonafide pulse on whose stock has already risen and whose has dropped. You have to account for the fact that we’ve had some injuries not to mention relievers who have lost their jobs already, so the pool of players has changed a tad, but not significantly.
So yes, for you dear fantasy baseball enthusiast, I reluctantly joined a draft this past Sunday just so I could pass along the results. Note that there were no auto drafters up until the last three rounds. This was a standard 5×5 roto league with 12 teams and a snake draft format and the average draft positions I’ll reference are those found in Yahoo.
The first round went almost as expected. Guys like Albert Pujols and Jose Bautista still went #3 and #6, respectively, which is about where they were going in February and March. The biggest mover early on was Josh Hamilton, who was selected 11th overall while his ADP was 33. Hamilton is already nursing a sore back, so perhaps owners missed any opportunity they might have been looking for to peddle him at his highest value — but his hot start rather catapulted him up the draft list on this day.
Not far behind Hamilton was Pablo Sandoval, whose current .311/.361/.500 slash line had some manager all in a dither so as to draft him with the 16th overall pick whereas his ADP was 42. My guess was he’d go somewhere in the 3rd round, but holy cow — this was either a real reach or Sandoval’s mother is now playing fantasy baseball. I’m not saying he’s not worth an overall 16th pick at his current clip, so perhaps this manager has a more reliable crystal ball than I do.
The 3rd-6th rounds had Stephen Strasburg going 28th (ADP of 54), Jay Bruce 38th (56th ADP) and Yu Darvish 52nd (83 ADP). In the case of Strasburg and Bruce, it could be that their value might never be higher. At 70 overall was Kevin Youkilis, who had an ADP of 64, so while his stock has dropped some, it’s not quite as much as I assumed.
If you’re in a buy-low mood, some of the gentlemen selected well past their initial ADP include Ian Kennedy at 93 (79 ADP), Mat Latos at 126 (109 ADP), Ike Davis at 165 (137 ADP), Ubaldo Jimenez at 171 (150 ADP), Dustin Ackley at 169 (148 ADP), Carlos Marmol at 189 (145 ADP) and Justin Masterson way down at 264 (198 ADP). Of the group, I’d probably be most interested in Kennedy, Latos, and Marmol if you can find them at a significant discount. Masterson is already finding himself on waiver wires.
On the other hand, if you’ve got glaring needs and you’re thinking of trying to sell high, there were a good number of players that were drafted much higher than expected just a month ago. There was a real believer out there in Emilio Bonifacio and his nine steals as he was selected 88th despite an initial ADP of 142. David Freese went 108th (135 ADP), Jesus Montero went 112th (157 ADP), J.D. Martinez went 131st (242 ADP), Edwin Encarnacion went 140th (203 ADP), and Mark Trumbo went 171st (194 ADP).
In the case of Montero and Trumbo, it might have a lot to do with position eligibility as Montero now qualifies in most leagues at catcher and Trumbo at third base. But the hot starts by Freese, Martinez, and Encarnacion definitely impacted this draft — and if you own them, it’s your call as to whether or not they’ll be able to keep it up or if it’s time to strike while the proverbial iron is hot.
It seems every team I’m running this year has a glaring issue. I have some with issues at catcher, others with some pitching issues, but there’s one in particular where I have just no solution at third base. We’re just a handful of games deep into the season, but there might already be fertile ground for trying to cherry pick brutal starts to the season by few old dogs. Yes, the small sample size applies throughout, but I like these guys as fantasy targets early on since there were enough question marks about age, health, and/or production before the season began which likely gave their current managers pause when they ultimately selected them. Now that the stats count, you might find a second-guesser willing to listen.
Ramirez has been a slow starter for the last few seasons, but he’s taken it to new levels so far. His .114/.179/.182 line is so bad it makes it hard to see beyond the fact that it’s just 39 plate appearances. He’s hit no home runs, two doubles, and he’s struck out eight times and generally been useless on the real and the fake field. He’s had little fortune from the bouncing ball with a paltry .143 BABIP, his swinging strike rate isn’t completely out of control at 11%, his contact rate is down a tick, but not overwhelmingly so. Aside from having a detached retina or something, I’d fully expect the proverbial pendulum to swing the other direction and he’s either going to start getting a little luckier, he’s going to start driving the ball, or both. It has typically taken him until June to really put things together — and that has been exacerbated in the last couple of seasons — but another week of falling on his face and you might have a real opportunity on your hands.
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).
| Tier 1 |
|---|
| Jose Bautista |
| Evan Longoria |
We rely on mock drafts to help guide us on trends without necessarily acting as the definitive voice. They’re somewhat like exit polls in politics — we’re just trying to get a pulse on public opinion before we see the actual results, with the exception that in mock baseball drafts, we can’t be entirely assured that a human being actually made the pick.
The problem being of course, is that mock drafts across formats is a lot like exit polls in Wyoming versus New York. So much depends on context. For instance – if you’re targeting Ian Stewart for any particular reason, Yahoo would suggest that you should expect to see him taken in the 20th round. If you trust Mock Draft Central, he is drafted at roughly 442, should anyone ever get to that round awake.
Stewart is an extreme case but it’s worth pointing out the differences in systems. As you well know, how a player is ranked in the draft room almost inevitably impacts where they are ultimately drafted — and some of the differences are so big that it could dramatically alter your draft approach.
Focusing solely on third base — here are some of the players that have a pretty major difference between Mock Draft Central and Yahoo’s current ADP. For the heck of it, I threw in any notable percentage changes in trend at MDC in case recent news has them moving up or down, and I tossed in the rankings of Eric Karabell over at ESPN (those that made his top 100 anyway).
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.
Yesterday I covered the bottom half of the list here, numbers 10 through 6. Some solid speculation on some people’s part in the comments section as to who made the top five, so without further ado…