A few sidelined Seattle Marines may not return as most expect. Here’s the inside information to factor in on draft day.
Despite an elbow injury that has kept Mallex Smith out for the entire spring, not many people seem to be worried. Well, I for one, am quite concerned. Mallex Smith was approved to begin throwing on March 8th. Throwing programs for outfielders entail ramping up in throwing distance & volume. Read the rest of this entry »
In the first significant trade of the offseason, the Rays sent Mallex Smith and outfield prospect Jake Fraley to the Mariners for Mike Zunino, Guillermo Heredia and minor-league lefty Michael Plassmeyer on Thursday. Smith was a key part of the Rays’ surprising 90-win season, and in finishing as the 15th-ranked outfielder in Roto value (per ESPN’s Player Rater), he was a revelation for fantasy owners as well.
As is the case for many breakout players, Smith’s rise had much to do with playing time. 2018 was his first full season in the majors, and Kevin Cash penciled his name into the starting lineup 127 times. An increased role was not the whole story, as the 25-year-old did improve his skill set in a couple of important ways. Smith became a better contact hitter, which enabled him to reduce his strikeout rate from 22.1 percent over his first two seasons to 18.0 percent in 2018. That, along with a .301 batting average on ground balls, helped Smith to bat a career-high .296 overall.
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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:
