Earlier this month, I updated the second base tiered rankings and opined that Tier One consisted of Robinson Cano, Dustin Pedroia and Ian Kinsler. That’s not really a controversial grouping, especially given the three currently lead qualified second basemen across the league in wOBA. They’re three ducks in a row atop the stat sheets.
And fourth in wOBA is … Matt Carpenter?
Back in 2009, Eric Seidman wrote a piece here that looked into when samples become reliable for certain statistics. The piece was based off work done by Pizza Cutter. You can read the piece here for a full explanation of how the conclusions were reached, but below is a list showing how many PAs it takes for a statistic to become reliable. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re roughly one month into the season, which means it’s time to update the tiered rankings for each position. Though I wanted to be conservative and not alter too many rankings based on data from only one month, some changes seemed warranted.
Here are the tiers:
We are entering year two of the post-Albert era in St. Louis and after an 88-win season that resulted in a wild card berth and a trip to the NLCS that fell just one win short of a World Series appearance, the Cardinals are returning with a largely unchanged infield configuration. For better or for worse, the St. Louis brass opted to leave things as is and let other teams play the free agent market this season. The “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy is in play here and for fantasy purposes, it’s not bad, but the upside is just as limited now as it was just a year ago. Read the rest of this entry »
Injury and ineffectiveness have a way of creating opportunity for players many of us have never even heard of. Or at least if we’ve heard of them, we never thought we’d actually consider putting them on our fantasy baseball squad. Enter Matt Carpenter, A.J. Pollock, and Kirk Nieuwenhuis.
All three are either short-term or speculative grabs at the moment, but it wouldn’t take a whole lot for each of them to fall into regular playing time – and given than none of them have ownership rates north of 5% (alright, Matt Carpenter broke 5% overnight), they’re at the right price. Call it “extreme” deep league waiver wire if you like.