Archive for Mike Moustakas

The Kansas City Royals have been one of the most enigmatic teams in the last few years. Not because they’re small market or because they’ve been a perennial punching bag for the rest of the American League, but because expectations have been on the rise for some time now and they consistently fail to deliver. Once the worst farm system in baseball, the Royals were suddenly flush with all of this great, young talent. We saw the debuts of players like Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas and watched as they added key pieces like Lorenzo Cain and Alcides Escobar. They hadn’t quite put it all together over the last two seasons, but this year, with a revamped rotation, the Royals became darlings in the American League and some even thought they could compete for a wild card this year. But while James Shields and Jeremy Guthrie did their part early on, the hitters failed miserably. The young studs were a disaster and after a modest 14-10 April, things spun out of control as the Royals went 8-20 in May and opened June 1-2. Manager Ned Yost was at a loss. He shuffled the lineup dozens of times without success. They fired their hitting coach and replaced him with the legendary George Brett, hoping that some Royals royalty would jump start the offense. But instead, it was the nerds who got things going for the Royals. Yost put the lineup decision into the hands of the sabermetric boys and the next thing we knew, Kansas City was on a six-game winning streak. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since the boss, Mr. Eno Sarris, showed me how to use the VLOOKUP function in Excel, I can’t stop comparing recent numbers to past rates. The function makes it easy to put this season’s numbers in one sheet, past season or career numbers in another sheet, and then pull the past numbers and place them right next to the corresponding season numbers for any sample of players.

Instead of billing a client from 1:15-3:05 yesterday afternoon at work, I toyed around comparing 2012 and career fly ball rates to 2013 numbers. I chose those two because we’re at the point in the year where most qualified hitters have a sample of 80+ balls in play, which is the point at which FB% stabilizes according to Russell Carleton.

The first thing I looked at was whether the hitters with the highest fly ball rates in 2012 had seen a shift so far this season. The idea was that the guys who cut down on the fly balls would see a corresponding rise in average given that fly balls go for hits somewhere in the neighborhood of 13%-15% of the time, while ground balls are hits roughly 25% of the time and line drives about 71-73% of the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Being that we’ve only completed about two weeks of the regular season, I like to preach patience above everything else when it comes to your fantasy team. Obviously there are some cases where waiver moves are a necessity, but when it comes to your struggling stars, patience is the key. Small sample sizes, law of averages, however you want to put it; so little time has passed with so much more to go and sometimes you just have to endure a couple of bad weeks to reap the quality benefits down the road. But not everyone subscribes to that theory and there are owners out there who are pained at the sight of their team near the bottom of the standings right now and have very itchy trigger fingers. If you are in need of help at the hot corner and you have one of those panicky owners sitting on Royals third baseman Mike Moustakas, now might be the time to pounce.

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When we do this thing where we categorize players into tidy little compartments it tends to bring out the monsters in many of you. Had I given more attention to some of my cultural anthropology or experimental psychology courses, perhaps I’d have an explanation as to why. But nonetheless intrepid reader, I’ll attempt to put forth my best tiered assessment of the available third basemen to you on draft day.

As you no doubt know, the tiers shift. They move like like an Omar Vizquel with Arthur Rhodes on the mound. But I know that many of you like to aim for top three tier material at as many positions as possible, so perhaps this will help you assuming you haven’t already put together your squads. If you already have and your guy is in tier five, well, condolences.

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And six weeks later, a team was born…

That’s right. After just six short weeks and hundreds of emails, we finally finished the RotoGraphs Ridiculously Early Mock Draft — Slow Draft Style. The process was definitely cumbersome, to say the least, but we all made it through relatively unscathed. Our fearless leader and draft overseer, Eno Sarris, published the results five rounds at a time (the links to all can be found in this post) and now it’s time to reveal our teams. Well, I don’t know if everyone is going to do it, but here’s mine: Read the rest of this entry »

We’re about a third of the way through the season, and while the proverbial gloves aren’t going to come off, I think I’ll stop coddling some and for others, I’ll be giving credit where credit is due. I wouldn’t say this is a “if the draft were held today” kind of list, but perhaps some amalgam of ranking based on current performance and anticipated performance for the rest of the season. I’ll do my best to tease out a rationale for the higher tiers.

The top tier of third basemen has historically been quite small, in large part due to the dearth of real superstars at the position. But since Jose Bautista has been acting like he might actually be mortal, it’s left room for some others to join him at the top.

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Just a month in and we’ve seen players like Danny Valencia and Lonnie Chisenhall lose their jobs, kids like Kyle Seager and William Middlebrooks defy expectations, and we’ve seen big guns like Evan Longoria and Pablo Sandoval go down to injury, among others. Third base has had a degree of volatility that has made it a particularly difficult position to manage.

While I’ve typically been more conservative in May in the past, there are definitely some movers early on. I wouldn’t say this is a list that represents “if the draft were held today” kind of a sentiment, it’s more a melding of injuries, expected future performance, but also performance to date.

Tier one is pretty unsurprising.

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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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Monday featured the third base version of the ongoing consensus rankings project and the results actually did reveal a pretty good amount of consensus from our four great minds, but there were some details and departures in opinions worth pointing out.

First of all, and this was teased out in the comments, it’s fairly likely we’re going to see names like Miguel Cabrera, Hanley Ramirez, and Mark Trumbo on the list of the third base eligible come May (for most league formats, probably much earlier). In the case of the former two, it would shake up the rankings in the top five considerably, and there’s a good chance many of you are targeting Cabrera as the overall #1 pick given his new digs in the infield.

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There are a number of position battles that have caught people’s attention this spring and with it getting down to crunch time for fantasy baseball drafts, it’s important to know how things are going to play out.  One spot, in particular that has drawn plenty of interest is the battle for second base in Kansas City.  Originally, the favorite was youngster Johnny Giavotella, but with both Chris Getz and (gulp!) Yuniesky Betancourt having decent springs, things are getting a little interesting.

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