Archive for Omar Infante

Check out last month’s rankings here.

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No more bland, rote tiers from this guy! Thanks to the urging of commenter “Urban Shocker,” my eyes are now open to the fun that can be had with ridiculously labeled tiers. You see, I used to just write these monthly second-base columns with boring old numbered tiers. That is, until Urban Shocker convinced me in the comments section of my April rankings to name my tiers from then on.

To be perfectly honest, the task of doing these monthly rankings can get rather stale — for both me and you — as the season wears on. Eventually, it gets to the point where the rankings barely change, because 30-day samples don’t substantially change the way I/we think about a certain player.

Furthermore, there’s only so many ways I can say “Jose Altuve had a good month again,” or “Dee Gordon steals lots of bases,” or “Holy crap, Dan Uggla is so incredibly terrible!” (Actually, never mind on that last one. I will never get sick of making jokes about Uggla, who got paid $13 million last year to post a weighted offense 72% below league-average.)

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One might think that writing about the Detroit infield would be easy. After all, how difficult could it be to say that “Prince Fielder & Miguel Cabrera are great and you should draft them”? Because, they are great. And you should draft them.

We can try to do better, though. Fielder’s debut as a Tiger was nothing short of a success, putting up a season that saw him lead all qualified major league first basemen in wOBA. (Joey Votto, of course, was far ahead, but missed too much time due to injury.) Fielder’s .398 mark was right in line with his .393 career average and there’s little to think he won’t be able to do it again, though it’s interesting to see that he got there somewhat differently than usual. His 30 homers tied for sixth among first basemen and were his lowest since hitting 28 in his rookie season of 2006. That’s partially due to the fact that he set a career low in flyball percentage (33.3%); while his HR/FB rate was within career norms, fewer flyballs is going to equal fewer homers. That’s not entirely a bad thing, because those balls largely turned into line drives, contributing to a career best .313 batting average. Fantasy players would like to see a few more of those hits end up over the fence, though either way, Fielder remains an easy top-three first baseman in all formats. Read the rest of this entry »

Lots of roster tweaking going on right now as fantasy owners everywhere are trying to put together the perfect squad.  But while most of your league has scooped up the top post-draft talent remaining, there are obviously a few strays lying around that could serve as quality bench guys for you to plug in when needed.  With the middle infield positions sitting so thin, you might want to start there. Read the rest of this entry »

In today’s edition of the Waiver Wire, we look at three players who have all been around awhile.

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I’ve done a fair amount of reading on third base rankings headed into the 2011 fantasy baseball season. While most prognosticators and enthusiasts recognize some elite talent at the tippy-top of the list, references such as “terrifying,” “black hole,” and, ahem, “talentless batch of hackers” have described the rest of the list, which I might venture to simply call not terribly deep. Third base will present many managers with a challenge, but I’m not so sure there aren’t some gems to be had in this list.

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So it looks like Dustin Pedroia might be out for the year now that his foot has remained sore. His owners are left crying into their caps, and looking for replacements. Since it’s normally time for a middle infield update anyway, this works out well. We’ll look at possible replacements based on the size of your league. The benchmarks come from Jeff Zimmerman’s article here.

Shallow Leagues (58% owned or less)
If you are lucky, Omar Infante (60% owned) will be out there for you. He is one of the better possibilities for replacing the little-bit-of-power, little-bit-of-speed thing that Pedroia had going, and he is also atop one of the better lineups in the National League. But Infante doesn’t quite hit our benchmark, so Alberto Callaspo (46% owned) has a little more pop than Asdrubal Cabrera (44% owned) and might therefore be a better replacement for the balding Boston ballplayer. Though neither has shown much power or speed this year, it’s Callaspo that has had the best power year (.156 ISO in 2009) between the two and Cabrera that has had the best speed year (5.9 speed score in 2009). Depending on your priorities, they make decent stop-gaps.

12-Team Leagues (26% owned or less)
The options on this level are Orlando Hudson and Ryan Raburn, and both have a little more power than the guys above. Raburn’s currently showing a .176 ISO and has a .186 career number in that category, so he’s the guy to pick up for power. With his strikeout rate (26.2% this year, 25.9% career), he probably won’t put up a Pedroia-an batting average, and his speed has declined from about average (5.1 in 2008, 5.0 is average) to below average (3.8 in 2010) in three years. Hudson will give you a decent batting average as he has been within spitting distance of his .282 career batting average in most years. Unfortunately, he’s in the midst of a four-year decline in his power and now owns a poor ISO (.118). While his speed score is still above average (5.6), he hasn’t cracked double-digit in steals since 2007. Either way, Hudson is the closer comp to the Boston second baseman.

20-Team Leagues (1% owned or less)
Yes, Blake DeWitt is playing every day and is atop a lineup, but he’s also owned in 3% of Yahoo leagues, doesn’t have much pop or speed, and that Cubs lineup isn’t anywhere close to the Red Sox lineup. Well, none of your options in leagues of this size will come close to Pedroia’s excellence, so let’s just get that out of the way. No, of the second basemen owned in 1% of leagues (or less), it’s Chris Getz that is the most interesting. He’s mostly wrested the second base job away from Mike Aviles, but he’s just about as flawed as the man he replaces (or worse). He has no power to speak of (.040 ISO this year, .069 career, .150 ISO is average), and now that he’s 641 plate appearances into his career and showing the same walk rate every year (7.8% this year, 7.3% career), we can say he doesn’t really get on base at an average rate (8.5% walk rate is average this year). Well, he does do one thing. His speed score has stayed above average every year and is decent this year (5.5). He has some wheels. His 13 stolen bases (87% success rate) even means that he could equal a fictionally healthy Pedroia the rest of the way in one category. Unfortunately for deep league owners, it’s just one category.

We’ve updated both the shortstops and the second basemen fairly recently, so it’s time to take a look at a deep-league middle infield option. Full disclosure: I own Mark Ellis in the Blog Wars fantasy league put on by FanGraphs user/commenter MDS or Million Dollar Sleeper. So this is a completely self-serving look at whether or not I have ‘solved’ my middle infield situation. I hope you get some use out of it, hah.

First, the good news. The batting average looks safe. Not only is Ellis walking about the same as ever (8.8% 2010, 8.3% career) and striking out a little less (13.4% 2010, 15.3% career), but his BABIP is neutral as well (.309 2010, .290 career). He’s reaching a little much (29.8% 2010, 21.3% career), but making the same amount of contact overall (85.7% 2010, 85.5% career). We also have to remember that the league-wide reach rate (28.6%) is up big from last year (25.1%), so his absolute reach rate, or difference between his reach rate and the league reach rate, has gone down this year from last year. He hasn’t changed much.

The overall plate discipline package looks like one that is about average everywhere except in one spot. Ellis can make contact with pitches in the zone at an above average rate. How’s that for a niche – it should go on page one of his agent’s presentation. His zone contact percentage rate has been steadily and significantly above-average across his career, and this year is no different (96.2% zone contact, 88.1% league-wide average). With his average walk rate in hand, and above-average ability to make contact on balls in the zone, Ellis should always put up a middling batting average when his BABIP is neutral. His career numbers in those regards (.290 career BABIP, .266 career batting average) provide good sign posts as they usually do.

In our league, which sports 15 owners and 31 roster spots (including CI, MI, and five OFs), any middle infielder that starts and puts up a decent batting average is ownable. For example, the best MI available on the wire, ranked by ownership, are Yuniesky Betancourt (74 wRC+), Omar “All-Star” Infante (93 wRC+), and Adam Kennedy (84 wRC+). That’s a craptacular grab bag of mediocrity, and Ellis’ 98 wRC+ stacks up well against all of them.

On the other hand, the almost-regular Infante could put up a better batting average (.268 career, but over .293 over the past three years) even though his BABIP right now (.370) is propping up his current average. The line separating Ellis from meh waiver wire fill-in at a position (like Infante) and an actual strong pickup is populated with counting stats. Can he put up some power or speed?

Short answer: not really. His career ISO (.139) is below-average for all of the MLB (usually around .155), and would be just about average for a batting-average qualifying second baseman this year (.138). He may barely crack double-digit home runs in an average year, but probably not this year. He’s putting a career-low percentage of his balls in the air (34.7% this year, 42.1% career), and yet he’s also sporting a career-low HR/FB rate (3.8% this year, 6.9% career). But maybe his 2010 ISO (.081), which is not yet accrued in a significant-enough sample size, will regress towards his career number and allow him to crack 10 home runs.

If he was a speedster, the power would be forgivable from a fantasy standpoint. And Ellis’ last two season have produced his career-high stolen base totals (14 and 10 respectively), so maybe Ellis will actually crack double-digits in that category. His speed scores (3.3 this year, 4.7 career, 5.0 average) don’t scream ‘speed demon,’ but at least he’s successful when he goes (75%) so he should continue to put up the odd steal. He’s batting seventh, so he’ll have some chances to steal in front of poor batters, but he’s no speedster at the top of the lineup. On the other hand, the overall suckitude of the A’s lineup (11th in the AL in runs) will keep his contributions in runs and RBI down.

Still, Mark Ellis is really just a filler. In a league as deep as ours, it’s important to have at least an average major league starter in each of your positions, and Ellis can be that. His lack of upside in the counting stats, however, soften any further impact he might have.