Archive for outfielder

Mike Tauchman deserves nothing less than the clickbaitiest of headlines. He’s my favorite player nearly no one has heard of or cares about, a name I draft that genuinely forces people to Google his name, a Triple-A hitter not only too old to be a prospect but also maybe too old to be a post-hype prospect, if he ever were a prospect, which he never was.

No one has heard of or cares about him because of any combination of: (1) he is not and never was a prospect; (2) there are a fair number of actual prospects in Colorado’s actual farm system who are actually exciting; (3) prospect status notwithstanding, he has no path to playing time because the Rockies habitually bury their actually exciting talent. At 28, Tauchman ain’t getting any younger, and I ain’t either. He deserves all the hype he can get, and I’m here to dish it out.

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I’m an Alex Dickerson fan, but I don’t know if anyone else is. He at least appears to have gone largely without fanfare thus far, as evidenced by his lowly ownership rates (4.7 percent at ESPN, 5 percent at Yahoo!). He never projected to be much of anything; former FanGraphs prospector Kiley McDaniel graded Dickerson’s tools below-average across the board, with exception to his plus raw power, and Dickerson led a weak crop of Padres prospects prior to the 2015 season in terms of projected WAR.

Fast forward to 2016, and Dickerson doesn’t look so meager. In 240 Triple-A plate appearances, he generated the Pacific Coast League’s 3rd-best wOBA. In fact, it eerily resembled that of the lauded Willson Contreras, and it only trails by a nonzero margin that of the seemingly powerful Mitch Haniger. Dickerson not only cranked up the power, posting a career-best .240 isolated power (ISO), but also shaved more than 7 percentage points off his strikeout rate (K%). The hit tool that once graded out well-below-average suddenly looked like a solid asset. While some hitters sacrifice power to refine their plate discipline or contact skills, Dickerson’s 3-year ISO of .199 from 2013-15 increased about 40 points.

The best news is the gains have carried over to the Major League level. To attest, Dickerson’s plate discipline, by definition, is above average:

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Previous rankings:
August
July
June
May
March/April (Preseason)

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It’s hard for me to feel like these rankings are worthwhile. Something like two-thirds of you are in your respective league’s playoffs or have already been eliminated. For those of you to whom this pertains, now we’re rolling the dice on small sample sizes — something inherently subject to volatility. Also, we’re practically a week into the month already.

So I won’t waste too much breath here. The following rankings reflect classic 5-by-5 rotisserie (“roto”) formats. Just please remember: this is your playoff hunt. If you play in a roto league, you know which categories you need to chase. I can’t answer that for you. But that category (or plural) are inherently more important to you, and you should value National League outfielders who contribute meaningfully to that category (or plural) accordingly. If you play in a points league, find power bats who minimize the split between their strikeouts and walks (assuming you are punished for the former and rewarded for the latter).

With that said, let’s dig in.

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Previous rankings:
March/April (Preseason)
May
June

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To this day, I think I don’t fully understand what y’all want. With these monthly rankings, do you want end-of-season rankings or rest-of-season rankings? For the record, given we just eclipsed the halfway point of the season, end-of-season rankings would equally weight players’ first and second halves. Rest-of-season ranking, meanwhile, would unequally weight a player’s second half in favor of his first half. First-half performance informs second-half rankings, but more in the sense that “regression will hit this guy hard” and so on.

I ask because, man, y’all rip into us pretty good with these rankings sometimes. And I know I’ve failed to adequately communicate my criteria for ranking particular players a given way because I simply don’t have enough words or time.

With that said, I will provide for you here rest-of-season rankings for National League outfielders, complete with anticipated regression and all that. Tiers will be named in order of my favorite Every Time I Die albums, which is totally not obscure in any way. Enjoy! (Or not.)

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I cover the National League outfield beat, but I occasionally abdicate my duties. I’m easily distracted. I also enjoy constructing narratives from a player’s statistics, and being on the NL outfield beat, I can only cover the same dudes so many times. But it truly has been a while, and given that market inefficiencies will always plague player valuation, I hear an old go-to of mine calling my name.

I’ll offer three NL outfielders at varying level of ownership (per Yahoo!’s tallies), make a case for each, and offer names of other more-owned NL outfielders to drop (or trade, given their inflated perceived values) in place of them. Got it? Cool. Let’s get cracking. (Ownership rates are current as of June 27.)

Less than 60% owned

Melvin Upton Jr., SD
58% owned

I do not totally get this, but I also do totally get this. Upton was bad for a while. The last three years were difficult to stomach, with his volatile offensive profile finally succumbing to his poor contact skills. The strikeouts grew, and the power shrank, and Upton was but a shell of his former self. He left a bad taste in our mouths.

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Previous rankings:
March/April (Preseason)
May

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The more I do this, the harder it gets. Each month I struggle with shedding my preconceived notions of a player’s value and coming to grips with the performance we have actually observed. And then there’s the additional element of teasing out what’s real and what’s not. Occasionally, there’s no change. That makes it easy. But for the guys who have made strides or taken big steps back — that makes it a bit harder. And then there’s accounting for over- and under-performance. Trying to anticipate when regression will occur, if at all, makes my head hur.

Also, there are just so many outfielders. And so many of them seem to be performing at a high level this season. It can be excruciatingly difficult to tease them apart. At a certain point, we’re splitting the microscopic hairs that grows on regular hairs. Full tiers become indecipherable blobs.

You know the rules, but if you don’t: hitters are pretty fluid within tiers. It’s not feasible to talk about every single guy, so feel free to ask questions (or leave criticisms) in the comments. (I know I left off a lot of hitters who make up the shallow side of a platoon or ride the pine. ) If I omitted a legitimate someone, let me know; unless it’s a part-time guy or a prospect, I probably just forgot. It happens from time to time.

I love Bob’s Burgers, so I’m going to name the tiers by my favorite episodes of all time. Because I can! This is off the top of my head, though, so I’ll probably screw up my own list. Oh well. Fight me!

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I alleged, behind closed doors, that I would cook up something pertaining to batting average on balls in play (BABIP) and the new shift data FanGraphs now hosts on its leaderboards. But, alas, such allegations — that I, uh, made, against myself — were false. There are more pressing matters to which I must attend.

Such as Gregory Polanco. Polanco, of the consensus top-100 prospect rankings in 2013 and 2014 prior to his debut. Polanco, of the pleasantly solid production that still, almost 1,000 plate appearances later, somehow, somewhat inexplicably, disappoints us.

If you don’t own Polanco, you may not know his weighted runs created (wRC+) currently ranks 8th among all National League outfielders. Better, his wRC+ isn’t elevated by an unsustainable BABIP or home runs per fly ball (HR/FB), like the seven hitters who rank ahead of him (except Bryce Harper, who is superhuman bordering on not human at all). One could argue, with nonzero persuasiveness, that Polanco is the (second-) best pure-hitting NL outfielder in the game at this exact moment. It’s a very specific subset of hitters, yes, but if you bestowed that title on me, I’d be pretty jazzed.

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Oh, man. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh, man. IT’S BASEBALL SEASON. Woo! We survived the offseason. We made it. Thank you for joining me here today.

Unfortunately, with only one (and a half-ish) day(s) of baseball under our elastic baseball belts, I can only conduct as much analysis as the smallest of small samples will let me. Not unfortunately, fantasy owners freak out during the first couple of weeks of the baseball. I’m no psychologist, but dang, do owners overreact. You don’t see these kinds of overreactions during the season — however many months of baseball has already been played, and changes to players’ stat lines shift much more slowly in August than April.

In other words, April is incredibly noisy. There’s gotta be a signal in there, yeah? I’ll serve up names of National League outfielders who had particularly good first games of 2016, and I’ll tell you over which players with higher ownership rates (using Yahoo! percentages, arbitrarily) I’d rather own them. It could be controversial, but hey.

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2015 Visualized: Shortstop
2015 Visualized: Third Base
2015 Visualized: Second Base
2015 Visualized: First Base
2015 Visualized: Catcher

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For the next few weeks, the RotoGraphs staff will devote an entire week to each defensive position, including spotlights on particular players as well as trends throughout the 2015 season. This week, we’re highlighting outfielders.

I don’t claim to be a Tableau (or data visualization) whiz by any means, but I thought it would be cool to visually represent the outfield landscape in 2015 — with some analysis sprinkled in.

Steamer and ZiPS represent premier player projection systems; FanGraphs’ Depth Charts combines the two, and the writing staff allocate playing time accordingly. The playing time part is less important relative to the combined projections, as aggregated projections tend to perform better than standalones.

I compared projected wOBA (weighted on-base average) from the preseason to actual wOBA (1) by team and (2) by player within team. Unlike WAR, wOBA is a rate metric, so it does not need to be scaled according to playing time.

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The storybook narratives of 2015 do not limit themselves to the Mets or the Twins or the Rangers or the Astros. Surprises abound each year, usually in the form of a former prospect who finally hit his stride or a journeyman Minor Leaguer who catches lightning in a bottle. Perhaps they’re more surprising, then, when they come from seemingly established players.

For example, Bryce Harper finally evolved into the Bryce Harper of prophecies’ past, basically hitting twice as many home runs as projected. Except the evolution happened, like, two or three or seven years sooner than expected. I don’t know when it was supposed to happen, but surely it wasn’t supposed to happen at 22 years old.

And Carlos Gonzalez, at 29, has hit a career-high 37 home runs, a healthy dozen-or-so more than any of his previous four seasons — all after having arguably the worst April of his career (rivaling 2011).

I’m thankful the Tigers traded Yoenis Cespedes into the National League so I can write about the dude now. Aside from Matthew Kory’s assessment of Cespedes’ chances to win a Most Valuable Player (MVP) award two weeks ago, we have pointed little attention to how Cespedes earned his way into MVP discussions in the first place. The injustice ends here.

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