Archive for pedro alvarez

Need a power boost? A Yadier Molina replacement? How about a hitter with multi-position eligibility and a good schedule in the short term or a promising bat you can stash for later in the year? You can fill each of these needs (or wants?) off the waiver wire in the vast majority of mixed leagues. Normally, in this column, I set the cutoff for ownership rates at 33 percent, but I’ve dug a little deeper this week. Each of the five players included is available in at least three-quarters of the leagues on each of the major sites.
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This is the weird part of the fantasy baseball season. Trade deadlines are rapidly approaching or have recently passed in leagues. Gamers in keeper and dynasty leagues range from pushing their chips in the middle to chase the crown this year to playing for future seasons. As the season winds down, I love looking at recent performance. This is especially true in keeper leagues. Who’s playing well down the stretch? Have these hot performers made tangible and sustainable changes that could improve their stock going into 2017? Is a youngster getting a look and playing well? Let’s pick through the data together. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2015, just 41 players hit 25 homers or more. Lowering the cut line to 20 homers bumps the total of players to reach that threshold up to 64. As one of the standard scoring categories, homers are desired, but there are only so many dingers to go around. Getting top-shelf power is usually attached to a premium draft selection, but the following three players hit 24 or more homers in 2015 and are being selected after pick 265 on average in NFBC drafts as of March 24th.

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We published our Top 300 lists today and it was a fascinating project for me. I’m more accustomed to doing positional rankings so this was somewhat new for me. I’ve made overall lists before, plenty of times, but only for myself so I could eyeball adjustments very easily in the midst of a draft. This required more precision because I couldn’t just assume the adjustments. I want to discuss five players where I really diverged from the final group ranking.

Dellin Betances, RP, NYY

(My Rank: 62, Group Rank: 130, Difference: +68)

I’ve completely bought in on the Yankees reliever. Obviously if he doesn’t get announced as the closer ahead of Andrew Miller, I’ll have to adjust, but I’m betting on him getting the role and excelling with it. I know he’s not just going to repeat last year with 35 saves. First off, he won’t get 90 innings as a closer and his crazy ratios are set to rise because it’s hard to maintain that kind of historical rate.

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Our Mock Draft is complete.

Team Schwartz/rounds drafted:

C: Travis d’Arnaud/17 1B: Victor Martinez/4 2B: Arismendy Alcantara/18 3B: Josh Donaldson/3 SS: Hanley Ramirez/2 MI: Jean Segura/19 CI: Prince Fielder/6 OF: Mike Trout/1; Mookie Betts/7; Ryan Zimmerman/10; A.J. Pollock/14; Steven Souza/20; Carl Crawford/24 U: Pedro Alvarez/21

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It’s official. 100% of my value is bothering @jeffwzimmerman to run data and then use that data for said content. I did just that this morning for updated shift data. I believe the last time he posted related content on RotoGraphs was here back in May looking at: Early Hitter Shift Data.

It was because of this post and his balls in play (groundball and pop-up rates) that led me to believe Albert Pujols was going to drop off/continue his downward trend. I guess I pushed out the fact that he was the best hitter of his generation. While the .375 BABIP (from the above link) against shifts did not last, he’s at a very respectable .284. Between this and additional discipline (best contact rate since 2008 and hacking less at stuff outside of the zone), he is able to hover around a .280 BA, which remains elite in conjunction with 30HR, 90R and 100+RBI.

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I don’t really like tiers, but it probably has something to do with the neatness of placing a player in a designated strata. I’ve never used tiers in fantasy baseball drafts because I think it tends to blind you to the nuances of each player and the specific needs your team might have. But now that the season has started, you should be all drafted up and it’s time to brand your cattle.

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In the leagues I run that have inexperienced and/or casual team owners, I always use the standard 5×5 roto categories because I feel that it would give me and the other experienced players an advantage. I know that the casual players in my leagues are using the rankings provided by the website on which we’re drafting or some other set of rankings from a major industry source. And almost all of those rankings are based on standard categories. If I replaced, for example, home runs with slugging percentage, I would be able to identify the players whose valuation or ranking would change with the different category. But the noobs would be using rankings made with home runs in mind.

I polled my Twitter followers to find out the most common uses of non-standard categories so that I could determine the players whose valuation/ranking changed the most when non-standard categories are used. The most common answers were OBP replacing batting average (which I covered here), slugging percentage replacing home runs, and OPS being added as a sixth category to the standard five hitter categories. Sorry if your league has a different non-traditional format.

Below are charts showing the biggest changes in SLG and OPS leagues. For an explanation of the methodology used, check out the OBP piece I just linked to. And if you’d like to see how all 242 hitters that I have projected are affected by SLG replacing HR or OPS being a sixth category, you can find the SLG list here and the OPS list here.

First up, guys who get a bump when slugging percentage replaces home runs.

Miguel Cabrera and Paul Goldschmidt are even more valuable in slugging percentage leagues, and they close the gap between them and Trout in auction leagues. Joey Votto shows up on this list just as he did in my OBP post. He’s obviously excellent, but the standard categories aren’t the best measure of his excellence.

Unsurprisingly, we see a few young first basemen here who haven’t reached the ‘power potential’ some thought they might. But really they just haven’t put up big home run totals. Freddie Freeman and Eric Hosmer may never settle in as 30+ HR regulars or even 25-30 HR regulars, but if you play in a slugging percentage league, their power plays. And Brandon Belt gets the biggest boost by switching to SLG. It’s possible his ballpark has something to do with it, but he’s very much in the Freeman/Homser mold. The only non-1B/DH player on this list is Yadier Molina who was 4th in the league in doubles last year.

Now the guys who you would prefer in a home run league. Read the rest of this entry »

Pedro Alvarez and Kyle Seager entered the season ranked 19th and 13th, respectively, in the Rotographs consensus rankings back in March. Although neither were likely to be your first choice to occupy third base on most fantasy teams, injuries to Chase Headley, Hanley Ramirez, Aramis Ramirez, Brett Lawrie, David Freese, among others, likely thrust Alvarez or Seager into lineups with fingers crossed.

So far, Seager hasn’t been useful at all, and Alvarez has been an unmitigated disaster. But I think there are signs that the former might yet prove to be useful, although the vultures are starting to circle on the latter.

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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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