Archive for Salvador Perez

It just hasn’t been Salvador Perez’s season so far. He missed the Royals’ first 20 games with a Grade 2 MCL tear in his left knee, which he sustained while carrying luggage. Perez responded well upon his return, posting an .840 OPS over his first 11 games and even catching both games of a doubleheader just four days after getting activated.

Since then, Perez has been hampered by a different type of baggage. Over his last 54 games, he has been batting .194 overall and just .201 on balls in play. His xBA over that period, according to Baseball Savant, is .257, but that doesn’t mean that Perez’s fantasy owners should just sit back and enjoy the positive regression to come. Over last month, encompassing 101 plate appearances, Perez has batted .163 with one home run and three doubles, and his hard contact rate has been a pedestrian 34.7 percent.
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Here is Travis d’Arnaud before he was sent down on June 8th: .180/.271/.273/.241 (BA/OBP/SLG/wOBA).

Here is TDA after his return: .269/.315/.481/.346. He also tore it up (again) at Triple-A.

Here is TDA from August fifth onward: .280/.335/.510/.369. Yan Gomes, FYI, went .278/.313/.472/.340 albeit for the season.

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This is a subject I tackled last year, but the basic idea for this article is that people playing in leagues that use non-traditional roto categories may not be equipped with proper draft materials. Almost any set of rankings you can find online are compiled with the standard 5×5 roto categories in mind. Some sites may have rankings published specifically for leagues that replace batting average with OBP, but the vast majority assume standard categories. If you’re using a set of rankings from a site or magazine, you’re doing yourself a disservice unless those rankings were designed for OBP leagues.

I’ve compiled my own projections for 242 hitters to generate my own rankings, and I’ve generated rankings specifically for standard 5×5 leagues and leagues that have replaced batting average with OBP. I want to highlight the players who gain the most in OBP leagues and the players who are hurt the most when OBP replaces average. I base my rankings off a number Zach Sanders calls Fantasy Value Above Replacement (FVARz). Essentially I assign each player a value for each category and add them all up while adjusting for positional scarcity.

Below I’ve included two lists; one shows the players whose FVARz increases the most when OBP replaces average, and the other shows the players whose FVARz decreases the most. I’ve also included their ranking among hitters and auction values for both batting average and OBP leagues. Over on a site of which I’m the managing editor, TheFantasyFix.com, I’ve posted how the rankings and auction values change for all 242 hitters I have projections for when the switch is made to OBP. You can find that here. All values are based on 10-team leagues with 25-man rosters, 13 starting hitter slots and three bench slots. If you have questions about the methodology, the charts or anything else, hit me up in the comments. Read the rest of this entry »

Heading into this season, Salvador Perez was a trendy pick for those who were diligent with their homework. He wasn’t exactly considered mainstream, but he also wasn’t considered a hidden gem or sleeper either. The now 23-year old Kansas City backstop was somewhere right in the middle. His somewhat impressive 39-game cup of coffee in 2011 helped put him on the map but a knee injury in the spring of 2012 took him right off as he missed the entire first half. But many still kept tabs on him and when he returned to the field in July of 2012, he put on a second-half display that immediately recaptured the attention of those fantasy owners still cultivating their teams. Now, during a season where some would call Perez’ overall performance a disappointment, he is finishing the year on an extremely high note and salvaging what many thought was lost. Read the rest of this entry »

While Yadier Molina may not be hitting for as much power as he has in the past two seasons, he remains a strong three-category contributor on par with the likes of Joe Mauer and maybe even a slight step above. Molina’s eight home runs may seem pedestrian, but his 54 RBI rank fourth amongst catchers, his 46 runs scored ranks third, and his .330 average ranks first among all qualified catchers. Speed isn’t exactly the first thing you think of, but his three steals have him tied for fourth. Replacing him here at the start of August isn’t an easy task, but remember, we don’t need for a replacement to do what he’s done, we just need one to do what Molina was going to do. Read the rest of this entry »

“In every life, a little rain must fall.” — My Blue Heaven

In honor of the above statement, we’re going to piggyback Michael Barr’s Definitive Guide To All Things Depressing here and make it catcher specific. While those who made the investment in Buster Posey, Yadier Molina and Joe Mauer are resting easy in the comfort of an all-star catcher’s mitt, there are many of us who saw a golden opportunity this spring to go a little cheaper on our backstops and still land some high-end production. The position seemed unusually deep this year, so really…how bad could it be? Well, there’s an air of disappointment that surrounds many of the catchers we thought we were getting and now we’re all left wondering if any of these guys are actually going to produce. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

With the updated catcher rankings recently released and thoughts beginning to turn towards another set of tiers being issued at the end of the month, it’s time to look at a couple of backstops who had us a bit concerned after a tough month of April. A highly coveted choice on draft day, Salvador Perez was expected to do great things this year but struggled mightily at the plate to open the season, leaving many who grabbed him relatively early in their draft (eighth round or so) wondering if they made a mistake. Meanwhile, A.J. Ellis, who had an outstanding breakout season last year, was also counted on to produce with some consistency at the plate, but failed to show any semblance of power he once displayed and also struggled to hit with any regularity. But with the calendar flipping to May, both have caught fire and those owners who were ready to hit the panic button can start to breathe a little easier. Read the rest of this entry »

Through the first 10 rounds of the RotoGraphs Ridiculously Early Mock Draft, a draft for a single-catcher league, we saw a total of eight backstops come off the board. In an effort to see how our picks matched up with public opinion, we’ve been comparing the results to ADP found on both Mock Draft Central (MDC) and the National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC). However, given how unreliable MDC data is right now due to small sample sizes and the fact that they don’t differentiate between one and two-catcher league mocks, we’re basically casting that ADP data aside and just matching up with that from the NFBC, a two-catcher league draft. With the current depth at the position, it should have been safe to assume that the top backstops would go a bit earlier in our draft than in the NFBC, however, in looking back at the comparisons, that was not the case. In fact, save for everyone agreeing that Buster Posey was a consensus late-first round pick, nothing went as expected. Read the rest of this entry »

There is always such a fuss made up over small sample sizes that often times a player is overlooked from year to year as fantasy owners in keeper leagues become hesitant to protect a player with merely a half a year’s experience in the majors. However, despite the increased depth at the catcher position, due to a heavy influx of young talent over the last few seasons, protecting Salvador Perez at this time might just be a shrewd move you can’t afford to pass up. Read the rest of this entry »