Three Bargain Platoon Pairings for Scoresheet Drafts

For many Scoresheet owners, keepers have been submitted in their leagues and drafts are about to commence. If you find yourself with a vacancy at a position, and you’re not excited about the players who are available to fill that spot, you may be able to find a suitable arrangement by drafting a platoon.

There are not too many players who get a large enough platoon adjustment against right-handed pitchers to make them desirable as platoon options, and even fewer who are likely to be available for drafting in a keeper league. (All of Scoresheet’s 2020 platoon adjustments are available on their site.) However, the three players below are all good candidates to be used in the larger part of a platoon, and none is likely to have been protected other than in extremely deep leagues or leagues that have an unusually large number of protection slots. All three hitters, for example, are available to be drafted in the 24-team mixed Baseball Prospectus Kings league.

I’ll make the case for each player, pair them up with prospective platoon partners and compare them against a more popular option at their position.

Eric Hosmer, 1B, Padres

Since becoming a Padre, Hosmer has increased his strikeout rate, though his rate was skewed by a miserable second half of 2019 during which he struck out in exactly one-third of his at-bats and in 31.1 percent of his plate appearances. Still, even before last year’s All-Star break, he had been more prone to strike out as a Padre than he had been as a Royal, and even when facing right-handed pitchers. Fortunately for Hosmer, he has been able to blunt the impact of those Ks by being above average at getting hits on balls in play. Particularly against righties, he has been proficient at hitting line drives, avoiding pulled grounders and hitting ground balls with a high exit velocity. That has enabled Hosmer to post a .285/.343/.461 slash line versus righties as a Padre.

If we take Hosmer’s overall .259/.316/.412 slash line with San Diego and apply Scoresheet’s .013/.015/.030 platoon adjustment to it, we get a less impressive .272/.331/.442 slash line against righties that we could use as a rough projection for his performance versus right-handers in the sim. Given that Hosmer batting average could improve with some regression from last year’s second half, that projection could be on the conservative side.

If we pair Hosmer with Miguel Cabrera as his platoon partner, you get to replace his splits against lefties (.201/.256/.301 as a Padre) with Cabrera’s (.323/.408/.512 over the last two seasons). If we apply the platoon adjustment to Cabrera’s overall slash line, that still gives us a .297/.379/.449 line that we can use as a loose projection for his performance against lefties in Scoresheet. Even if Cabrera falls slightly short of that, when platooning him with Hosmer, we create a first baseman who could perform not much worse than last year’s version of Paul Goldschmidt, but with less power against lefties. You are getting a massive range factor downgrade when Cabrera (1.77) is on the field, but Hosmer’s 1.84 range factor is not too far off Goldschmidt’s (1.88).

Shin-Soo Choo, OF, Rangers

The 37-year-old Choo has been a beacon of consistency over the last three seasons, but even if his performance falls off a little in 2020 (as all of the major projections systems are predicting), his ability to get on base should make him more valuable in Scoresheet than in standard Roto. That is especially true if we can find a suitable platoon partner for him. After adding his platoon adjustment, we can reasonably expect Choo to put up a Scoresheet slash line of .265/.370/.450 against right-handed pitchers.

That’s better, though not dramatically so, than his overall ZIPS projection of .251/.356/.414, but that’s before we pair Choo up with Jordan Luplow. If we add the platoon adjustment to Luplow’s career slash line of .241/.330/.473 (which also approximates his ATC projection for 2020), we get .260/.364/.545. By combining Choo and Luplow into a single outfield spot, we don’t land too far from Bryce Harper’s 2019 splits (.249/.375/.474 vs. RHP, .283/.366/.583), particularly in terms of OBP. Also, against lefties, you are getting an outfielder with a similar range rating to Harper’s.

J.P. Crawford, SS, Mariners

As with Luplow, Crawford’s rate stat projections are hovering around the marks from his relatively brief career, so let’s use his career numbers as a starting point for projecting his 2020 Scoresheet splits against righties. Scoresheet is only bumping up his OBP by eight points, but Crawford is getting a 28-point adjustment to his SLG. We can project that he will have a .231/.328/.395 slash line against righties in Scoresheet. That’s not great, but then again, it’s close to Dansby Swanson’s .240/.320/.414 splits against right-handed pitchers in 2019. Swanson is likely to either be protected or drafted earlier than Crawford, so the similarities provide an opportunity to get a bargain on Crawford and address a position other than shortstop earlier in the draft.

It’s hard what to know to expect from Swanson against lefties, as his results from the last two seasons have diverged greatly. Part of the reason for that is that he posted a 29.6 percent line drive rate against left-handers last season, and it is safe to assume that he is due to hit fewer liners and have a lower batting average against lefties than last year’s .293. Swanson’had a .248/.314/.406 slash line against lefties from the last two seasons combined. If you draft José Peraza as a platoon partner for Crawford, after adjusting his platoon split for Scoresheet, you should get something around a .295/.335/.420 slash line from him against lefties in Scoresheet.

Both offensively and defensively, the combination of Crawford and Peraza should perform about as well as Swanson would as a full-timer. Peraza could actually outperform Swanson against lefties, but we should bear in mind that I may have painted an unnecessarily negative picture of Swanson. Prior to sustaining a heel injury in late July of last season, he had compiled a .265/.330/.468 slash line overall, and while is OBP dropped by only five points, his end-of-season SLG was 46 points lower. Nonetheless, if Swanson was protected in your league, you could draft a Crawford-Peraza combo and probably wind up with a sufficiently close equivalent.