Updated Consensus Ranks: Third Base

May 10, 2012

I’ll be honest with you. Rankings week is a tough week. It seems that everybody zooms in on the rankings of their players and wants them to be better. Most want more reactionary rankings than a site like RotoGraphs is going to give. The difficulty is that it is much more likely that a player’s true talent is the same as it was a month ago, and we do our best to find that true talent.

Of course, there are breakouts. There are role changes. There are injuries. And that’s where most of the movement will come. Third base should provide more movement than most, considering the fact that the position has had more breakouts, role changes and injuries than most. Let’s take a look at them.

We told you that we’d rank the new third baseman as soon as they were third baseman, and in the case of Miguel Cabrera, it seems defensible. He’s probably the worst defensive first basemen to ever move back to third base, and when that ball took a bad hop and hit him in the face in Spring Training, Tigers management could have pulled the plug on the experiment. They didn’t, though, and here we are with Cabrera first and Hanley Ramirez fourth.

The pair of injuries to Pablo Sandoval and Evan Longoria blew a hole right in the front of these rankings, so while Brett Lawrie hasn’t quite started out gangbusters, he’s shown enough to move up along with the rest of the healthy third basemen. Ditto even for the younger third-sackers that ended up behind the injured duo. David Freese, Mike Moustakas, and in-name-only Edwin Encarnacion have all shown enough to think that pre-season projections were a tad light.

Emilio Bonifacio and Martin Prado are sorta BABIP-dependent at the plate, and BABIP doesn’t stabilize this early, but a mediocre BABIP can put their offensive production in focus. But how about the sole two guys that didn’t move — two Pirates, Pedro Alvarez and Casey McGehee, are turning out about as we expected it seems. We always thought that Alvarez would have power and patience with a lot of strikeouts, but in a 5×5 environment, walks don’t correlate with batting average while strikeouts sink it. McGehee is finding time around the diamond. It might be a surprise that he’s managing to accrue about 1/2 to 3/4 the time of a regular, but preseason projections had him at around 500 PAs, so maybe it’s not such a big surprise.

Who do you like better or worse?

FanGraphs Consensus Rankings: Third Base
New	Last	Player Name	Eno Sarris	Mike Podhorzer	Jeff Zimmerman	Zach Sanders
1	NA	Miguel Cabrera	1	1	1	1
2	1	Jose Bautista	2	2	2	2
3	4	David Wright	3	4	5	3
4	NA	Hanley Ramirez	4	3	3	6
5	6	Brett Lawrie	6	6	4	5
6	5	Adrian Beltre	5	5	7	4
7	9	Michael Young	10	9	8	7
8	7	Ryan Zimmerman	7	8	9	10
9	10	Alex Rodriguez	11	10	11	9
10	2	Evan Longoria	8	13	6	20
11	3	Pablo Sandoval	9	14	10	15
12	8	Aramis Ramirez	12	7	13	18
13	17	David Freese	12	17	16	8
14	15	Mike Moustakas	14	12	17	17
15	21	Edwin Encarnacion	17	11	22	12
16	19	Chase Headley	16	20	18	11
17	16	Emilio Bonifacio	15	18	20	13
18	13	Martin Prado	18	15	15	19
19	12	Mark Reynolds	19	16	12	23
20	11	Kevin Youkilis	13	19	14	27
21	NA	Mark Trumbo	21	21	19	14
22	23	Chipper Jones	26	21	23	20
23	18	Daniel Murphy	22	22	21	26
24	35	Mike Aviles	23	27	26	24
25	25	Pedro Alvarez	20	26	32	28
26	30	Chris Davis	25	25	28	30
27	14	Ryan Roberts	29	37	24	25
28	32	Jed Lowrie	24	24	30	40
29	20	Danny Valencia	30	39	25	29
30	26	Placido Polanco	33	28	31	32
31	27	Scott Rolen	28	30	37	34
32	22	Brent Morel	31	36	27	36
33	29	Ian Stewart	32	31	36	31
34	40	Sean Rodriguez	39	29	29	35
35	37	Kyle Seager	27	33	38	37
36	36	Casey McGehee	36	40	34	33
37	34	Chris Johnson	34	32	41	39
38	33	Juan Uribe	35	35	40	41
39	24	Lonnie Chisenhall	37	43	35	38
40	31	Alberto Callaspo	38	41	33	42
41	39	Wilson Betemit	40	34	39	43
42	41	Brandon Inge	41	38	44	46
43	38	Chone Figgins	42	42	43	45
44	28	Jimmy Paredes	43	44	42	44

BAL	CHW	LAA
BOS	CLE	OAK
NYY	DET	SEA
TBR	KCR	TEX
TOR	MIN	HOU

ATL	CHC*	ARI
MIA	CIN	COL
WSN	MIL	LAD
NYM*	PIT	SDP*
PHI	STL	SFG