We’re going to do something a little different here. The Bullpen Report guys — Alan Harrison, Benjamin Pasinkoff and Colin Zarzycki — are knee-deep in every bullpen every night, just to update you. So they’re in a great position to rank relievers when it comes to 5×5 roto leagues.
So they’ve got the keys to the car, and now they get to wreck it.
We’re coming to an end of the series! We’ve pushed the consensus bullpen ranks over to the Bullpen Report guys, so they’ll have that to you soon. But for these four rankers, this episode is drawing to a halt. You can find all the updated ranks on your right, linked in that helpful little box.
The ranks, and the comments, have provided us with content for the coming weeks. Thank you for communicating which players are the most divisive. That allows us to know exactly which players we should be breaking down, RotoGraphs style. Add to that our timely coverage of players in the news, and we’re set.
Pitching changes on a dime though. While hitters give us their customary four or five plate appearances in a game, pitchers give us roughly five times that information every time they appear. So it’s fair that we break down every appearance for them and weight recent work heavily. And yet, every pitcher has a baseline, and we know how luck, park and weather factors can influence any one matchup. So we have to keep their careers in mind.
If you’re in a league that designates outfielder slots, this isn’t quite true, but in most leagues: outfielders are the pitchers of the lineup. Not that they hit like pitchers — I wouldn’t wish that on anyone — it’s that they are just ‘outfielders’ and it doesn’t matter if they play center or left or right. That simple fact alone means that there will always be more outfielders. While you have to populate ‘second basemen’ and ‘third basemen,’ you’ll always have this one big pool of outfielders, and you just have to get three of them. You could get three plodding old man outfielders, as long as you got your speed on the infield! And the outfield is the last (okay, second-to-last) resort for bats with no glove.
In any case, there’s some offensive talent here. So much we couldn’t even decide who was number one. (I’m personally not worried about Bud Selig and the papers from that clinic, not with the power of the MLBPA, but Mike Trout is too sexy.) I might be worried about Matt Kemp‘s shoulder, and Jason Heyward‘s insides and maybe Giancarlo Stanton‘s everything?
But, judging mostly on the color coding, it looks like the outfield has mostly been a profitable enterprise.
Should you short stop or just stop short? This year the position feels like it’s an injury magnet, even if the evidence doesn’t necessarily point to shortstops being injured more often.
But there you have Hanley Ramirez, Jose Reyes and Derek Jeter dropping because of injury. That’s allowed players that are not even performing well — Asdrubal Cabrera, I’m looking at you — to move up just because they didn’t go down with an ailment. Health is a thing. Troy Tulowitzki always had number one talent, and his health makes him number one now.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t any superlative performances that have pushed the needle. Ian Desmond is proving last year was no fluke, Josh Rutledge has shown enough power and speed for most of us to believe, and Jean Segura — though not a 25 homer hitting shortstop — has exceeded even our semi-lofty expectations. Maybe Andrelton Simmons will be next.
Third base is slowly creeping up on first base in terms of production. At least in standard twelve team leagues, look at the elite guys. One of them used to be an elite first baseman even. Where you might suffer a little in power when compared to the first basemen, you add a little speed with David Wright and Chase Headley. And where some first basemen make you choose between power and batting average, third base has some guys like Adrian Beltre and Aramis Ramirez that are good in both categories.
That said, once you drop out of the top ten, there’s been plenty of movement. New stars are on the rise — Manny Machado and Nolan Arenado skyrocketed — and some young players have cemented their status — Kyle Seager and Josh Donaldson come to mind. Mike Moustakas is missing some power, Ryan Zimmerman can’t get healthy, and Hanley Ramirez boasts both problems.
Still, this is a position that is likely owned into the low 20s even in twelve-team mixed leagues, because third basemen make decent corner infield fillers, and occasionally even man a utility spot.
Second base. Where you stick your shortstops that fail defensively and your third basemen that can’t hit. Second base, where a little agility can turn a tweener bat into an every day asset. Second base! Where fantasy team dreams go to die.
Second base. Where you hope you’re in a 16-team league or less, because the 17th-best second baseman might not hit .230 the rest of the way. Second base, where a guy like Darwin Barney — who may not hit six homers or steal six bases or hit .280 — may yet figure in to your deep league plans.
I make fun, but at least some sleeper two-baggers have shown us enough to solidify the back end in traditional mixed Leagues. Josh Rutledge has his flaws, but he’s already shown power and speed. Chase Utley has a degenerative knee condition, but he’s doing well for now. Neil Walker and Howie Kendrick haven’t been vintage Neil Walker and Howie Kendrick, but it wouldn’t kill you to run them out there for a while. Especially if you’re waiting for Aaron Hill, who showed enough in a short sample sophomore effort in Arizona to be exciting.
It’s time for the updated catcher ranks.
I do actually like the process of ranking players. It’s enjoyable to weight different inputs, and consider a player’s long-term track record as well as their short-term work. I like taking a look at the few things that stabilize quickly — contact and swing rates, and (soon) batted ball mix — and looking for legitimate change in the early season.
But it does seem to get us all riled up. And that can be exhausting.
It’s cool, it’s the way of the world. But the number one thing that seems to drive a lot of the discussion is power. And almost every power metric takes a long time to stabilize. Hit a couple of home runs and suddenly your ISO looks fine. Drive a few balls and your batted ball distance improves. As the weather improves, the balls go further.
So it’s not that worrisome to me that Jonathan Lucroy‘s power is down. You didn’t own him for power anyway, and he’s still just as likely to hit ten out. Brian McCann doesn’t jump in the rankings because of the homers — well not because of the homers themselves, but because they represent possibly decent health — and Miguel Montero looks to be about the same as ever (with a ground-ball asterisk).
It’s time to update the rankings!
Hopefully these rankings will allow you to find your own buy-low and sell-high opportunities. The disagreements between our different rankers should help. Jeff Zimmerman‘s rankings are largely built upon a mix of Steamer and ZiPs, Zach Sanders has his own secret sauce, and Mike Podhorzer and I are a little more intuitive, even while we both use the projections as a basis. Hopefully we are representative of the different types of fantasy managers out there.
The first basemen shuffled the cards around a bit, but the elite are still the elite… except for one Anthony Rizzo, who is zooming up the ranks. To the point where we are wondering if he’s the number one fantasy first baseman going forward. Well, someone knew it was coming, and yet that same someone wouldn’t yet make Rizzo the number one guy. There are still the matter of his strikeouts and his final batting average.
It looks like Roy Halladay is done — at least for a while, as he is expected to hit the disabled list with a shoulder problem — but the real question is if he is Done. He’s about to turn 36 and he’s aching in the worst body part for a pitcher. Just how bad is this news?
At the beginning of last year, we took some heat for leaving Adrian Gonzalez near the top of the first base rankings. Our reasoning, if I can speak for the consensus ranking crew, was that power takes the longest to stabilize and we didn’t know for sure whether or not the power was going to come back. The player himself said his shoulder didn’t hurt any more. As the season progressed, the truth became more obvious, and he dropped in the rankings.
Going into this season, we had three consecutive half-seasons of evidence that his power was gone. We dropped him in the rankings, and I even made a bet that the other former Padre first baseman — Anthony Rizzo — would outperform him this year. Now the player himself has admitted what we’ve known for a while and suspected for even longer.
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