With the World Series coming to a conclusion, every baseball must now endure the winter with no baseball. The best way for me to brave through these five months is thinking about the game and specifically, evaluating a player’s fantasy baseball value. Last year I wrote my first fantasy and although I’m very proud of the work, there were still silly errors, grammar mistakes and frankly, bad analysis in certain spots. This year I’ve begun the construction of the 2014 guide two months earlier and will be ready to go by the end of February.
Without further adieu below is my first player capsule for Buster Posey. The “RK” refers to the positional rank and are subject to change. The “Player Rater” numbers are positional player rater values taken from ESPN and NFBC.
Bats: R | Age: 27 | Team: Giants | Position: C | RK: 1 | Player Rater: ESPN (7), NFBC (5)
Last year I said it was crazy for Posey to have an ADP of 18.25 (in NFBC) and 17.3 (in ESPN) because he clearly was not going to hit .385/.456/.649 for an extended period of time again and not provide the same value as 2012. Turns out, I was right. Hooray! That said, I still had him rated as the best catcher, which turned out to be wrong. Looking at the baseball cards stats it’s easy to see why he finished so low. His power numbers and batting average decreased to career lows (for a season with at least 100 games played). Before 2013, his career HR/FB rate was 15.5 percent, last year it was 9.7 percent. The amount of ground and fly balls that were hit were essentially the same over his career, which leads me to believe his HR/FB rate should increase towards the 13-14 percent range. Prior to 2013 his career BABIP was .339, but last year it was only .312; obviously it appears he got a little unlucky with balls in play and the manifestation of that is shown through the well hit average (WHAV). In 2010 and 2012 his WHAV was .301 and .288 respectively. However, last year it was only .247. I expect a rebound season where he’ll finish the year with a .310 batting average with 20 home runs.
