Investing & Maybe Fantasy Baseball

It comes with great glee to tell you my rankings and projections are now available for public consumption! You can download the file here or you can find it at the Fantasy Guides page. First thing you should know is the rankings were created based on 15-team mixed league using two catchers and roto scoring. I’m playing mostly in 15-team mixers, which is why the rankings cater to those league settings. Do not worry, 12 and 10 team rankings will be up in a week or so. Also, these rankings are not final as some players have not signed with teams and some players are recovering from injury who have not had any game action yet (I’m looking at you Manny Machado). I’m a conservative ranker with players like Machado until I see them play and/or I read good reports from multiple sources during spring training. If you have any questions about the rankings hit me up on twitter.

What this also means is my player write-ups are all done (all 440 of them), which also means the fantasy guide is almost done. All that’s left are the position summaries and gathering all the data for the player tables. The guide should be ready on March 1.

Last year Pedroia had the lowest home run and stolen base totals since 2007 (I’m excluding 2010 when he only played 75 games) and in the process disappointing his fantasy owners. When evaluating his power, the first thing I noticed was the substantially lower HR/FB rate. The HR/FB rate at home was relatively the same; 7.6 percent compared last year to an 8.6 percent rate (from 2008-12). The biggest drop off came while on the road with a 2.2 percent HR/FB rate last year compared to a 8.1 percent (from 2008-12). Obviously the road HR/FB rate will positively regress, but there are still warning signs his power may be on the decline. For example, other than his rookie year he had the lowest ISO of his career. Maybe that was due to the home runs? Last year he had the lowest extra base hit percentage of his career (table below). The table also shows that the percentage of base hits were still fairly low even if you remove home runs from the equation. Lastly, his ground ball rate was nearly five percentage points higher compared to 2012 and it was the highest of his career. Those four stats are quite alarming and therefore I conclude his power upside in 2014 is going to be limited. Instead of hitting 15-20 home runs I expect his home run totals to be in the 8-14 range.

Another concern is the stolen bases. Not only has his stolen base totals decreased year over year, his stolen base attempts have decreased as well. To his credit, last year was the most games he’s ever played in a season; despite the one year he only played 75 games he’s averaged 141 games played since 2007. The road power should definitely improve next year, but how much? The batting average should be about the same, but is there room for improvement? Probably not given the fact he’s making weaker contact and is hitting the ball on the ground more than ever. He’ll most likely be drafted as the second or third second baseman, but I rather take the upside of a Jason Kipnis or wait for a Howard Kendrick or Omar Infante later in the draft.

If you are looking for his statistical projections please go here and download my latest projections.

Before the season I began I complete wrote off Moss’ 2012 season as a fluke year that will never happen again and that I would be surprised if Moss would get more than 300 plate appearances for the A’s, but obviously I was wrong as he was a borderline top ten first baseman. Moss was able to achieve his .256 batting average in multiple ways. First, the A’s platooned him against left handed pitchers (with Nate Frieman). Second, his strikeout rate reduced 2.5 percentage points from the prior year. Most importantly, the strikeout rate and swing and miss rate (WHIFF) decreased substantially during the second half of the season (table below).

Another reason why he performed better during the second half is the percentage of plate appearances against left handed pitchers dropped. In the first half 19 percent of his plate appearances came against lefties while in the second half it was only 14.7 percent. Based on the data I bet he’ll continue to get less at-bats against lefties, which will suppress his runs and RBIs, but they’ll inflate his batting average. I believe he has room to more than a .256 hitter next year based upon his second half results and the fact the A’s are not going to bat him against lefties. Lastly, what’s extremely interesting is the swing and miss (WHIFF) rate only decreased three percentage points while the strikeout rate a little more than seven percentage points. That tells me he’ll always have a high strikeout rate, but it appears he became more selective at the plate and stopped swinging at “bad” pitches. If he for some reason were to leave Oakland, which is highly unlikely, he would have even more value. Below are his home-road splits the last two seasons (table below). For 2014 I expect 25-30 home runs with 80-plus RBI, 70-plus runs and batting average in the .280 range.

If you are looking for his statistical projections please go here and download my latest projections.