Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Correction (and Kyle too)

In a previous post, I mentioned that Gary Sheffield was kept. That is not true. That section should have read "Miguel Cabrera, Magglio Ordonez and Curtis Granderson."

Thought I'd clear that up.

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Keeper Review –
Clemens’ Roid Needles

Chosen Keepers
Miguel Cabrera
Magglio Ordonez
Curtis Granderson

Draft Picks Lost
3rd, 17th and 21st round picks

Last Year Fantasy Point Total (position rank)
Cabrera – 730 (4)
Ordonez – 898 (1)
Granderson – 734 (3)

Players Not Kept of Note
Lots.

Thoughts:
Kyle appears to have a slight Tiger bias, eh? All three of these guys are eligible to be kept next season which is a plus for Kyle, but I don’t see him keeping Ordonez another year.

Miguel Cabrera will drive in a lot of runs and score a lot of runs in a loaded Tiger lineup. I do see his home run numbers going down and his double numbers going up in spacious Comerica Park (or whatever it is called now).

I think Ordonez will benefit from all the help in the lineup, which should help hide his declining production. He is a great value pick (17th round), but I think he should have kept a guy like Jimmy Rollins or Brad Penny instead.

Granderson was a great keeper choice and a steal at round 21. To me, that may be the best keeper decision of the all of the keepers who were actually drafted.

4 comments:

King Gus II said...

Granderson was genious, if I do say so myself. That being said, Ben seems to have a huge anti-Magglio bias. Maybe Ben's best friends with Ozzie Guillen or something. Anyways, I offer his Andy Beherns analysis to support the Magglio keep as an equally genious decision:

There's another player we need to discuss here in the introduction – someone who, like Crawford, doesn't fit neatly into any of the groups below. But before we name him, let's just look at a remarkable five-year stretch:


R HR RBI SB AVG
141 36 137 3 .356
142 38 123 0 .342
117 28 139 4 .363
125 32 114 0 .343
124 25 127 4 .369

Pretty incredible, eh? Any guess as to who that is?

Those seasons actually belong to a pair of players who were separated by six decades. The first two years were Ted Williams in 1942 and '46, and the last two were Williams in '47 and '48. The season in the middle was Magglio Ordonez in 2007.

That is how good Ordonez was last year, at age 33. He was so good that you can just slide his stats into the peak years of the greatest hitter who ever lived, and they look like they belong.

Of course Williams also had an on-base percentage of .497 or better in each of those four seasons, and Ordonez didn't really approach that. There are significant differences between their seasons in real terms, just not in 5X5 terms.

So what should we expect from Ordonez at age 34?

It's an important question, since he just completed a season in which he was a top-five overall player in fantasy leagues, yet he's taken late in Round 3 in an average draft.

It's not as if Ordonez had never produced a great year before. In 2002 he scored 116 runs, hit 38 homers, drove in 135 and hit .320 for the White Sox. The Canseco/extortion/PED rumors bother many of you, no doubt, but there's no actionable fantasy intelligence there. Ordonez is also three years removed from that exotic-sounding Austrian shock-wave nonsense that fixed his knee, so a recurrence of those troubles no longer seems like an imminent threat.

The one area where you can reasonably expect a significant decline by Ordonez is in batting average. He somehow managed a .385 batting average on balls-in-play last season, which is both extraordinary and unsustainable. Ordonez can lose 63 points from his AVG, however, and still hit .300. The Tigers lineup produced the second-most runs in the AL last season, and it's likely to be better in 2008. Here's the projected batting order:

Curtis Granderson
Placido Polanco
Gary Sheffield
Magglio Ordonez
Miguel Cabrera
Carlos Guillen
Edgar Renteria
Ivan Rodriguez
Jacque Jones vs. RHP/Marcus Thames vs. LHP

If Ordonez manages to play 150 games next season in that lineup, he's going to have a difficult time avoiding 100 runs and 100 RBI, no matter what happens to his BABIP. For that reason, it's just not reasonable to keep him out of the second tier.

Unknown said...

Im still not sure why some of our keepers this season arent keepable next season...

Also, Kyle youll find that Ben finds SOMETING wrong with everyone that isnt his haha. Last season in fantasy football he gave pretty much everyone on my team a "what if" label...and most of them didnt perform up to par so he was right with the what if...but I ended up tied for the best record and won the league.

Blown Save said...

You're right Kyle, whenever I think about Ted Williams I do immediately follow that thought with Magglio Ordonez. Same player for sure...

King Gus II said...

Not exactly what I was saying. In fact not even my words. Point is, even if Magglio has a significant dropoff from last year, he is still a top 50 player, and getting him in the 17th is a steal.