The Wondertwins

ROUND 18:  Stephen Drew (SS, Diamondbacks)

I open with a quote from Yahoo's Brandon Funston:

What is it about those Drew’s that they end up leaving you wanting when the dust settles.

What is it indeed.  Drew was another one of my high draft picks from last year, on the heels of his excellent 2008 campaign (.291/.333/.502  91/67).  Then in classicly Drew fashion he regressed to a .261/.320/.428 71/65 on a vastly improved Arizona offense.  Somebody slumming the later rounds of a fantasy draft might take this to mean that, on what promises to be an even better Arizona team in 2010, he could see an easy return to form and derive some serious fantasy value from selecting him in the eighteenth round.  Yahoo's position primer page had him in the three-star tier of shortstops, between Jason Bartlett and Elvis Andrus (both taken in round 7).  Andy Beherens went so far as to put him on the "Shortstop I Love" list.

Somebody with a more objective point of view would probably note that the Drew clan is known for its serial disappointment, and that he probably dropped this far for a very good reason.  Brandon Funston had Drew on his "Shortstop I Hate" list.  Now these lists are largely BS, since they never pick anybody even sniffing the top 10 at the position, but the nugget of wisdom quoted above is something to keep in mind.  Even if Drew can slug over .500 again, his position in the batting order, relatively low career OBP, and status as a Drew will prevent him from having one of those tier-jumping seasons.  His current line (.284/.361/.486 14/8) is encouraging, due largely to his improved walk rate and fewer strikeouts.  Of course, he also has a knack for getting the day off during Arizona's best games, such as last night's 12-run explosion.

In the end I expect another typical Drew-ish line, something just far enough above a generic SS replacement to prevent me from making a change, but not enough to crack the top-10.  In other words, when that desert dust settles, I'll still be wanting.  At least this time I paid a fair price.  And I can always hedge my bet with...

ROUND 19:  Alcides Escobar (SS, Brewers)

I considered this pick something of a steal.  Escobar was one of a tandem of highly touted sleepers, along with Everth Cabrera (round 16) who supposedly had blistering speed and a guaranteed starting job.  Given a choice between Escobar, who at the time was projected to bat first or second ahead of Ryan Braun and Prince Fielder, or Cabrera, stuck with the Padres, I wanted Escobar.  He supposedly has .300 BA potential, 40 SB potential, and if he ever developed power he could have been in the Jose Reyes category of electric infielders.

And while all this best-of-times projection is exciting, the reality is that he's a rookie known more for his defensive work, batting 8th in the lineup, posting a .274/.312/.438 11/8 with no stolen bases.  There are promising signs here.  He has a mind-boggling contact rate of 100% on swings outside of the strike zone, and he's at 94% inside the zone.  Overall he's fifth in MLB in contact rates.  The dude just doesn't miss the ball.  Good eye, right?  Well no, he also doesn't walk.  He doesn't strike out much either.  Mainly he just makes contact.  Of his twenty hits, he has three doubles, three triples, and one home run.  This is about 2.4 CLE, or 2.7 MTE (the new Mark Texeira Eq).  Just enough promise to prevent me from dropping him, since he might get moved in the order, might start batting with guys on base, his BABIP could climb above .300, he could start stealing bases, etc.  As it stands now, he's just another prospect warming my bench, but he's a nice asset to hold against Stephen Drew's slumps.

Re: Scott Downs

One of the few benefits of my employment is that I'm generally free all day to monitor baseball-related activities.  Trevor Hoffman just blew his fourth save of the season, and I'm jumping on Mikwaukee 8th inning disaster LaTroy Hawkins to possibly slide into the closer role.  Best case scenario, I have my third closer.  Worst case, Hawkins and Downs are basically the same awful pitcher at this point and I'm not losing anything.

In other Brewer news, Ryan Braun hasn't had an extra base hit in seven games.  I don't think my team has so much as a double yet this week.

Draft quick-hits

ROUND 16:  Scott Downs (RP, Blue Jays)

With the Toronto closer battle still in turmoil, I took a guess on who'd emerge victorious.  Downs had the role part-time last year and wasn't bad.  He also had the best spring stats of the three relievers in contention.  Little did I know that spring-failure Kevin Gregg would eventually win out, selected two rounds later.  Oh well.  I'll probably drop him when I can jump the gun on the next closer-out-of-nowhere, assuming it doesn't happen at 3am on thefourteenthbaseballrelatedwebsitethatmikereadshourly.com.

ROUND 17:  Aroldis Chapman (SP, Reds AAA-affiliate)

The $30 million dollar man is doing roughly what you would expect from an imported phenom arm in AAA:  0.60 ERA, with 10 walks and 18 strikeouts in 15 innings.  He spends so much time nipping at corners with his fastball (still occasionally clocked at 100mph) and above-average slider that he ends up walking a ton of batters and running up his pitch count so high that he's almost always out of the game by the 5th inning.  It's tough to guess how his game will translate to the majors.  There have always been power arms who've succeeded on basically two pitches.  Randy Johnson spent nineteen years hurling nothing but FB/SL combinations, until he tried working a splitter into his arsenal in 2007.  Mariano Rivera was a 97% fastball pitcher until he discovered the cutter in 2004, and now he's a 95% cutter thrower.  Josh Johnson, Ervin Santana, Matt Garza, Jonathan Sanchez (he will haunt me this entire season) etc.  It can work.  AJ Burnett is fastball/changeup and he hasn't exactly been a disaster.

Of course there are some failures.  Johnny Cueto, cuban import, 90% FB/SL.  Fausto Carmona.  Scott Kazmir.  Mark Redman and Brett Tomko and Vicente Padilla and Matt Clement and I'm not going to look these guys up but I'm guessing probably also Rick Ankiel and the older versions of Carlos Silva and John Rocker.

By all accounts, the changeup is Chapman's wild pitch.  I have a personal theory that Chapman's location is off in AAA because he's working on that changeup and throwing it more than he would in the bigs, and that when called up his pitch splits will look like Josh Johnson's (in the 65/25/10 range) or at the very least comparable to other high-velocity arms (55/25/20) like Ubaldo Jimenez,  Jorge de la Rosa, and Clay Buchholz (and Sabathia and Liriano and the list goes on).  This theory also helps me sleep at night when I should otherwise be terrified of owning both Brian Matusz and his wilder Cuban cousin.

I drafted Chapman here because the list of astounding and immediately fantasy-viable prospects this year was very short.  It looked basically like this:  Jason Heyward, Stephen Strasburg, and Aroldis Chapman.  These three had all the spring hype, were posting gaudy spring training stats, and each had a reasonable shot of actually starting the season in the majors.  If he hadn't had a minor back spasm, Chapman probably would have been the Reds fifth starter, though I suppose looking back I should be thankful Chapman's had the opportunity to avoid the Reds' poor April.  I will naturally regret watching Liriano (my first pick last year) go ahead of him and begin the season in Madden-style FU mode.  But since everybody else seemed to be filling in their final lineup holes (Nolan Reimold?  Corey Hart?!)  I wanted to take my pull on the hype slot machine here instead of in Mat Latos land.  I was still confidant that I'd land my shortstop.

In which I pretend all Japanese pitchers are the same.

ROUND 15:  Hiroki Kuroda (SP, Dodgers)

Almost everybody in this round was some variety of injury or new-team comeback story hoping to happen.  If round 14 was everybody rolling the dice on the game's top prospects and feel-good stories, round 15 demonstrated that the talent pool is shallow.  This is also, of course, where fantasy seasons are won and lost, so making the best educated guesses here is important.

I want to note here that, at the time of the draft, Matt Capps was radioactive in spring training and nobody had any real idea what was going on in Toronto, since Gregg, Downs, and Frasor were all still undrafted at this point.  The closer pool was essentially closed.  I still wasn't taking shortstops for the same reason I've ignored them for ten rounds.  This left only my fifth starting pitcher to pluck from the bottom of this murky barrel.  Having gone to the AL for my last three starters, I felt some pressure here to hedge my bets by not only selecting an NL player but also deviating from the Scherzer/Matusz gamble of high-strikeout high-WHIP, opting instead to seek out a more conservative source of outs, maybe somebody with a longer track record to use to justify the selection post-hoc when Wade Davis or Gio Gonzalez or whatever rookies of the year start tearing up the league and make their owners look like fucking geniuses.

Scanning down the list of players taken in the remainder of the draft, here's the list of remaining NL starters with at least two MLB seasons under their belts, and a quick note about them and their 2010 performances thus far:

Hiroki Kuroda:  His 2009 season was cut short due to non-arm-related injuries, but he still squeezed in 117 innings of 8-7 ball for the Dodgers, posting a 1.14 WHIP (primarily by only walking 1.84 batters per nine innings) with an ERA under four.  He's presently 2-0 with a 2.18 ERA and 1.21 WHIP.

Chris Young:  Has been injured his entire career, and is in fact on the DL as I type this now, having gotten through six whole innings of work before shoulder inflammation.

Clayton Richard:  Has never gone over 90 innings in his career, and is currently winless with bad stats.

Paul Maholm:  Has started 31 games the past two seasons, which were all rubbish.  Currently has a 4.74 ERA, which leads all Pirates starters.

Joe Blanton:  Hasn't pitched an inning this season, but was drafted nonetheless.

Johnny Cueto:  Winless, 1.59 WHIP

So you can see where I'm going with this.  In my extremely narrow list of NL-non-rookies that stops immediately before Brad Penny, I seem to have made the right pick.  This however doesn't forgive me the oversight of the litany of AL pitchers having equally impressive or better seasons to date, like Andy Pettitte, Jeff Niemann, Carl Pavano, Wade Davis, Shaun Marcum, and Ricky Romero, all of whom went entire rounds later.  In a longer-term sense, I don't think we'll have a decent understanding of how the first month performances of any of these guys translates over the course of a full season, but I can still try to analyze what I've got.

Aside from the superficially excellent stats listed above, his 7.89 K/9 is nearly 1.7 above his career average.  His 1.31 BB/9 is half a walk lower than his career tally.  3.03 FIP suggests he's been lucky but still very good (.332 BABIP supports the unlucky bit).  Of his ten runs allowed this season, five have been unearned.  He's always been a ground ball pitcher, but this year even moreso (57.1% vs. 49.5%).  The biggest change this year seems to be in his pitch selection.  His traditional 60/25/10 split for fastball, slider, split-finger has become 43/35/22.  Maybe the increased emphasis on breaking balls accounts for the higher strikeout and ground ball totals, or maybe he just had good outings against K-happy teams like Arizona and Florida (second and fifth in MLB, respectively, for strikeout totals).

The unknown factor here is that Kuroda is 35 this year, an advanced age for pitchers, especially Japanese ones.  You hardly ever see statistical improvement at this stage in a career (if they're even in the league at all).  But we also don't really know what Kuroda can do in a full MLB season on a competent team.  He went 8-7 in two thirds of a season in 2009, and 9-10 for a 2008 Dodgers team that was 24th in the league in runs (but had the best bullpen in baseball by various metrics).  What are his comps?  What would PECOTA do?

Hideo Nomo is the original Japanese pitching success story.  Nomo was a beast in Japan, going 18-8 and striking out 287 hittiers in 235 innings during his rookie season, and continuing that success throughout his career there.  By the time he was 35 and pitching in the US,  Nomo had a pair of 16-win seasons with a low-3 ERA for the Dodgers.  He capped that last season with shoulder surgery and was a non-factor in baseball forevermore.

Shigetoshi Hasegawa was the 1991 NPB rookie of the year and had a respectable Japanese career.  His age 35 season for the Mariners resulted in a 5.16 ERA, and he was out of the league by 37.

Hideki Irabu held the title of the fastest pitch in professional Japanese baseball until 2005, and was basically the NPB's Lincecum for roughly seven years.  He then came to the Yankees at age 28 and was immediately and uniformly awful and washed out of baseball by 33.  Career ERA: 5.15.  Guess those magnets didn't help.

Masato Yoshii debuted for the Mets at age 33, and his ERAs over the next three years were:  3.93, 4.40, 5.86.  Out of the league by 37.  Did he have shoulder surgery?  Of course he did.

Masao Kida was the Japanese Eric Gagne, but his entire MLB career (beginning at age 31) consisted of 95 innings of 5.83 ERA baseball and one car accident, and he was arguably done before the accident.

Tomo Ohka sadly never made it to 35.  His final stint in the bigs resulted in a 5.79 ERA, three years after his own personal arm surgery.

Kaz Ishii, 1,277 strikeouts in 1,184 innings in Japan with a no-hitter in the books.  Face surgery age 29, out of the league by 32.  Career ERA:  4.44

Kei Igawa, won Japan's equivalent of the Cy Young and had a NPB-career 3.13 ERA.  72 innings of 6.66 ERA baseball for the Yankees, washed out of the US, didn't even make it to his 30+ career-ending surgery.

Hiroki Kuroda's best Japanese season came in 2004, when he posted a league-best 1.85 ERA and won various video-game-sounding awards through 2006.  He didn't even come to the US until age 33.  He's currently 35 and to date hasn't had arm or shoulder surgery.  His career line with the Dodgers is 3.64 ERA, 1.19 WHIP, 6.19 K/9, 19 wins and 17 losses.  His final year in Japan looked like this:  3.56 ERA, 1.21 WHIP, 6.16 K/9, 12 wins, and 8 losses.  You tell me what the comp is, because I don't have a BP subscription.

It's not over until the fat lady swings.

ROUND 14: Geovany Soto (C, Cubs)

I found round 14 to be the most interesting part of the draft, in retrospect. Everybody seemed to be taking chances here, whether on rookie phenoms (Heyward, Strasburg), potential one-year-wonders (Prado, Garrett Jones, Scutaro), or restoration projects (Webb, Wood, Price, Soto). To be honest, I would have been happy with any of the players that went here.

I knew I didn't have to take a starting pitcher here because Fabian already had about twenty seven of them. With all the closers not named Matt Capps gone (Lindstrom wasn't projected at the time to have the closing gig), I had to look at filling some positional needs. SS was still open, but everyone had theirs and we weren't at the point of drafting bench players, so I could wait. I would normally have been happy drafting a catcher in round 21 like I did last year (Navarro, eventually dumped for Miguel Montero) because usually down this far they're all the same, but Geo Soto was still on the board.

Yahoo's stable of professional fantasy guessers ranked Soto between 6th and 8th, for catchers during the preseason, ahead of players that had already been selected (Napoli [this round], Suzuki [round 9!], and Russell Martin [round 7, wtf]). This is probably because, in the sphere of paid fantasy writing, the reputation penalty for missing a stud/rebound is far worse than the penalty for overselling a sleeper/washed-up-star. Everybody remembers the big out-of-nowhere picks and ascensions to greatness. Nobody will remember this same brain trust declaring Brandon Phillips the fourth best second baseman in MLB, ahead of Cano and Zobrist. This is why every Matthew Berry column or podcast or chat is nothing but a laundry list of "I'm high on Chris Davis", "I'm in on Heyward for .280/30/100", etc, but nobody's column cautions about Brad Penny or Yunel Escobar or Michael Young or anybody that hasn't already been abysmal for three years. So despite Soto's pedestrian .218/.321/.381 last year in over a hundred games, his rookie stats (.285/.364/.504) demonstrated enough potential that he qualifies for fantasy analyst ball-licking for at least another year or two.

Is there something tangible to hang this on? Soto's 2009 campaign was poor by even catcher standards. According to the new stat I just submitted to fangraphs.com, that season was worth about 2.8 CLEs (Carlos Lee Equivalency units), which is towards the bottom of the scale for paid professional baseball players at the major league level. Scott Pianowski claims that Soto's improved batting eye is proof positive of good things in 2010, enough to rank him second in the "Catchers I Love" column, behind heavy 2010 disappointment Miguel Montero. Did Soto's 2009 batting eye demonstrate improvement over 2008?

His walk rate increased from 11.0% to 12.9%. Is this a significant increase? His strikeout rate decreased from 24.5% to 23.3%. I guess you could point to this wafer-thin lining of silver and claim an improved batting eye, but then you'd also be ignoring pitcher trends across these two seasons. In 2009, Soto saw more fastballs and cutters than 2008, and fewer offspeed pitches. It suggests that pitchers challenged Soto a bit more in 2009 (or that the cutter is spreading like wildfire), which, given his weight issues that season, was probably a good idea. Some fatties can really turn on a fastball, but most fall behind. But this isn't the whole story.

Fangraphs tracks contact trends, for balls and strikes. As it turns out, Soto really did swing at fewer balls outside of the strike zone (17.8% of them, versus 20.1%) and increased his in-the-strike-zone contact rates four percentage points. He also cut his swing-and-misses by almost a fifth. What do you know, Scott Pianowski actually did some homework and didn't just pull a factoid out of his ass for a column on a deadline.

Of course I didn't actually perform this analysis myself before the draft. I had no fucking clue about anything in the world of Geovany Soto, had never seen him play, never seen him swing a bat, never saw his tremendous girth rippling in the soft Chicago breeze. But hey, Pianowski says he's primed for a good season, and Brad Evans says he lost weight over the winter by remembering he's a paid professional athlete and actually exercising and monitoring his food intake. Crazy. I just knew that Soto had upside, and the next catcher on the list (Doumit) had injury concerns I didn't want to bother with. Soto was the last catcher on the board guaranteed a majority of his team's playing time, and now he's mine.

This meant he'd start his 2010 season in the same slump as Teixeira, Lee, Phillips, Escobar, Abreu...basically all of my hitters except Braun and Crawford. His first week resulted in a .286 OBP, .091 SLG, no RBI no run no SB flop, otherwise known as 1.7 CLE. He had one hit and three walks, though those walks seem to be forming a trend. Since that first week ended on the 11th, Soto has been on base every game he's played, with 14 hits and 12 walks in 11 games. His current line is .349/.517/.512. A higher OBP than SLG is an obvious red flag. Surely his batting eye hasn't become Bonds-esque.

His walk rate is an astounding 25.9%, the best in the majors for everyday players that weren't called up last friday. He's nearly doubled his line drive rate (a whole lot of singles) and more than doubled his HR/FB rate. The two possible outcomes here are: 1) Geovany Soto is the second coming of Babe Ruth, and 2) It's early in the season and this is all largely meaningless to make projections on, especially immediately after a hot week. After all, Colby Rasmus and Kelly Johnson are in the top 5 batters in various metrics. Soto will come back down to earth eventually. His BABIP is .433, third in baseball behind Austin Jackson and Martin Prado, so a regression is clearly coming. However, his patience at the plate is promising, and in the end if he can climb his way out of 8th in the lineup (he's been 7th the past few games) and put himself in a position for better counting stats, I'll consider Soto a steal in the 14th round.

Deep Sleeper Alert

ROUND 13:  Brian Matusz (SP, Orioles)

On cue, Mike sounded the sleeper alert system (perhaps appropriately, passing on Jonathan Sanchez again to take a rookie in the AL East) but I'll stand behind the selection.  Our draft occured roughly one week before the internet prognostication regarding EOY awards crowned Matusz as the consensus pick for the AL rookie of the year, and the dude plays for the Orioles, so I won't blame the room for not knowing his name yet.  Here are the facts:

• Matusz was called up to the majors late in 2009, where he went 5-2 for the lowly O's, striking out 38 in 44 IP.
• His .343 BABIP was abnormally high, suggesting a better performance in 2010
• He was lights out in spring training.
• Unlike most young strikeout arms, Matusz has four pitches, and doesn't necessarily have to rely on an overpowering fastball.
• He posted a 4.63 ERA with a 1.48 WHIP in 2009.
• He was giving up 1.29 homeruns per 9 innings last year.
• He doesn't have an overpowering fastball, averaging about 91 MPH.

Given the way that pitching continued to be heavily drafted, even here in the middle rounds, I had no faith that there would be any of these high-K guys left by the end of round 14, so I had to take one here.  I went with Matusz instead of Sanchez because...fuck, I don't really know.  There's no particularly good reason.  I wasn't sure the Giants could put up decent run support, but, it's not like Baltimore is lighting anything up except crack pipes.  Now I have to root for the Orioles and the Red Sox every fifth day.

I suppose David Price was also in the running here, but beyond a little seasoning there's not much difference between two AL East young arms.  His 2009 wasn't any more hope-inspiring than Matusz's.  All three names mentioned here are better than the other SPs that went in similar rounds, whether due to poor outlooks or concerns about playing time (Buehrle, Webb, Ervin Santana, Strasburg).

As of today, Matusz isn't pitching poorly.  9.85 K/9 is precisely why he was drafted.  The baggage is the 4.38 ERA and 1.30 WHIP.  He lacked control in his first start, leading to five walks, but then he only gave up five walks in his next twenty innings.  His BABIP remains high (.330), and FIP remains low (2.70) so there's hope for tomorrow, in the sense of that statistically wonky style of hope that inflicts professional fantasy baseball writers into rosy projections of every MLB player under the age of 32.  He's 2-0 for the Orioles, and in the interests of looking on the bright side of a glaring midround oversight, I consider those two wins icing on an unfinished cake.

Draft part 2: Prospecting

ROUND 12:  Max Scherzer (SP, Tigers)

Round 11 began an interesting split in pitcher philosophies.  On one side, you have owners like me happy to live in the realm of the High WHIP Strikeout Pitcher.  Guys in the 1.35 WHIP neighborhood with a reasonable shot at 9.0 K/IP.  Names like Zambrano, Scherzer, Matusz, Buchholz, De La Rosa, Kazmir, Sanchez, and Ervin Santana.  On the flip side are the Low WHIP Contact Pitchers:  Randy Wolf, Rowland-Smith, Happ, Wells, Correia, Hudson, etc.

As an overall strategy I think, once you're in this zone of 3rd and 4th pitchers, there's more fantasy value in the upside of a high-K guy than in the low-K guys.  It just seems that the high strikeout crowd is more likely to strike gold and develop into SP1/SP2 type talents.  Besides, free agency always seems to have two or three of the low-WHIP type of pitchers available for plug-and-play if you're sick of Hiroki Kuroda after six weeks, but strikeouts are never left sitting around.

SP was the right call for me here considering the state of my roster.  The outfielders coming off the board here have some upside, but I'd already filled OF and UTIL, and I regret losing that flexibility.  However, I don't regret missing the opportunity to draft a slugger like Alexei Ramirez.  SS just isn't a pressing need once you're this far down the draft sheet.  There were two worthwhile catchers still remaining, but I had to lock in some pitchers before I was stuck clicking names like Pineiro and Harang.

So far this season, Scherzer's got a 2.63 ERA and 1.17 WHIP, which is fantastic for a 12th round pick.  The drop in his K/9 (6.38, against 9.24 lifetime) is slightly concerning, with two low-K performances against the Royals, but his walks are also down (2.63 per 9).  Assuming his arm strength holds up for the entire year, I anticipate his K-rate to rise towards his career average, and eventually the Tigers bullpen will stop blowing his leads.

Verdict:  No regrets
Hindsight:  Jonathan Sanchez has better stuff, better stats this year, and pitches in the NL.

The draft and WTF was I thinking.

I didn't have a firm strategy for this year's draft beyond placing a greater emphasis on hitting than years past.  Each season I seem to end up plucking good pitching from free agency and then witnessing my team's annual early- and late-season hitting slumps destroy my scores.  If I had to commit to general guidelines for my pre-draft meditations:

1) Get better hitters.
2) Don't be afraid to draft value while everyone else is reaching.
3) Don't be afraid to reach for pitchers if you get a good feeling.
4) Try to find a way to stop slumming free agency for middle infielders.
5) Don't get caught on the ass-end of a closer run.
6) Fuck Fabian over whenever possible.

So, thus equipped with my banal mantras and outdated magazine, we began.

ROUND 4: Johan Santana (SP. Mets)

So much for hitting.  A surprising number of pitchers were keepers, and then Wainright and King Felix went early at the start.  I knew that if I wanted to entertain the concept of having a single staff ace, I'd need to select a pitcher here.  My options were:  Guys from the AL East, the guy pitching in Coors Field, and guys in the NL East.  Playing the odds, it basically came down to Santana (recovering from surgery and whatever strange affliction plagues the Mets clubhouse), Josh Johnson (owned last year, loved), and Tommy Hanson (acquired last year for a cheeseburger, loved).  Of course I picked the 30 year old coming off arm surgery.  Of fucking course I did.  I want to say it's because I couldn't yet trust this high a draft pick to two guys that have only pitched at the ace level for one (or one half) year, but really I just choked.  Johnson should have been the pick here.

I should note that I desperately wanted to get one of the stud 3B or 2B that weren't kept, like Sandoval or Reynolds or Hill or Zobrist, but everyone else was a step and half-dozen draft positions ahead of me.

Season line to date: 2-1, 2.59 ERA, 1.11 WHIP, 22 K
Verdict:  Paying off
Hindsight is 20/20: Ubaldo Jimenez (Drafted last year, dropped mid-season.  This will become a theme.)

ROUND 5: Brandon Phillips (2B, Reds)


This pick is purely adherence to guideline number 4.  I didn't want to have to wait through another two rounds, fingers crossed that I could catch a winner like Dan Uggla on the rebound, or otherwise once again spam refresh on Yahoo's research tab looking for this year's Martin Prado (who seems to be Ty Wiggington, free agent).  His stats have been declining for three or four years, he plays for an awful team, and he was clearly option six at this point in the draft.  There's some upside in that he's batting cleanup for the Reds, and he's good for at least 20 stolen bases.

Season line to date:  .217/.299/.377, 9 RBI, 9 runs, 1 SB
Verdict:  Epic fail
Hindsight is 20/20:  Jayson Werth

ROUND 6:  Bobby Abreu (OF, Angels)

I already had two outfielders, so this was just a value pick.  Abreu had dropped pretty far, and had comparable numbers (or better) to the five other outfielders that were taken since my Phillips pick.  There were no appetizing third basemen or shortstops here either, so outfield was the only decent place to go.  I understand there's an age concern, but the man's been putting up identical stats for a decade.  Surely at 36 he can still turn on a fastball and steal thirty bases.  Right?  Fuck.

I would have liked another pitcher at this point, but they were all going going gone.  We were in Billingsley/Peavy/Baker territory when my turn came around, and I wasn't particularly interested in the damaged goods of the second tier.  Nolasco and Kershaw, sure, but they were gone.   By the way, the triumvirate I listed that sandwiched my Abreu pick?  Averaging a 6.51 ERA.  Further note:  I knew Fabian didn't have any outfielders at this point.

Season line to date:  .270/.316/.446, 9 RBI, 9 runs, 2 SB
Verdict:  Could have been worse.  He's been better lately, and going pitcher wouldn't have been any better.
Hindsight:  Nelson Cruz.  He's everything Abreu was:  Power, speed, in his 30s.

ROUND 7:  Jonathan Broxton (RP, Dodgers)

There were going to be twenty four picks between this and my next one, so I had to make it count.  At this point not a single RP had come off the board, so the time seemed right.  Of the upper echelon of closers, Rivera is old, Papelbon is unstable, Wilson and Soria play for awful teams.  Broxton was the right call.  It also began a closer run that saw guys like Brian Wilson, Bell, and Marmol get called while, say, Carlos Pena was still around.  It was supposed to help keep the talent pool inflated long enough for me to scrape something of value off the edges on the flip side of the round when I had two picks nearly in a row.

Season:  0.00 ERA, 0.57 WHIP, 1 save, 11K
Verdict:  The lack of save opportunities isn't his fault.  Worth his tremendous weight.
Hindsight:  Brett Anderson was interesting, but unproven.

ROUND 8:  Carlos Lee (OF, Weight Watchers)
ROUND 9:  John Lackey (SP, Red Sox)

Lee is batting a robust .143/.169/.175, which I think is similar to the statistics Prince Fielder could put up if he batted without a bat and just kind of gyrated his stomach over the plate and tried to beat out the throw and his personal seismic activity following him down the first base line.  I thought I was getting amazing value.  He's only 33, and compared to the other hitters selected before him (Shane Victorino, Yunel Escobar, Brian Roberts) I thought I'd do the smart thing by avoiding the dime-a-dozen powerless middle infielders and speedy powerless outfielders.  There are signs of life (he hit a triple today, which gives him more triples [1] than home runs) but this is somewhat like saying finding a single microbe on Mars is a sign of life.

Lackey's stats are on the wrong side of everything, and frankly I don't want to type about them.  His strikeouts are down, his hits are up, and obviously getting a second life in Boston just means that you're a fucking undead zombie thing living in Boston, and pitching in the AL East.  Also, I hate having to root for the Sox every five days.

Verdict:  Referenced above.
Hindsight:  Michael Cuddyer and Roy Oswalt

ROUND 10: Jose Valverde (RP, Tigers)

Needs, at this point:  C, SS, 3B, SP, RP

I was disappointed to see Posada go last round, because we were getting into dire catcher territory, with terribly few names remaining that were a step above the generic catcher line:  .240/.280/.360  55 rbi, 45 runs.  Everybody already reached for their shortstops at this point so I felt safe ignoring them.  Third base would be taken care of after Fabian's picks.  No good starting pitchers were taken in the next two rounds, so I'm vindicated in not taking one here.  Locking up a second closer seemed like the right idea, and Valverde is in the tier of closers that wouldn't start the season immediately in a closer battle with the setup guy.

Line:  1.13 ERA, 1.10 WHIP, 5 saves, 4 K (yikes)
Verdict:  Just about right
Hindsight:  Would do it the same a second time

ROUND 11:  Chipper Jones (DL, Braves)

 I took a lot of heat for this pick in the draft room.  I just want to say that:
1) This is round 11.
2) Chone Figgins and Gordon Beckham went before this guy, and look how that's working out.
3) Cantu.  Who knew?  (Hint:  He'd been on my team the past two years.  Fuck me.)

Despite pulling a muscle and apparently hurting the right side of his hip this weekend, Chipper's not doing badly.  That he doesn't seem to have anyone ahead of him on base ever isn't his fault, it's Yunel Escobar's.  I'd expect the RBI total to rise, provided he continues hitting at this pace and doesn't resume deconstructing the lower half of his body during BP.

Season:  .283/.421/.500, 5 RBI, 10 runs, 2 SB
Verdict:  Good, not great, but my hole needed filling
Hindsight:  Ian Stewart or Cantu.

STATUS REPORT

C:
1B: Mark Teixeira (Good thing I didn't draft any slow starters..) 
2B:  Brandon Phillips, aka Where RBIs Go to Die
SS: 
3B:  Chipper Jones
OF:  Ryan Braun
OF: Carl Crawford
OF: Bobby Abreu
UTIL: Carlos Lee
SP: Johan Santana (arm surgery)
SP: John Lackey (2009 arm woes)
SP:
SP:
SP:
RP: Jonathan Broxton
RP: Jose Valverde
RP:
RP:
Bx3:

Thinking at the time:  I have a lot of speed and power, this is exactly what I wanted.  Now I can focus on some sleeper SPs while everyone else scrambles for twiggy outfielders.

Thinking now:  All my drafted hitters are having the worst slumps of their careers, my best closer has no saves, and my second best closer and starter can't strike anyone out.  Might be time for the annual desperation team name change.

Second half coming later.

Introduction

Primary [initial] function:  A place to offhandedly type out my thoughts and concerns about the 2010 fantasy baseball season without feeling like I'm interrupting someone's busy evening with pretty mundane shit.

Secondary function:  All-purpose blog and repository of interesting finds.  Twitter seems like the wrong tool, and Facebook is certainly the wrong venue.  If prior history is any indication, posting about Geovany Soto would result in my mother offering me tickets to the next Cubs-Reds game.