Tag Archives: Taijuan Walker

The No. 1 Prospect For 2014 Is …

by Ben Carsley

In preparation for our highly successful and critically acclaimed A Podcast For Your Eyes debut last week, our Benevolent Dictator Bret Goodwin asked Craig and myself to create individual Top 10 lists for 2014.

While I was initially glad to accept my assignment simply because I find these things enjoyable, I was surprised to find that it’s actually a pretty useful exercise, too. If you want to really put a prospect under a microscope and truly weight his upside, what better way than to ask yourself if you could ever see that man topping a list of all players in the minors?

I’ve carried that idea to its logical conclusion here, and am bringing you eight players I think could rank No. 1 over all on Top 100 or 101 or 150 lists before the 2014 season. The first four names might make you say “duh,” but reasoning is provided. The following four might surprise you, and reasoning is provided here as well. My Top 150 rankings from my 2013 list are in parentheses.

The Frontrunners

Xander Bogaerts, SS, BOS (3)

I’m not sure if you guys know this, but I’m actually sort of high on Bogaerts. All he did last season was decide to post a wRC+ of 144 in High-A and of 159 in Double-A as a 19-year-old, all while convincing many that he can at least begin his career at shortstop. That’s, like, really good. I don’t think he sees a ton of MLB this season because there are two capable players head of him in Stephen Drew and Jose Iglesias, and if he does switch positions he’ll need time to adjust as well. But if Bogaerts is still prospect eligible next season and he still profiles as a shortstop, he’s almost guaranteed to top my list. Continue reading →

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A Podcast For Your Eyes: The 2014 Top 10 Fantasy Prospects Edition

by The Dynasty Guru

As I hinted at in yesterday’s post on projecting the Top 10 fantasy prospects at this time next year, Ben, Craig and I tried something interesting on Wednesday night as we sat down on gchat and conversed for almost an hour and a half about the topic at hand. The following conversation has not been edited, abridged or otherwise touched (besides cleaning up our names so that it’s easier to read).

Without any further introduction, I present to you the Episode 1 of A Podcast For Your Eyes. If you like it, tell us and we’ll do them more often. If you don’t, tell us and we’ll forget this whole thing ever happened. And we’re off..

Bret:  whats going on guys?

Craig:  watching O’s/Rays over here

Ben:  watching NYY/BOS

Craig:  also eating a peanut butter and jam sandwich, because I’m 12

Bret:  i’m watching the mets start their WS run

Ben:  sooo playing MLB the show?

Craig:  I was going to say…can we have a moment of silence for Bret’s sanity?

Bret:  my sanity has been missing for a long time

Craig:  touche

Bret:  alright, so you guys have the consensus list, right?

Craig:  yes but I just dripped jelly on my shirt so I’m in crisis here

Bret:  save that gold for when we’re “recording”

Craig:  hahaha. ok problem solved, but you feel free to include it

Bret:  fair enough, i’m going to do an introduction, and then we’re just going to jump right in and ben and i can fawn over xander bogaerts

Ben:  im super good at fawning over bogaerts

Bret:  ha, i’m sure you are. alright, let’s do this

Continue reading →

Predicting the Top 10 Fantasy Prospects For 2014

by The Dynasty Guru

With the minor league season kicking off today, we wanted to do something fun here at The Dynasty Guru. And that something fun started with a rather innocent question to the rest of the staff: who do you think will be the Top 10 Fantasy Prospects on next year’s list?

I can’t speak for the thought process of the rest of the guys (see the bottom of the post for more details on that), but when I sat down to come up with my individual list, it was a bit of a balancing act between performance and PERFORMANCE. Hear me out for a second. You have a bunch of guys who are going to start the year in the upper minors, but if they perform extremely well, they could force their team’s hand and get them a call up this summer, which would result in them losing their prospect list eligibility. On the other hand, if they stink, they’re not going to be worthy of being in the top-10 for a whole other reason.

For my money, I made the assumption that all of the big names at the top of the 2013 list (Profar, Taveras, Hamilton, Myers and Bundy) would all lose their eligibility for 2014. Same for other top-20 pitchers such as Gerrit Cole, Zack Wheeler, Shelby Miller and Jose Fernandez.

So here’s what we did. I collected the individual top-10′s from Craig, Ben and Ian and made a TDG collective top-10. For any prospect to make the group top-10, they had to be on at least two of our individual lists. Each player also received a two-point bonus for each list they appeared on. And the following is what the process churned out – your 2014 Top 10 Fantasy Prospects:

Continue reading →

Ben’s Eleven Bold Predictions

by Ben Carsley

As a prospect writer, I’m wrong on the World Wide Web all the time.

“Casey Kelly makes a smart late-round pick this year,” I will write one week before we lose him to injury. “Adam Eaton can grab you 30 cheap steals,” I opine before his elbow acts up. “Devin Mesoraco will be a Top 12 Fantasy catcher this year,” is a sentence linked to my name from 2012.

You have to be willing to look bad sometimes to do this on a regular basis. It’s just the nature of the beast. So when Bret asked if I wanted to make 11 specific predictions about the 2013 season, my reaction was a simple one: how bad could it be?

Here’s what I think will happen as Opening Day nears. This article will self destruct in mid-June.

1. Shelby Miller will win 15 games for the Cardinals this season, to go along with an ERA in the mid-3.00s and 190 strikeouts in 180 innings. The Cardinals are a good team and Miller is a good prospect, so perhaps this isn’t super bold, but when you consider just how good the stat line I offered up is, this prediction should count. He’s really good, even if he’s overshadowed by the likes of Oscar Taveras. In related news, I have Miller in all but one of my redraft leagues this season. Happyface.

Continue reading →

The Top 225 Dynasty League Starting Pitchers, Part 1 (#1-50)

by The Dynasty Guru

There are nearly a million ways to construct a starting staff for your dynasty league team. However, I cannot stress how important it is (especially for starting pitchers) to know your league’s scoring system inside and out. The rankings you’ll find below are for a standard 5×5 rotisserie league, but more and more leagues are switching over to a points format, which makes pitcher valuations a little trickier. Does your scoring system value overvalue or undervalue strikeouts? Does it give a lot of weight to wins, losses and quality starts, or not? How important is it for a starter to accumulate 225+ innings? The easiest way for you to determine where you can take advantage of your scoring system is by looking at previous season totals and comparing them to standard 5×5 end of season valuations (like the ESPN Player Rater). No matter how sharp the guys in your league are, there’s always room for arbitrage.

There is a lot of great information out there, when it comes to individual starting pitcher analysis, but nothing more comprehensive than Paul Sporer’s Starting Pitching Guide. If you don’t know what it’s about, check out the link here. And if you do, and haven’t ordered it yet (like I have), you’re starting out at a disadvantage. He’s running a 33% discount off the regular price, which you can get if you order it before my dynasty league rankings are complete on February 14th.

And now your top 50 dynasty league starters, with commentary:

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The Top 150 Dynasty League Prospects, Part 5 (#30-1)

by The Dynasty Guru

Today is Day Five. Over the next 27 days, this site will be dedicated almost solely to the task at hand – the 2013 Dynasty League Rankings. If you’re looking for background on both the content you should expect and the dates you should expect them, check out the 2013 rankings homepage. And we’re kicking off the month-long project with the list that I’ve gotten the most questions about since the off-season started. The only difference between the original schedule and what you’ll see this week is that I’ve broken the Top 150 out into five parts, not three. Each day of the week, you’ll get thirty more guys until we culminate Friday with #1.

First, I have a couple of disclaimers specific to the prospect list before we jump in. These rankings are for fantasy purposes only, and do not directly take into account things like an outfielder’s range or a catcher’s pop time. Of course, these things do matter indirectly as they affect a player’s ability to stay at a particular position. So, while Austin Hedges may be a top-50 prospect in baseball, due in large part to his defensive value, he’ll be much lower in these rankings because his upside isn’t nearly as great for fantasy. Additionally, these rankings will take into account a player’s parent organization – so a pitcher likely to call Petco or Safeco home, will get a bump. Same with hitters who are likely to play at Coors or in Arlington. But most importantly, the intention of this list is to balance the upside, probability and proximity of these players to an active fantasy lineup. So, in a vacuum, I’d rather have the #104 player on this list than #105 on my dynasty league roster right now, based on all of those factors.

Additionally, if you want to delve any further into the list or have specific dynasty league questions, either post them in the comments section below, catch me on Twitter at @dynastyguru or send me an e-mail to dynastyguru [at] gmail [dot] com and I will answer all of them. If you just want to say hello or tell me I’ve over/under rated someone you love/hate, that’s great too. I’m a firm believer that an ongoing dialogue is always more helpful than a singular monologue, and the goal of this is to be an additional resource in guiding your team to a championship.

So without any further ado, here is the final installment of the 2013 Top 150 Dynasty League Prospect list:

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The Dynasty Guru’s Crystal Ball: 2017′s 5×5 Category Leaders

by The Dynasty Guru

This is a fun exercise I’ve wanted to do for a while now. Right now, Opening Day 2017 is four and a half years away, but there’s absolutely no reason I can’t start speculating about who will lead the standard 5×5 rotisserie categories that season. Who knows if the 5×5 format we use now will still be the most commonplace scoring system that far into the future anyway? Maybe a standard ESPN league will be using OBP and QS instead of AVG and W. For the purposes of this post, we’re going to assume that the categories are remaining the same.

Now, this isn’t an all-prospect list – although there are some prospects on here. And if you think I’m understating the impact of prospects in this exercise, here’s a fun fact for you. If we did this exercise after the 2007 season, looking at the 2012 category leaders, guess how many of the categories would be led by players who had not played a game in the majors at the time? The answer is 5 out of 10. And if you expand out to the top-3 in each category (including ties), you get 13 out of 33, which is 39%. Of those 13 top-3 category finishes, 7 were from players that debuted in 2008, 2 were from players that debuted in 2009, 2 were from players that debuted in 2010 and 2 were from Mike Trout, who was a junior in high school when the 2007 season ended. In fact, Trout and Buster Posey were the only two players who finished in the top-3 of any 5×5 fantasy category in 2012 to be drafted AFTER the 2007 season.

Anyway, that’s enough of an introduction – let’s go to the Future Dynasty Guru for the breakdown of what happened in 2017:

Batting Average: Miguel Cabrera (.341)

It feels like Miguel Cabrera’s been around forever, but he only turned 33 on Opening Day 2017. While his power has started to wind down (this was his first season with under 30 HR in over a decade), Cabrera continues to maintain a high batting average. The two main reasons for this are: 1) he’s still a fantastic hitter to all fields and 2) by the laws of physics, it’s been impossible for him to get any slower than he was back in 2012. Runners up: Oscar Taveras (.334), Starlin Castro (.328)

Continue reading →