Fantasy Baseball Quiz: Blind Resumes

Player A: Zack Wheeler

Player B: Ervin Santana

This is going to be our only pitching comparison since pitchers are even more susceptible to the follies of small sample sizes at this point of the season, having only made four or five starts in 2017. That’s why we had to go big with the Wheeler-Santana comp just to give all of our readers with Santana on their roster that stomach-drop feeling.

Santana has clearly been excellent this season with his sub-1.00 ERA and sub-0.70 WHIP. However, he has gotten about as lucky as is humanly possible. The two numbers that stand out most are his opponent BABIP and left on base rate. For some perspective, the league-wide BABIP allowed last season was .298 (.129 for Santana this year) and the league-wide left on base rate was 72.9 percent. Having a left on base rate of 99 (99!) percent through five starts for Santana is the moral equivalent of attempting real-life Frogger across the Lower Manhattan Expressway and living to tell the tale. For those who are thinking, “Well, maybe Santana is different, maybe he is just able to step up his level of pitching when there are runners on base, and that makes him able to sustain a higher left on base rate,” guess what his career left on base rate is: 72.9. Sound familiar?

Wheeler, on the other hand, has had fewer strands than a bald man this year (57.7 percent left on base), and he has paid the price with a 5.40 ERA. Wheeler is actually striking out batters at a better clip than he has throughout his solid career, and he’s walking significantly fewer hitters. However, hitters have been finding the gaps on Wheeler, and when combined with Wheeler coming off TJ surgery, it’s fair that prospective owners have been scared off a bit.

Going forward, it’s fair that Santana has higher ownership than Wheeler. He has certainly performed better in 2017, and although Wheeler has the edge in xFIP so far this season, Santana has a safer track record and should be ranked higher. That being said, there’s no way the gap should be this vast. Santana is a perfect sell-high candidate, while Wheeler is the ideal buy-low (or put on your watch list) candidate. This will be a common theme throughout the article.

Player A: Scott Schebler

Player B: George Springer

This is one of the wildest ones to me. These two players have nearly identical profiles, with Schebler hitting more fly balls, while Springer has hit a few more ground balls and line drives. Both players have had some terrible batted ball luck (in Schebler’s case, brought on in part by the anemic 9.6 percent line drive rate), and they have matching .280 on-base percentages.

Schebler’s power has come a bit out of nowhere, as he had just 12 home runs in his career before 2017. Of course, he had played only 101 games prior to this season, so that comes out to about 19 home runs per 162 games – not a bad total. Schebler also hit 55 home runs in 2014-15 in the Dodgers’ minor league system, so it’s not as if this is a total fluke. Great American Ballpark is one of the best stadiums for left-handed power hitters, and if Schebler can do a season-long Jay Bruce impression, he’ll have plenty of value even in a time when power is easier to find than ever before.

As for Springer, once a few batted balls start finding gaps in the defense, he should be fine. He was chosen more to show just how good Schebler has been, as Springer’s seven home runs of his own are a nice start to 2017. One thing to keep an eye on with Springer, however, is his walk rate. We still aren’t out of April, but 7.2 percent walk rate is noticeably lower than in any other season of his career. A chunk of Springer’s value comes from his career 11.3 percent walk rate and the fact that he bats at the top of the Astros’ lineup. If he continues to struggle getting on base, he may be moved down in the lineup, which would hurt his value. It also hasn’t helped that Springer is 0-for-2 on stolen base attempts this season, and it seems as though the days double-digit steals may be over for the 27-year-old.

Player A: Mike Moustakas

Player B: Joey Gallo

After missing most of 2016 with an ACL injury, Moustakas has looked solid in 2017, hitting seven long balls already and sporting an above-average .276 batting average to go along with the dingers. While the jump in strikeout rate is a bit alarming for Moose (22.5 percent, up from 15.7 percent career K rate), it hasn’t slowed him down yet, as his production has been, as noted before, solid.

Here’s the thing, though: Joey Gallo has a Giancarlo Stanton-esque ceiling. He could easily lead the league in home runs and he could toss in 15 steals to boot. If you’re in an OBP league, he’s been a top-ten hitter in 2017. As a 23-year-old.

Of course there’s a reason he’s still available in over 60 percent of ESPN leagues. Before this season, Gallo had struck out in over half of his plate appearances, and was sporting a .173 career batting average. (Now it’s all the way up to .193 for his career.) Even though he has cut down on his strikeouts in 2017, he’s still striking out in more than a third of his plate appearances, and he’s never going to hit .300 for you. You’ll be lucky if he hits .260 to be honest. But the raw power, speed, and third base position (not to mention OBP skills for leagues where that matters) is more than enough to cover his flaws.

Gallo originally got the callup to start the season to cover for an Adrian Beltre injury, but it’s hard to imagine the Rangers sending Gallo back to the minors with the success he has been having so far in 2017. Gallo is even getting starts against left-handed pitchers these days, and he has an OPS of .933 against them this season.

Moustakas still has a slight edge over Gallo in traditional leagues thanks to his guaranteed safety (if Gallo slumps right before Beltre comes back, who knows what Texas does) and his batting average. If you’re in an OBP league, however, I’d already put Gallo right there next to Moustakas in the rankings and way ahead of him in terms of long-term potential.

Player A: Jonathan Lucroy

Player B: Robinson Chirinos

You had to know this was a case of cherry picking a great player who is really struggling and a not-so-great player who has been having a lot of success, but you might not have guessed they were teammates.

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That’s part of what makes Lucroy’s slow start even scarier – his backup is absolutely mashing the ball. Now Lucroy is a career .282 hitter who left the yard 24 times just last season – he’ll be fine. What’s worrisome is that the longer he struggles and the longer Chirinos mashes, the closer this will get to a 50/50 timeshare. In fact, over the past eight games, Lucroy has started four games and Chirinos has started four games. For Lucroy owners, that should be the scariest part.

It’s not as if Chirinos has been getting entirely lucky either. Sure, his .364 BABIP is screaming for regression from a 32-year-old backstop, but his 53.3 percent hard hit ball rate would be among the league leaders if he had enough plate appearances to qualify. Keep up this kind of hitting, and maybe he will get enough at bats to qualify sooner than later.

Lucroy shouldn’t be worried about losing the lion’s share of the catching responsibilities just yet. He is due for some nice positive regression and Chirinos is definitely due to come back to earth. That being said, catcher is a position where you hate to see a big-money backstop struggling this hard, the position is already a wasteland, so buying someone like Lucroy was supposed to keep you out of that morass.

Player A: Jarrod Dyson

Player B: Billy Hamilton

Saving my hottest take for last: Dyson is better than Hamilton. Now, you shouldn’t go out and drop Hamilton if Dyson is out on your waiver wire. Hamilton is a great commodity for stolen bases, and he deserves to be on rosters in most leagues, even if he doesn’t do much outside of those steals and a few runs scored. Instead, if you own Hamilton and Dyson is available, maybe you look to trade the bigger name in Hamilton and add Dyson to your roster, basically getting for free whomever you are able to acquire with Hamilton. (Maybe someone like a DJ LeMahieu.)

Dyson gets on base at a much, much better clip than Hamilton, thanks in part to a higher batting average, but also to a much better batting eye that allows him to draw a decent number of walks for a hitter who shouldn’t be scaring many pitchers. Getting on base is the name of the game when it comes to speedy guys like Hamilton and Dyson, so that edge is worth its weight in gold, even if you are in a batting average league and not on-base percentage league. Dyson also puts the ball in play a lot more than Hamilton (who has way too high of a strikeout rate), which is key since once the ball is in play, Dyson has more of a chance to make an impact. Whether that impact is reaching via a hit or getting on base via an error because his speed forced a poor throw from the third baseman, it’s much better than striking out.

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Both hitters have a relatively similar batted ball profile (the advantage for Hamilton in line drive percentage isn’t even enough to cancel out the difference in strikeout rate), as they look to slap the ball and run – it doesn’t matter much how hard they are hitting the ball. Dyson has three multi-hit games in his last six games, with four steals in that time, so he may not be available for much longer. Make your move.