Rounding Third: 2016 Draft Primer

WE'VE STARTED THE LAST TWO SEASONS looking at the reliability of starting pitching in the early rounds of draft leagues. Now that the concept of taking elite starters early has become more accepted, let's look at two other trends.

PUNTING CATCHERS

Top-tier catchers proved to be remarkably poor investments in 2015, perhaps the worst in recent memory. Here are two quick ways to distill how poorly these catchers fared.

2015 Top Earning Catchers

2015 Top Ranked (By ADP) Catchers

The "earned" amounts are calculated using RotoWire's Earned Auction Values tool, using 12-team mixed leagues with two catchers required in a $260 budget as the default setting. The ADP (Average Draft Position) comes from the 2015 National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC). As always, I like to use the NFBC as a baseline for league behavior, as the players are very well informed and prepared, and less inclined to use experimental draft plans that might skew the ADPs. The floor that a player can earn is $0 - but some $0 earned amounts are worse than others. Hence the "Relative Rank" in the second table - just how well or poorly did that catcher fare against his peers? I'm looking at you, Mike Zunino.

Only 11 catchers earned a positive value in 2015 - there were 13 such catchers in 2014 and 14 in 2013. Of those 11 catchers, one is no longer catch- er-eligible (Evan Gattis), another wasn't catcher eligible in last year's drafts (Stephen Vogt) and a third essentially wasn't drafted (Kyle Schwarber). Schwarber barely retained catcher-eligibility, catching 21 games in the big leagues. He was a lot more valuable than his $1 earned given the abbreviated amount of time he was with the big league club. He'll have the benefit that Gattis did in 2015 of not spending too much time behind the plate, though the Cubs haven't yet said that he won't catch at all in 2016. Dynasty league owners have reason to hope he'll get another 20-plus games in behind the plate.

Meanwhile, only five of the top 15 catchers drafted in the NFBC returned positive value. Long DL stints doomed many of these players - Jonathan Lucroy, Devin Mesoraco, Yan Gomes, Yadier Molina, Matt Wieters and Travis d'Arnaud all were gone for extended periods of time. This wasn't a coincidence, as all six of these catchers were injured in the course of playing their position. It's sim- ply a fact of baseball that playing catcher leads to more injuries and depresses offensive production.

We've always known that, however. That's why when we project draft values, we account for positional scarcity behind the plate. Catcher is the only position where we do so, as there are usually enough middle infielders earning positive values with their raw stats to not apply a bonus. That position might suggest that the elite players at shortstop and second base get undervalued on Draft Day, but that's a discussion for a different article. We *must* apply that bonus for catchers, because as a league we're required to spend at least one dollar on 24 of them, despite 11-14 being capable of earning positive value. That bonus doesn't apply evenly, either. Buster Posey is going to get a bigger boost because he's heads-and-shoulders above the field at the position, both in rate stats and in the number of at-bats that he gets at first base. One could argue that he's worth paying for more than ever, having been the top earning catcher two years in a row and a positive-earner in the last three.

But where the investment really becomes risky is with the next tier of catchers. Not only did the second tier fail to return its investment, but its membership class is shrinking. Evan Gattis, John Jaso and Wilin Rosario lost catcher-eligibility following the 2015 season, as did Carlos Santana and Joe Mauer in recent years. Many teams are valuing elite receiving skills more highly, and some are protecting the investment in their good hitters by moving them out from behind the plate.

It might make more sense to wait to draft catchers in your two-catcher mixed leagues much like fantasy football owners wait to draft defenses and kickers, and attack the problem with volume instead of using a higher-valued slot or more auction dollars. You are not guaranteed to land on the next Stephen Vogt or Kyle Schwarber in the draft - in fact, your investment will be very volatile. But the benefit is in saving opportunity cost, and having the freedom to pivot from a failing investment more quickly. In leagues such as the NFBC where there are no DL spots, those limited reserve roster spots become valuable. It's cost-prohibitive to hold on to an injured catcher for an extended time frame. You will have to take a zero with one of your active spots, or you will lose the ability to speculate on a young player elsewhere. You may also miss the chance to stream a two-start pitcher, or to keep a potentially emerging closer.

Avoid all that trouble, especially if you don't draft Posey or Schwarber this year, and consider waiting until the very end to fill your two catcher slots.

IS Dee Gordon WORTH A TOP-20 PICK?

With the Kansas City Royals making it to the World Series two years in a row and winning it in 2015, one might think that other teams have copied their model and emphasized speed and defense more in the course of building their teams. Perhaps some teams are on that path, but the results aren't yet there at the major league level. There were 2,505 stolen bases in 2015, down from 2,764 the previous year and well down from three years ago when there were 3,229 total stolen bases.

In fact, the number of stolen bases per game in the majors was as low as it's been since 1973. We've spent so much time in the last five years analyzing the decline in homers and runs scored in baseball, but it's easy to overlook a similar decline in stolen bases.

Thus, when I ran the dollar values for the first time after completing the projections for 2016, I was astounded to see how high the speed artists were valued. Both Jose Altuve and A.J. Pollock returned first-round values with their projections, and Dee Gordon came very close as the 12th-rated hitter. Moreover, how I rate a marginal stolen base is actually pretty conservative - I didn't aggressively increase its value compared to last year's projection set.

Gordon is particularly interesting to assess. With his .333 batting average, 57 stolen bases and 88 runs scored, our Earned Auction Value tool suggests that he earned $30 in a standard 12-team mixed league last year. He did this despite missing 17 games with a dislocated thumb. While that average is a really good bet to decline, he also has a good likelihood of playing more games and scoring more runs, with a presumably healthy Giancarlo Stanton batting behind him more than he did in 2015. Is his stolen base rate sustainable? We've seen other top thieves like Altuve drop off as they age and start to hit with more power, but that doesn't seem likely for Gordon, who is of slighter build (but taller!). With the rest of the league running less, if he steals near 60 bases again, those bags could have even more value than they did in 2015.

League trends can vary - after all, another team might emphasize contact and speed over power like the Royals did, a rule change could happen, or a power shift in front offices might occur. The latter seems unlikely, however, given the track record of front office hires in recent years. My guess is that this latest trend will continue.

In the RotoWire Online Fantasy Baseball Championship with the NFBC, there were 1,500 teams. A rule of thumb in the past has been to try to finish in the top 20 percent of all 10 categories to do well both in your league and in the overall contest. To finish in the top 20 percent in stolen bases last year, you needed 152 stolen bases. In contrast, you needed 279 homers to finish in the top 20 percent in homers. Dee Gordon's owners got 37.5 percent of the way to that milestone just by owning him. There's no slugger that can make a similar impact in a single category (of course, their value doesn't lie solely in home runs).

Still, instead of trying to lock up 70 homers between two players in the first two rounds, perhaps you should be on the prowl for 60 combined stolen bases. If you select near the end of the first round or beginning of the second round, Gordon should be a highly-valued target.

This article appears in the 2016 RotoWire Fantasy Baseball Guide. Order the magazine here!