DME makes his SECOND appearance in the Fantasy Focus Baseball Podcast!

Check out the Fantasy Baseball Podcast for 08/10/09; at the 21:48 mark, Nate again reads (part) of one of my emails. As always, they refused to read the whole email because it is "too long" (the email is posted below; is it really too long compared to my three-page Dan Haren emails?), but at least this time they got where I was from right.

Hey Matthew and Nate,

This summer, I work at a liquor store and recently two new wines were released in theme with both the White Sox and Cubs. One is Mark Buehrle's merlot called "Buehrlot" and the other is D Lee's Carbernet called Caberlee. Though neither tastes perfect, it it fair to say that I'm drinking the juice on each player this season, as both have somewhat helped carry me in my deep 15 team mixed league. What do you see as their fantasy values not only going forward, but also come next year? Will Derrek Lee return to his top 100 draft status? Will Mark Buehrle be draftable (finally) in ten team mixed leagues?

Also, why was Raise Your Hands never mentioned in the Bon Jovi trilogy for either Pod Vader or Matthew? Do either of you even like Bon Jovi, because no Jovi lover would ever forsake his legacy by leaving out Mog's jamming theme (Spaceballs reference).

Jeffrey of Chicago, IL

We're just on fire this week. NBC News, ESPN Podcasts, MLBTradeRumors. Everyone's getting in on the Game Of Inches action! Hell, even Eno Sarris of Fangraphs.com has gotten in on the action:

One criticism I have of your piece is that Rios was great last year (worth $25+ million), and that it doesn’t seem his defense was ‘trending’ downwards, it’s just been crap this year. UZR, though a great measure of defense, is not always stable from year to year.

Look at Carlos Gomez’ defensive stats. He can hardly be trending downwards, but he’s gone from 16 UZR/150 to 6 this year. Mark Teixeira had a 9.3 UZR/150 last year and is negative this year. The number oscillates pretty wildly from year to year, even for players widely considered strong defenders.

On the other hand, Rios has been fairly stable on defense, worth around 9 runs defensively in the three years sandwiched between his great debut and his very good last year. I think it’s safe to say that Rios is above-average on defense, and at 28 should be so for another couple of years. 5 years will be pushing it, for sure.