Before baseball season was starting and fantasy baseball drafts were starting everyone was ranking their top choices for the fantasy baseball season. It is always hard to predict who will have a good season and whom is worth your top few first round picks. In my opinion I always want my first few picks to be steady consistent guys I know I can count on to be healthy and productive. I don’t want to gamble with my first few choices. I save that to the later rounds. I know baseball season isn’t over yet, but here are the biggest fantasy baseball busts. All of these players had bad seasons for a variety of reasons. The most common reason is injury and the player either missed most of the season because of it, or couldn’t find their stroke when they came back. I have two rankings in the column’s below next to their name. The first ranking is their projected ranking and pick in Yahoo before the season started. The second column is their current ranking and how they actually did. I decided not include all of their stat’s on why it was a bad season so you can look them up on your own.
Before Season Current Ranking Comments
1. José Reyes 4 1030 He had an hamstring injury which made him loose the best part of his game.
2. Grady Sizemore 6 165 A injurey plagued year.
3. Josh Hamilton 10 408 Was last year a fluke?
4. B.J. Upton 16 215 Always a streaky hitter.
5. Lance Berkman 18 130 His career on the downside.
6. Alfonso Soriano 19 273 He is showing old age.
7. Aramis Ramírez 28 286 The Shoulder injury lost all of his power. His average is up, but the power is gone like David Wright.
8. Alexei Ramírez 44 152 He is in Sophomore slump.
9. David Ortiz 46 216 He started the season looking like he had lost his timing with old age, but has started to find it lately.
10. Russell Martin 47 415 He lost his breand and butter of being a very good average hitter.
11. Álex Ríos 50 255 Will he ever show the promise that got him the big contract.
12. Geovany Soto 54 979 A big sophomore slump.
13. Corey Hart 57 353 He sould re-bound next year.
14. Rafael Furcal 58 359 He career looks on downside.
15. Magglio Ordóñez 62 431 He lost all of his power.
16. Garrett Atkins 64 983 Not given a chance in Colorado.
17. Chipper Jones 65 190 Age looks to be catching up with him. he is considering retirement.
"a very good average hitter" lol
ReplyDeleteI think eckstein will disagree that corey hart will rebound
Soriano is the biggest bust. It would have been better for him to be hurt, as opposed to sucking up 500 useless at-bats
I wouldn't call Alexei a bust. He's ranked 14th among all SS for the entire year. Sure, it was an awful decision to draft him where you did, but considering guys in the top like Ben Zobrist, Marco Scutaro, Asdrubal Cabrera, and Yunel Escobar never went drafted, I wouldn't go so far as to call him a bust. I think you just got bad value for him.
ReplyDeleteI mean if you're going to say A-Ram's a bust then so it David Wright because he performed, but not at the level you quite expected.
Hart is usually a good hitter, but this season he is struggling. I am not personally a big fan of him, but this is his worse season since he established himself.
ReplyDeleteSoriano was bad the whole season, even before this knee injury started. He batted below .200 for two different months!
I wouldn’t say David Wright is doing that bad though and a bust. Yes, he was a bad pick that high, but is still productive. He still helped you in all other general scoring categories besides for homeruns. He still scored 85 runs, has 68 RBI’s, 25 stolen bases (a lot for a third basemen not Chone Figgens) and a good average currently at .314. This is down from last season where he had 115 runs, 124 RBI’s, and 33 HR, but his numbers are still average. He was injured for a bit with the concussion. Aramis Ramírez was inured a lot more than David Wright so his production is a lot worse, thus he was a bigger bust.
ReplyDeleteAt second glance I guess your right on Alexei and he isn’t that bad, but defiantly not worth a top pick.
Worst analysis EVER!
ReplyDeleteSoto is not in a soph. slump. He's had 3 injuries that have limited his ability to drive the ball this season. Hitting with a 900+ OPS in september after coming off the DL
Hamilton's also had the oblique injury, which has zapped him of all power. Oblique and Shoulder injuries are only second to wrist injuries in terms of how they affect a player's power stroke
I've never liked Corey Hart. I'm pretty sure I wrote a full post on this all (http://gameofinches.blogspot.com/2009/06/corey-hart-i-told-you-so.html). Hart just overperformed in 2007.
Aram has been better than David Wright in like every category except SBs. His AVG is higher and even with missing 2 months, he has 2x as many HRs
In 2007, I drafted Corey Hart and he paid off big time. With a .295 AVG, 24 HR and 23 SB (not to mention the 86 R/81 RBI), Hart entered the 2008 season high on my list of guys to target. Hart, however, would prove to me over the course of last season that he is not a guy with 30/30 potential (he only had 505 AB in 2007), but rather a player with poor basic skills to go with raw talent.
ReplyDeleteCorey Hart has never been a batter with a good eye. His career BB% is a below average 6.1%, but since his first full major league season, he has seen his already poor pitch recognition erode further. Last season, Hart posted a laughable 4.2 BB%, 15th worst among the 213 players who had a minimum of 400 PA's. This season, Hart has a deceptively "high" 8.8%, largely due to the 13 walks he drew in the month of April (Hart has only drawn double digit walks in a month of play one other time in his entire career -- 14 in June 1007). Since May 1, Hart has walked at a 5.2% clip.
Hart's power has also been in the decline since his first full season -- or perhaps it merely spiked in 2007. Hart's 2007 ISO (.244) is almost a full .100 points higher than this season's rate (.150). In 2007, he hit a HR every 21.1 ABs. In 2008, he hit a jack every 30.6 ABs. This season, Hart's home run power has regressed even further, as his HR rate has fallen to one per 34.4 ABs.
The sheer power of Corey Hart isn't the problem (his career home run distance average is over 400 FT, 418.5 FT this season), but rather the ability to make quality contact with pitches. With a swing% above the major league average and contact rate almost 10% below the league average, Corey Hart helps pitchers beat him.
Other aspects that have hurt Corey Hart's game have been decreasing speed (his speed score has gone from 7.6 to 6.2 to 4.5 since his debut), decreasing range (from positive defense to negative), a complete inability to hit sliders (his wSL (run value per 100 sliders) is -4.0 and pitchers have increasing throw sliders to him since 2007) and an increased groundball rate. All of these factors, combined with the waning/deceptively non-existent slugging power collectively conspired to make Hart incredibly overrated. The .380 wOBA player of 2007 set a bar that the .327 and .309 wOBA players of 2008 and 2009 have not and could not live up to.