Sean Manaea

Profile: Sean Manaea had positioned himself to be a top-five pick and perhaps even go first overall entering last spring. Sadly, his college season didn’t go as planned. Manaea had some performance issues and dealt with various injuries this year. He fell all the way in the draft to the second round, where the Royals happily stopped his freefall. Manaea ended up needing surgery for a tear in his hip labrum, but the prognosis for recovery is good. When healthy, Manaea works in the low 90’s and touches higher with a sneaky fastball from a deceptive delivery. His slider flashes well when he stays on top of the pitch but he often gets around the side of it from his low three-quarters delivery and the pitch flattens out into a slurve. His best offering is a diving split change that mystifies batters. Manaea is a big, strong kid with great makeup, strong stuff and the ability to miss bats. He has the potential to develop into a number two starter and his floor is probably a mid-rotation type with his present stuff. He would also fit quite well in the pen and could feature as a late inning option if injuries persist and his command falters. (Al Skorupa)

Quick Opinion: Regarded as one of the top talents in the draft entering the Spring, Manaea fell due to inconsistent performance and injuries. When healthy, Manaea has the stuff to be a mid to front of the rotation starter. If he shows up healthy in 2014 he’ll quickly return to top prospect status.

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The 2013 season saw a number of rookies play key roles for their respective clubs and, in the process, significantly impact fantasy baseball. Arms like Jose Fernandez (Marlins), Julio Teheran (Braves), Hyun-Jin Ryu (Dodgers) and Trevor Rosenthal (Cardinals) made names for themselves while providing important innings for their respective clubs and fantasy managers alike. Hitters such as Yasiel Puig (Dodgers), Nolan Arenado (Rockies), Jedd Gyorko (Padres) and Wil Myers (Rays) set the foundations for future successes and look like future fantasy studs.

With each new fantasy season comes a new group of impressive — yet volatile — prospects. Barring injuries, star athletes’ performances are somewhat predictable. Rookie performances, though, are often much hard to pin down but, if you guess right, they can have a huge impact on a fantasy team’s season.

This article will endeavor to (somewhat accurately) recommend the key rookie players to target at each position based on both expected playing time and overall statistical impact for the coming season. It’s important to note this article ranks players based solely on projected 2014 impact, not future impact or overall ceiling…

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced last April by the present author, wherein that same ridiculous author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own heart to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column last year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion in the Five) was any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above both (a) absent from all of three notable preseason top-100 prospect lists and also (b) not currently playing in the majors. A more thorough discussion of eligibility, and the criteria for determining it, can be found here.

The basic idea, though: to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents might otherwise warrant.

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Auction season is nearly upon us, which means many of you are scouring the web to find your draft projections, auction values, sleepers, and more. And, scour as you might, you are not finding anything that even closely resembles ottoneu auction values.

But we here at RotoGraphs are nothing if not obliging and so, for the second year, I am going to present you with auction values for all ottoneu formats.

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If you’re reading FanGraphs+, you could probably explain the idea of positional scarcity with relative confidence. But simply knowing that it exists is not really enough, because positional scarcity is a fluid, evolving idea. In the mid-2000s, the league was flush with power-hitting third basemen, but now the position is scarcer than outfielders and first basemen. It’s not enough to have read about scarcity and committed it to memory, because position scarcity changes all the time.

Now, if you are unclear on what positional scarcity is, allow us to explain (don’t just search it, less you end up on the player page for early-30s Red Sox legend Russ Scarritt, who was once worth more than two wins below replacement level just with his bat).

Back in 2011, our own Mike Podhorzer described position scarcity as follows:

In the simplest terms, position scarcity exists when there are not enough positively valued players at a position to fill up every active roster. In a standard 12-team league with 14 hitters, a total of 168 hitters will be drafted as starters and each must be valued and purchased at $1, at the very least. If you projected every hitter and valued their raw stats based on a $260 salary cap per team, there is virtually no chance that 24 catchers will make your top 168. There is also a possibility that there won’t be the required minimum of 36 middle infielders.

In short, some positions are deeper than others, and because positive fantasy value at some positions is less available (“scarcer”), the price for said value increases. If there’s only one shortstop who will help your team, your willingness to pay for him is a lot greater than an outfielder with the same stat line.

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Fantasy owners all have their little quirks. Every league has the guy who drafts closers way too early, or the owner (or owners) who just cannot stay away from their hometown team.

But me, I am the guy who builds a roster full of players with heavy platoon splits. I am the guy who will go the extra dollar for Matt Joyce, sign Brandon Moss and target Justin Morneau. I know full well that these players often ride the pine or put up ugly stats when left in the game for the wrong matchup. But I don’t care.

And not caring has served me well. The reality is, in certain circumstances, these players are vastly undervalued in fantasy. And this happens for a number of reasons.

First, there is just the general buzz around them. “Yeah, his stats are okay, but you know he can’t hit lefties at all.” Suddenly a lot of owners take a $10 player and discount him because he struggles in 30% of his PA. Forget the fact that the stats used to value the player already take his ugly split into account.

Second, the player’s numbers get deflated. Matt Joyce fell two home runs and three stolen bases shy of a 20-10 season in 2013 and without a doubt hitting those milestones would have impacted his standings. The fact that you could have used him in the 109 games he started and gotten 17 of the HR and all seven of his SB, and still had 53 games – a full third of a season – with another player to make up the difference, that fact somehow gets ignored.

The goal of any fantasy auction/trade/roster building exercise, though, should be to accrue the most production at the lowest cost, and platoon players can help you do that. Here is a perfect example:

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The diligent and hard-working fantasy owner has always had the opportunity to utilize fringe platoon players to their advantage. Players such as Matt Joyce, Nelson Cruz and Alex Rios can offer a special advantage to teams with deep leagues, deep benches and sustained focus. Paired with a mashing platoon mate, these guys can turn a position of interest into a position of strength.

But the righty-lefty split isn’t the only platoon split out there. Just as there is a distribution of LOOGY- and ROOGY-killers, there is also a selection of hitters who excel against ground-ball and fly ball pitchers. Fantasy owners should be more aware of not only the advantages of a potential ground ball-fly ball platoon, but also the players who can help them to that end.

This, we should note, is Platooning: Advanced Edition.

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Over the years, Bill Petti has done some fascinating research on hitter volatility. He recently updated that work at the new Hardball Times. I strongly recommend taking a look. You can follow Petti on Twitter @BillPetti. Hopefully he’ll now forgive me for shamelessly stealing his work for fantasy purposes.

Before we dive into Petti’s work and how it applies to fantasy baseball, let’s define volatility. In finance, volatility refers to variation in price over a period of time. A stock that sees frequent fluctuation of price is considered to be more volatile than a stock with very little price fluctuation. In fantasy baseball, we can replace price with category production or points. Player A is more volatile than Player B if his day-to-day performance is more varied.

Petti’s research is in day-to-day volatility, which differs from streakiness. As fantasy owners, we know that Jay Bruce is one streaky mofo guy. He’ll put up 20 excellent games followed by 30 atrocious games and he’s been doing it since the day he entered the majors. By Petti’s measure, Bruce is only four percent more volatile than league average over the last three years. That’s (probably) because he’s not measuring these long term fluctuations.

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A year ago, I discovered how highly correlated a hitter’s average home run and fly ball distance is to his HR/FB rate. Chad Young and I then embarked on a quest to use an assortment of data, including this batted ball distance, to construct an expected HR/FB, or xHR/FB rate, metric. Unfortunately, we failed to find an equation much better than the one that used just distance, of which the R-squared was just 0.54. While this was an excellent start, it simply wasn’t good enough to use in place of plain old HR/FB rate.

Thanks to Jeff Zimmerman, whose Baseball Heat Maps site inspired this quest to be undertaken to begin with, I have been provided with a wealth of additional data. The hope was that it included another piece or set of pieces to the HR/FB rate puzzle.

I began with a player population set that included 4,985 hitter seasons from 2008-2013, which also included pitchers during their times to the plate. In order to prevent the results from being skewed due to the randomness occurring in the smaller samples, I removed all player seasons with fewer than 20 total home runs and fly balls. This left me with a pool of 2,645 ready for analysis.

Let us begin with a correlation table:

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Finding diamonds in the rough is *the* goal for fantasy owners. Top 100 prospect lists can give you an idea of which young players are up and coming. I am not going to be looking at players experts have been writing about. Instead, I am going to look for non-prospect position players who have a chance to contribute in the majors if given a chance. Your diamonds in the rough.

To help me find these players, I have created a metric which looks for traits which may not get the most notice by the ranking services. Here are the criteria I used to filter the players:

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