Article:Fantasy SS debate?..Not really

from www.thebaseballfix.com

If I asked you to choose between three shortstops and did not give you there name’s, just simply stats and called them player A, player B and player C. How would you choose? Would you look to see if one excelled across the board (considering his position and adjusting accordingly)? Would you look and see if maybe one player simply crushed the rest of the pack? And then choose? Well here are the stat lines for the players from the 07 season.

Player: Avg/HR/R/RBI/SB

Player A: .331/29/125/81/51

Player B: .281/12/119/57/78

Player C: .296/30/139/94/41

Based on these stats from last season we can draw a few conclusions. First, player A was the clear stand out above the rest. He was a clear five tool stud and when you factor in his position (SS) you can make a case to take him as a number one pick and certainly a number two overall in your draft, considering the edge he give’s you at his position. Another way to look at this is to break it down in a point structure. Let us assign three points for the leader in one of the tools, two points for second and one point for third. The scores for this method are as follows

Player A: 11

Player B: 7

Player C: 12

Interestingly player C move’s up to the front of the pack. Yet when you adjust for margin difference, player A still appears a better fit considering he hit 35 points higher and stole ten more bases all the while hitting for similar power and similar runs. Player B on the other hand comes up lame in both studies. He has an edge in SB’s yet it is not double any of his counter parts. Where as player B falls short in margins across the four remaining tools.

If you have not figured it out by now, player A is Hanley Ramirez, player B is Jose Reyes and player C is Jimmy Rollins. The reason for not giving names was so that people would not dismiss the information that is so readily available to them. As I see in every draft when Reyes (a two tool player) is taken ahead of the two true five tool short stops in the game. It would be one thing if Reyes was stealing twice as many bases as anyone in baseball, however this is not the case. Also I am not saying that Reyes is not a great fantasy option. He is, however does he do enough to merit being a top five selection? sometimes we have to pose the question and dare to go against what the "experts" say.


 * if you go back and look at the avg's for all five tools and do the same exercise over the last two season's(since Hanley has only been up since '06) Reyes still come's up last.