Rickrolling your fantasy team

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Okay. Thanks to Mark, the GM of “Stalin’s Sluggers” for Rickrolling me, along with the rest of my league this morning, suggesting that Rick had some excellent advice for winning your fantasy baseball league.

Rick’s got a point. The first week of the season generally isn’t the time to give up on a player. Taking all the players who have recorded at least 20 plate appearances so far, I present to you the ten worst players in Major League Baseball so far in 2008, based on their on-base percentage and slugging:

	OBP	SLG
Rodriguez, Ivan C DET	0.2	.300
Cantu, Jorge 1B FLA	0.2	0.2
LaRoche, Adam A. 1B PIT	0.1667	0.1364
Polanco, Placido 2B DET	0.087	0.087
Lowell, Mike 3B BOS	.2692	0.2083
Peralta, Jhonny SS CLE	0.1429	0.1905
Tulowitzki, Troy SS COL	0.2174	0.1905
Pence, Hunter CF HOU	0.1852	0.2222
Soriano, Alfonso LF CHC	0.087	0.0455
Ortiz, David DH BOS	.2593	0.2273

Honestly, is there anyone on this list you would drop now? With the exception of Cantu, every one of these players is owned in my league. No one’s moving. Go ahead and pull the trigger if you’re even considering downgrading Big Papi because at .0909 he’s a bit off his 3 year slugging percentage of .6169. Call me first, and I’ll make you an offer.

Playing with pitchers, you get a similar idea. As of the close of games yesterday, there were only 18 pitchers with two starts, and their IP ranged from a high of 16 (Jake Peavy) to a low of 9 (Odalis Perez). Using their ERA as a ham-fisted way of judging their performance so far (please, no flames about the relative merits of ERA vs. other metrics – finish reading first), you see that C.C. Sabathia had a miserable start to his season. Livan Hernandez has two wins and a 3.86 ERA. He also hasn’t walked anyone in his 14 innings.

Sabathia had a lousy start, no doubt. But if you take a look at their three-year averages, you see:

	WHIP	BAA	Kd9	ERA
Sabathia, C.C.	1.19	0.2525	7.76	3.47
Hernandez, Livan	1.499	.293	4.94	4.54

Sabathia, despite his performance, still had a k/9 ratio in the top half of all pitchers with 2 starts (7.59), which is quite close to his 3 year average of 7.76. Hernandez, on the other hand, had the lowest Kd9 ratio of all pitchers with 2 starts – 1.93. I’m intrigued by his performance and I’m going to pay a bit more attention to him next week, but I’m not putting him in yet.

Granted, neither of these two guys is Jake Peavy. But it does demonstrate that the first week of the season doesn’t show you too much about what the season’s going to be like. As for Peavy himself, his k/9 ratio so far of 6.75 is well off his usual average of 9.58. Call me if you want to let him go.

P.S.  By the way, for you Mets fans (or enemies) out there... there are several campaigns going to get the Mets to play his song every 7th inning stretch this season.  Have fun.