Micro to Macro: The Jay Bruce Episode

So I’ve been talking about my fantasy baseball team, the Black Hole Army, which resides in this 12-team, fantasy point, head-2-head keeper league. I have been linking my team so people can see the roster, but have realized that our league might not allow outsiders to look on OR if you don’t have a www.sportsline.com ID, then you can’t get access to my league. So I will quickly rundown my club right now:

C- Victor Martinez
1B- Joey Votto
2B- Chase Utley
SS- Orlando Cabrera
3B- Ryan Braun
LF- Carlos Quentin
CF- Shane Victorino
RF- Jeff Francoeur
DH- Josh Hamilton

P- Jason Bergmann
P- Chad Billingsley
P- John Danks
P- Shaun Marcum
P- Dustin McGowan
P- James Shields
P- Brandon Webb

Bench—Brian Fuentes, Jon Rauch, George Sherrill, Justin Upton, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, and Nick Swisher.

YES, the same Nick Swisher who I finally gave up on last week is back with the team almost 7 days later. I was mulling Swisher, Cody Ross, Fred Lewis, Luke Scott, and plenty of others, but after dissecting every possible scenario, it seemed it was best to give Swisher another chance. And of course, I had to cut Kevin Slowey as his two-start performance in week 10 was—well, let’s just say Slowey was the big disappointment in my life this week. YES, it’s that serious! I already gave Slowey his 15 minutes of fame in my column last week so that’s all I want to say about him. So after cutting what’s-his-name, I dig around the waiver wire in search for a new RF as Francoeur is really struggling in the past two weeks. So I’m off to finding a replacement RF and come up with those names mentioned. I started with Fred Lewis and I like his speed (great guy for stolen bases roto-leaguers, in case you missed it. He’s only owned in 23.2% of ESPN leagues and only in 28% of Sportsline leagues), but the guy bats left-handed and doesn’t hit lefties very well (.167 average, .557 OPS) and he’s facing Greg Smith and Dana Eveland this week and those guys are both LHP. So I passed on Lewis. Next comes Ross, who is crushing the ball the past two weeks, but then I saw the scheduled starters he was facing this week against the Phillies and Reds and I had to pass. Then I saw Scott, but after seeing Scott’s best career numbers vs. Swisher’s best career numbers, I saw that they were pretty similar to each other. The final kicker for Swisher was that he had a more favorable schedule than Scott, so I picked him up. However, the whole point was to replace Francoeur for fantasy week #11 and none of these guys made me feel comfortable to insert into the starting lineup. With Swisher, I’m hoping that his batting tear from week #10 finally jump starts his season. I’m afraid that Swisher has become that girl you want to break up with, but had a hard time dumping her, and when you finally did, couple of months later, you were back together again. The way I see it, if Swisher falters, there’s plenty of guys to replace him with.

Moving on, you guys already know that Troy Tulowitzki is on my DL-slot (I can’t wait for him to come back!) and rounding out the roster are minor leaguers Carlos Carrasco, pitcher from the Phillies’ organization and Matt Wieters, catcher from the Orioles farm system. As you can see, Carrasco is striking out a lot of guys, but his walk rate is getting close to that magical number of 3.5 (or as I like to call it, “flirting with disaster”), has a batting average against of .271 and has a WHIP of 1.38. Very disappointing numbers, but I’m hoping that he can turn into, get ready, Edinson Volquez. Looking at Volquez’s numbers, when he started his professional career, Volquez would give up hits in bunches. In an ironic twist, Volquez’s walk rate was very low. It wasn’t until 2006 until his hit rate went down, but his walk rate went up. When he was at Single-A Bakersfield in 2007, he registered a mediocre WHIP of 1.34, which isn’t too far off Carrasco’s WHIP. So here’s hoping Carrasco can cut back on the walks, the hits, and have his K/9 rate soar him into the Phillies’ rotation.

Wieters was the O’s top pick in last year’s draft and has an OPS of 1.018, has a K:BB ratio that’s close to 1, a .344 batting average and has 13 homers with 35 RBIs. I’m hoping Wieters becomes the next Victor Martinez, but I’m aware that young catchers take long to develop their offensive game when they get called up to the Majors as pitching and defense take top priority over hitting. There are plenty of examples of young catchers who are struggling offensively this season so far: J.R Towles, Jeff Clement, Jeff Mathis, heck John Buck was supposed to be a hot-shot catcher 3-4 years ago and is just finally hitting above .250 this season. Remember Toby Hall was the premiere catcher in the minor leagues in the Tampa Rays’ farm system earlier this decade? He was supposed to be the next best catcher as soon as he arrived into the Majors. Well, it’s 2008 and now he’s the White Sox’s backup catcher. That being said, I’m hoping his hot start in the minors does help him develop into the next V-Mart in 2-3 years so this is obviously a long-term project.

However the other reason I’ve settled on Wieters is because there are no big name minor leaguers available in my league. Jay Bruce, Clayton Kershaw, David Price and Homer Bailey were already owned in the off season, while Justin Masterson was picked up way back in April. Even I stuck with Eric Hurley and Gio Gonzalez before replacing those two with Carrasco and Wieters. With the league being so competitive, it has become almost difficult to pick up a top-notch prospect during the season because they’re all gone long before any buzz is generated in the rest of the fantasy world, let alone the regular, non-fantasy baseball world. You almost have to project the next group of top prospects for next year to catch a decent minor leaguer. So Wieters is on my roster until I find that next top-of-the-line prospect, but it is admittedly getting harder to do so and even though Wieters is a catcher, his numbers right now are still impressive, regardless of position. Even Baseball America has Wieters as their #3 prospect in their latest “hot sheet.”

And finally, I will like to end this week with the emergence of Jay Bruce into the foreground of fantasy baseball. When I’m not writing articles, I hit the fantasy forums, most notably, Yahoo! Answers. The controversy surrounding this guy was amusing to read since his call up. There were owners who wanted to trade him while his stock was high as they didn’t think he could keep up his torrid pace. There were owners who were willing to sell their entire team to build their ball club around him—some of those owners were in non-keeper leagues though. Some owners were willing to trade more established players on their team for help in other positions or categories and insert Bruce into their active/starting lineup. And then there were owners who were willing to stash away Bruce on their bench, like money hungry misers in hopes that he becomes a stud by the end of this season. And there were plenty of owners who refused to pick him up as they didn’t believe in the hype that this kid was generating, the recent success was too small of a sample to see if he could provide a consistent performance for the rest of 2008 and took a wait-and-see approach to this kid—some of those owners could use a guy like Bruce for their struggling team, but sometimes, old habits are hard to break. At any rate, if you didn’t have Bruce by May 26, 2008 or so, there was a good chance that you were not going to pick him up in the next few days following that date. As of this writing, Bruce is owned in 96% of Sportsline leagues (in my league, the owner who picked up Bruce stashed him in his minor league slot—LAST SEASON).

Now, I’m not going to explain this guy’s history, background, or pedigree. Let’s face it, this guy has pedigree, he’s not a fluke, he’s not all hype (you want to go after hype, go see Andruw Jones and the big fat contract he was given by the Dodgers). No sir! Gentlemen, what this kid has created since he was drafted in 2005 was “buzz.” Heck, the buzz peaked after spring training, when many baseball “experts” thought that the Reds should have started the season with Bruce as their starting CF. It was just a matter of time when he would be called up by the Reds this season. So we established that Bruce is real. Is he an elite player? No, not yet. Is he the 2008 version of Ryan Braun? Nope, now you’re just comparing apples and oranges. What Braun did in 2007 as a rookie is rare and placing those kinds of expectations on this 21-year-old are just not fair. So what is he? Bruce is a highly touted prospect who got called up in late May and he’s going to have to learn the MLB game as much as any rookie who gets called up during the season. If you can get “a lot” for him in a trade, good for you, but if you’re the one seeking Bruce, don’t go overboard, even if you’re in a keeper league. Trades are supposed to be fair for both sides. One owner at Yahoo! Answers tried to deal Cole Hamels (or Ervin Santana), Takashi Saito and Jose Reyes for Jay Bruce, Mariano Rivera, and Kelly Johnson. Talk about reaching for a player! Even if this were a keeper league, you’re only getting one good, “ideal” keeper player and giving up two elite super studs in Hamels and Reyes? The owner trying to acquire Bruce was no longer sold on the “Bruce Buzz”, but was buying the “hype.” Just because you see one player on ESPN’s SportsCenter 100 times on a given week (because they re-air episodes all morning long of course), doesn’t make him the premiere fantasy player in our fantasy world. Let ESPN try to sell you hype. In the fantasy world, you have to go with the “buzz” that a player creates, wherever he plays. There are a lot of hot-shot prospects that come up every year and its great to pick them up before anybody else in your league, but you have to limit your expectations. Once you start thinking that you have the second coming of Fernando Valenzuela or Ryan Braun, you just bought into your own hype of that player and the hype that was sold to you by outside forces. One should notice buzz and try to control hype (by the way, the buzz vs. hype argument was adapted from a recent Stephen King column in Entertainment Weekly. Here’s a quick synopsis of said article).

So what can you expect from Bruce the rest of this season? As of this writing, Bruce was on pace to reach 154 at bats, score 33 runs, hit 7 home runs, reach 26 RBIs, and steal 4 bases. His projected numbers coming into the 2008 campaign are as follows: 200 at bats, score 25 runs, hit 7 homers, reach 28 RBIs, and steal 6 bases. So even though he’s off to a hot start in his MLB career, he’s still only on pace to reach his projected numbers, not surpass them. And it looks like Bruce has already hit a rookie wall of sorts as his last 6 games, he’s only hit .268, with a laughable .666 OPS. Bruce does have as many walks as strikeouts, but due to a small sample of that ratio, it doesn’t mean he necessarily has a good approach or plate discipline, but it does mean he has a good contact rate (after all, he is hitting .391 thus far). Nevertheless, in the minors, he did put up a dangerous walk/strikeout ratio. He struck out 106 times in 2006 and a combined 135 times at three different stops in 2007. Whatever “rookie wall” or slump he encounters this season will not be short-lived if he continues to strikeout like he did in the minors.

So that’s my rant on Jay Bruce. He’s good, he’s real, he has pedigree, the tools to be a successful Major Leaguer. Is he going to undergo some growing pains? You bet. If I had Bruce, in a non-keeper league, I would keep him around based purely on potential. If somebody is foolish to offer me Cole Hamels, though, I would hit the accept button in record time!

At this point, I must mention that I will not submit an article next week as I will be on vacation in good old Seattle, WA. The highlight of the trip will definitely be visiting gorgeous Safeco Field. Too bad the Mariners are out of town, but the way they’ve been playing, they might as well move to Oklahoma with the Supersonics. Until then, you can catch me at Yahoo! Answers until June 17 and you should consider yourself lucky if you receive my help.

As written by,

Felipe Melecio
Currently Listening To: Red I Flight, “Of Myth and Men”
Looking Forward To: Trip to beautiful Seattle, WA
Really Enjoying: Euro2008 (Go Spain!)