Different owners from the Tout Wars expert league will be submitting a guest Fantasy Baseball column to CBSSports.com each week. This week's columnist, Jason Collette, writes for RotoJunkie.com.
By Jason Collette
We are nearly one-third through the 2008 baseball season and to a point where we are no longer looking at small sample sizes with our players, but harsh realities at how awful some players have been this season. For every owner who is bloviating about how they knew Cliff Lee, Ervin Santana and Blake DeWitt would be this good, there is an owner crying in his favorite frosty beverage over their Ryan Howard, Carlos Pena or Eric Gagne wondering where it all went wrong.
Coming out of the Tout Wars draft, I really liked my team and thought it was going to be a contending team. Tout Wars is a "Top Gun" league, so as Iceman said in the movie, "The trophy for second place is in the bathroom boys." I have experienced buyer's remorse this week because I look at my team and have been happy that I've been anywhere between second and fourth place for nearly the entire season. But I currently find myself a whopping 35 points behind the defending champ, Mike Lombardo of WiseGuy Baseball. Where did it all go wrong? Did I appease Lombardo by letting him go after players I was not as high on and now watch in awe as his team blitzkriegs through the league? Where did it all go wrong?
Culprit No. 1 -- J.J. Hardy, SS, MIL: In one of the previous guest pieces, Lenny Melnick pointed out Hardy's struggles this year. I was not expecting the early 2007 numbers from Hardy; I was projecting a happy medium from that start and how he finished the year. Spring training pointed to some hope but eight weeks into the 2008 season, and Hardy's .239/.315/.303 line is doing nothing for me. His problems come from his own personal effort to keep groundskeepers employed at stadiums in the NL. He is hitting 51 percent of his balls in play into the ground and has a very low 12 percent line drive rate. Better days have to be ahead, right? The only plus for him right now is he is walking 10 percent of the time, which is his best rate in three years. Hardy took Josh Beckett over the fence for a two-run homer Sunday, thus doubling his season total from his previous 144 at-bats.
Culprit No. 2 -- Kevin Kouzmanoff, 3B, SD: It is never a good thing when you have more letters in your first name than you do walks in 181 at-bats. Kouzmanoff has four walks on the year, which equates to a 2.2 percent walk rate, which is the fourth-worst rate in all of baseball behind the likes of Erick Aybar, Yuniesky Betancourt, and Jason Bartlett. Just because Kouzmanoff thinks he can hit everything does not mean he should. On the plus side, he has struck out less frequently than he did the previous two seasons, but his walk rate is 67 percent off last year's pace. I drafted Kouzmanoff for help in the power categories, but combine the free-swinging ways plus his home ballpark, and a suppressed five percent HR/FB rate, and Kouzmanoff is causing a lot of buyer's remorse. Even once his HR/FB crawls back to league average, his batting average and overall production will suffer from a microscopic walk rate. One more bit of salt to rub in the wound -- Cristian Guzman has more home runs than Kouzmanoff this season. Say that three times fast without throwing up a little in your mouth.
Culprit No. 3 -- J.R. Towles, C, HOU: Going into the draft, I had budgeted $10 to spend on either Towles or Geovany Soto. When Towles came up in the draft, my team was looking a bit slow so I spent my allocated money on the speed potential Towles brings to the table. He stole 27 bases over the past two seasons on the farm, and combine that with his high-contact abilities and I was projecting a .280 average with the ability to approach double-digit homers and steals. So far, he is on pace for double-digit homers, but he has yet to even attempt a stolen base. To make matters worse, he is hitting a robust .144 on the season. A 10 percent line-drive rate and a .134 batting average on balls in play are killing his numbers. At any other position but catcher, I would have cut him long ago. However, Towles will only improve from here as his statistics regress toward the mean, and it's not like there are tons of options out there on the free-agent wire.
I will not complain about any of my pitchers because my staff was by design. I spent my picks on pitchers with high strikeout abilities, regardless of age or experience. Andrew Miller did not pan out for me but Jonathan Sanchez, Jair Jurrjens, and Wandy Rodriguez have been pleasant surprises.
If I could go back to March 22nd and re-draft, those are the three players I would draft differently. Doing that might get me within twenty points of Mike Lombardo's team. Buyer's remorse is a tough thing to deal with because unless you are good friends with Doc Brown, you cannot go back in time and change things. All you can do now is analyze and adjust. Clearly, it will be tough to trade guys like Hardy, Kouzmanoff, and Towles with their current production, so you must decide whether you can continue to roster these types, move them at a reduced value, or reserve them until they start producing.
- Tout Wars main website
- Tout Wars: Mixed Standings and Rosters
- Tout Wars: AL-only Standings and Rosters
- Tout Wars: NL-only Standings and Rosters
You can e-mail Mr. Collette a question or a comment about this column to DMFantasyBaseball@cbs.com. Be sure to put "Attn:Tout Wars" in the subject field. Please include your full name, hometown and state. Be aware, due to the large volume of submissions received, we cannot guarantee personal responses to all questions.