Wilin Rosario: #1 Fantasy Catcher

Wilin Rosario number one?  You must be high (so says Ian Miller of Productive Outs).  High on fantasy baseball, amiright?!  I’ve seen that sort of reaction to having him ranked 1st, and that’s really not surprising, as before I began the ranking process, I assumed Buster Posey would be holding down that spot for me (as he was by everyone else involved in our rankings.)  I feel some explanation is in order.

When putting together my catcher rankings this year, I decided to take a somewhat different approach than I had in the past.  Previously I had undergone an exercise that basically consisted of a purely mental exercise that involving balancing previous stat lines, lineup positions, and future expectations… both well accepted, and more personal, and ultimately turning that into a ranked list.

This season I tried to throw a little math into the equation, and come up with a formula that would pump out rankings for me, and because I don’t trust the formula implicitly, use the produced rankings as simply another factor on top of the factors I have used previously.   The formula I came up with, and I’m sure I was not breaking any new ground here, was a rather simple one, boiling down to how much each player deviated from the average player at the position who was likely to be started at a particular league size.  I went through this process using league sizes of 10,12,15, and 20 using the standard 5×5 roto categories R, RBI, HR, SB, AVG, and projections from 2 different sources (CAIRO and RotoWire).

For example, this is how the top of the projected HR rankings looked from one projection source, telling us how their HR production compares to the top HR producers at the position.

I then took each players score in each category and summed them up to get an overall score from each projection., and voila, I had some fancy pants computer generated rankings.  At this point I had basically 8 different rankings.  Four sets for the different league sizes times two for the different sets of projections.  To simplify things for ranking purposes, I chose league size 12 as what I thought would be the most common size,  and to average out the rankings from the 2 projections.  When all that was said and done, Mr. Rosario was left standing alone with the top spot, finishing #1 using RotoWire projections and #2 using CAIRO for an average rank of 1.5.  Following Rosario in the result was a 4 way tie for spots 2-5 at 3.5, so the spreadsheet had a clear winner.

So there’s the math argument, but I also like to consider things using my brain a little more directly… accessing the logical and emotional factors that go into ranking players.  So brain, why could Rosario be deserving of the top spot?  Well, Chris, let me tell you.  Well, the most obvious thing Rosario brings to the table is power.  He missed the catcher home run crown by 1, trailing Matt Wieters 22 HRs, but he did so in fewer at bats (449 vs 523) and did so with a much higher average (.292 vs .235.)  Rosario’s HR total did decrease last season, however both his FB% and HR/FB% were career lows, while his LD% was a career high.  An optimist will see that he’s making better contact than ever, and has the ability to regress to his typically higher HR/FB%, resulting in an increase in HRs in 2014.  Rosario was also relatively strong in batting average in 2013.  His previously mentioned .292 was 4th among catchers with at least 400 ABs, and Molina was the only one in the bunch ahead of him to hit over .294, so he was very nearly 2nd in that category.  His average has increased each season in the majors, which projection systems like, and though I wouldn’t suspect he has much room for improvement here, the possibility to maintain is there, and would be very valuable.  Runs and RBIs are difficult to predict.. tied to team performance and where a player ends up in the batting order.  Rosario has a heart of the order bat, and has hit there in the past, so that opportunity may be there.  Finally when it comes to stolen bases, as most catchers, Rosario should not stand to be much of a contributor.  In fact I was worried that even with only a handful of projected swipes, it would give him a disproportionate bump in the computed rankings, but being slightly lower in projected SBs than the other catchers, it actually gave him a (disproportionate) bump down, only improving his ranking in my mind, as weighting categories scores logically is still something that I have not tackled.  Now one caveat is that his OBP was pretty poor, so if you play in an OBP league, that’s something to keep in mind, but it didn’t play into my standard 5×5 calculation.

So there we have it.. both formulaic and manual reasoning to put Rosario in the top spot.  Perhaps the beautiful thing here is that I suspect most people will be of the mindset that Posey is the #1 guy at the position, and I wouldn’t argue with that, but it means that even if you think Rosario is going to be the most valuable catcher, you probably wont need to make him the first catcher selected.  For what it’s worth, MockDraftCentral currently has Posey going 1st among catchers at 59, and Rosario going 2nd  at 86, so in a 12 team league, you can grab Rosario a couple of rounds later, and if you believe the math, still be getting #1 catcher production.

In the end, even if the math is sound, it all depends on the accuracy of the projections, and if projections were always accurate nobody would be doing rankings in the first place!

PHOTO: Chris Humphreys-USA TODAY Sports