I made a trip to the local Barnes & Noble today in search of fantasy baseball magazines. Specifically I was looking for the FanBall offering as a good friend of mine, Jason Collette, is a big part of their coverage. Unfortunately, it was not in but I did pick up the annual Sporting News fantasy baseball magazine. Say what you will about fantasy baseball magazines and their value, but I usually end up with three or four every year and I make no apologies for it.
Having just finished my outfielder rankings, I immediately turned to SN’s rankings of outfielders to see how the two lists compared. What follows is a comparison of the two lists. There were 96 of my outfielders in their top 105 so that’s what I’ll be looking at here. It was interesting to see who I really liked compared to them and who they really liked compared to me. There were 14 players that SN & I were within one rank +/- of each other.
Outfielders I Love…
Here are the guys I rated much higher than the Sporting News. The cutoff was a double-digit difference between the lists:
Coco Crisp was the biggest split between the two sets of rankings. Initially, I thought that might just be because they went to press before Crisp was in Kansas City. One of the biggest knocks on magazines is timeliness. At any rate, they DID have Crisp in KC… they just didn’t see him as being all that valuable. We differed on a lot of young guys: Milledge, Dukes, Jones, Maybin, Upton, Bruce and Young all got much lower marks from Sporting News. I don’t necessarily consider myself the type of fantasy player that buys into youth and potential all that much. I like proven, established players much more, but it would appear that Sporting News has me beat on downgrading youth movements.
Outfielders They Love…
Here are guys that Sporting News rated much higher than I did in my list. Again, the cutoff was a double-digit discrepancy:
Check out that Aaron Rowand love!! For me, I just don’t see it. It’s not like they projected him for 20-90, but they did predict a healthy boost in his run production numbers and I see no clear reason to expect such. At best, he stays status quo from last year, which would give him a stat line behind plenty of his peers. The aforementioned Jason Collette will no doubt side with Sporting News on Nelson Cruz as he simply loves the guy! I was really by the following: Winn, Ludwick, Ibanez, Quentin and Holliday. All of those, for one reason or another, really stuck out to me as inexplicably favorable rankings. And for the record, Holliday was already on Oakland when he received the #1 ranking for their book. I found their Holliday capsule & prediction interesting:
His minor league performance was not indicative of the player Holliday became with Colorado, but he is moving to one of the best pitchers’ parks in the American League. It would be foolish to expect 30 home runs or .319 average in Oakland, but the Athletics value stolen-base efficiency, and Holliday was decent on the basepaths last season.
Projection – 111 r/35 hr/122 rbi/27 sb/.324 average
I love Holliday and I really hope he gets those kind of numbers, but the two entities seemed to contradict one another. At any rate, I am by no means trying to start crap with Sporting News and say I’m right and they’re wrong. I think the comparison between rankings is half the fun of coming up with a rankings set.
I leave you today with the entire list of 96 that were compared:
I want to again thank everyone for their very kind words about the piece. I put a lot of effort into doing the work and I really hope you all find some value in it for your fantasy prep this winter/spring. Please continue to stay tuned to the blog for more rankings, articles and discussion.
Baseball By Paul 