By Dalton Del Don – Senior Writer
It’s time to throw some offers at the owner of Travis Hafner in your league. The window of opportunity to “buy-low” may be closing with two homers over his last four games, but his overall numbers still look quite stunted. His BABIP (.285) is more than .50 points below his career mark (.336), while his contact and K:BB rates are the best of his career. Slugging has been a big problem, and the Indians do play in a pitcher’s park, but I’m chalking up the lack of extra-base hits to a fluky 250 at-bats (last year he had 73 XBH in 454 ABs). There are only a handful of hitters I’d rather own from here on out.
Ben Sheets has really transformed himself this season. The old Sheets posted crazy strikeout numbers (10.55 K:BB ratio in 2006) but was seemingly always hurt. This year’s version has been a reliable, more efficient hurler whose K rate has declined drastically (6.18 K/9 IP). He’s still giving up homers at a pretty high clip, but he has a better offense and bullpen behind him than seasons past. While he’s clearly lost some zip on his fastball, Sheets has apparently compensated by becoming more of a “pitcher.”
Adam Dunn is one of the most underappreciated players in major league baseball. While his low batting average hurts your fantasy team, his above average OBP more than offsets that for Cincinnati. First, the negatives – he’s not a very good defender and strikes out a ton. The striking out issue is extremely overblown: (note: I’m not saying striking out isn’t bad, as it clearly hurts one’s overall BA. However, comparing outs after the fact, a K is very rarely worse than any other type of out). First off, it prevents a double play. You’d need to advance a runner about four times to make up for grounding into one double play. With two outs, it doesn’t matter. With the bases empty, it doesn’t matter. I could go on and on, but the point is, “productive outs” are few and far between. Now, onto the positives – Dunn is extremely durable, has a .944 OPS this year and can even steal you a base. With his power and ability to get on base, Dunn puts more runs on the board than he gets credit for. Ken Griffey Jr is the guy Wayne Krivsky should be shopping.
Gregg Zaun has an interesting approach to throwing out runners on the basepaths – he doesn’t. After the Twins racked up three stolen bases in Monday’s game, Zaun explained that it’s more important to him that his pitchers throw quality pitches than sacrifice to be quick to the plate. Blue Jays catchers have thrown out 13.2 percent of baserunners, with Zaun at an even 10 percent.
With the additions of Milton Bradley and Michael Barrett, my Padres bet is looking better and better.
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