Things are starting to get more serious with two full weeks of fantasy baseball wrapped up. In some head-to-head leagues, you may find yourself in an 0-2 hole and questioning everything you know about baseball. In roto leagues, you may see yourself at the top of the pack and think you are the bee’s knees. But, there’s still a ton of baseball to be player, my friends. In the meantime, let’s look back at the week that was with the 2011 WERTH roto values:
I’ll be maintaining this list out on Google Docs throughout the season as long as gDocs keeps allowing me to do so. Therefore, you can feel free to keep that bookmarked if you like all of this data. You’ll see six tabs which cover batter and pitcher data from the first and second weeks as well as the season totals. They each contain the basic stats and then the WERTH totals (how many points in the standings the player contributed in that week for the season total) and WERTHy totals (how much they would have contributed if everyone got the same amount of playing time).
Lance Berkman came out of nowhere and crushed a lot of baseballs last week to lead the roto values in scoring as he was singlehandedly worth 2 roto points on the season for you if you started him. Albert Pujols proved to everyone he is still Albert Pujols with a return to the top of the charts. Beyond that, we did see a couple of surprise appearances by the likes of Starlin Castro, Johnny Damon, Jonny Gomes, Sam Fuld and Jonathan Herrera.
Castro is a good player but won’t remain in the top 5 most valuable players in the game all year with a .400 average. It’s likely that his value won’t get higher than this so it’s understandable to try to trade him away now. But, he’ll still put up decent numbers on the year if you hold onto him. Jonny Gomes struggled a bit last year but definitely has 30 HR potential so keep an eye on him. I wouldn’t get excited about Herrera though. While he has some speed, he doesn’t even have much of that and offers nothing else for you in the long term.
You had some usual pitchers topping the charts with Dan Haren and Cliff Lee as well as some surprise visitors like Livan Hernandez and Michael Pineda. Pineda is definitely a player to keep an eye on as well as he has good strikeout potential but his xFIP leads you to believe that he may be getting a bit lucky. Two other pitchers worth mentioning are Tommy Hanson and Josh Beckett. Hanson struck out 14 over 12 innings and put up two good starts despite an unlucky BABIP (strikeout pitchers can overcome that sort of thing). Beckett had another good start, which puts him in the top 10 pitchers on the season, and there’s no sign that luck is a factor in this as his xFIP is looking good and he has great strikeout numbers at the moment. I think it’s for real and might look to see if someone is thinking they can “sell high” on him.
Jed Lowrie continues to make a case for himself as he had one of the highest WERTHy values for the week. Though he won’t be able to sustain a .538 BABIP, he can still bring a lot to the fantasy table if he gets full time AB’s. Keep an eye on that situation as Marco Scutaro hasn’t done much to keep his job.
If you have any ideas or suggestions for what should be included in the Google Docs sheet, let me know. In the meantime, enjoy another crazy week of baseball.