There has certainly been an outage of offense in the American League this season. The questions of why and for how long remain unanswered. Here is a list of the Top 3 players by position using Baseball Prospectus' VORP statistic. Note how much difference there is just between the top player and the third-best one. This would lead me to believe a Stars & Scrubs versus a balance approach may be the best fantasy strategy. Agree?
Also, note how poorly the OF VORP leaders due relative to the other position players. The top VORP is lower. This supports the contention that the OF is "shallow" relative to the other positions. However, the drop-off is not as dramatic. There could be more depth in the OF relative to other positions. This supports a strategy that focuses on acquiring the top positions player at the expense of OFs. Agree?
Finally, look at the top three DHs. This helps epxlain the drop in AL production this season. That extra hitter has struggled mightily. I bet the answer to this question goes a ways to explaining the production outage in the AL.
NAME | TEAM | POS | AVG | OBP | SLG | VORP |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Brian McCann | ATL | c | 0.331 | 0.393 | 0.606 | 21.6 |
Geovany Soto | CHN | c | 0.314 | 0.414 | 0.601 | 20.2 |
Ryan Doumit | PIT | c | 0.35 | 0.382 | 0.573 | 12.4 |
Lance Berkman | HOU | 1b | 0.382 | 0.463 | 0.763 | 44.7 |
Albert Pujols | SLN | 1b | 0.351 | 0.479 | 0.602 | 31.1 |
Kevin Youkilis | BOS | 1b | 0.32 | 0.386 | 0.584 | 20.4 |
Dan Uggla | FLO | 2b | 0.323 | 0.402 | 0.695 | 32.2 |
Chase Utley | PHI | 2b | 0.31 | 0.387 | 0.63 | 27.8 |
Brandon Phillips | CIN | 2b | 0.299 | 0.342 | 0.531 | 16.5 |
Rafael Furcal | LAN | ss | 0.366 | 0.448 | 0.597 | 26.1 |
Hanley Ramirez | FLO | ss | 0.304 | 0.392 | 0.515 | 23 |
Miguel Tejada | HOU | ss | 0.34 | 0.373 | 0.518 | 20.6 |
Chipper Jones | ATL | 3b | 0.41 | 0.482 | 0.687 | 37.8 |
David Wright | NYN | 3b | 0.287 | 0.388 | 0.52 | 16 |
Aramis Ramirez | CHN | 3b | 0.285 | 0.406 | 0.513 | 14.4 |
Ryan Ludwick | SLN | rf | 0.336 | 0.418 | 0.733 | 24.8 |
Josh Hamilton | TEX | cf | 0.328 | 0.375 | 0.599 | 23.8 |
Nate McLouth | PIT | cf | 0.298 | 0.382 | 0.602 | 23.1 |
Matt Holliday | COL | lf | 0.324 | 0.414 | 0.528 | 19.5 |
Carlos Quentin | CHA | lf | 0.294 | 0.408 | 0.588 | 19 |
Pat Burrell | PHI | lf | 0.271 | 0.413 | 0.542 | 16.4 |
Milton Bradley | TEX | dh | 0.317 | 0.425 | 0.566 | 19 |
Hideki Matsui | NYA | dh | 0.297 | 0.381 | 0.458 | 12.5 |
David Ortiz | BOS | dh | 0.249 | 0.353 | 0.469 | 11.8 |