Eric Hosmer Archives

Padres Land Eric Hosmer

Eric Hosmer has decided to sign with the Padres with an eight-year, $144M deal. The Padres don’t necessarily need a first baseman, but they could use his above league average bat in the lineup. The 28-year-old Hosmer is coming off a career season, at least from a fantasy perspective, with a .318 average, 25 HR, 98 runs, and 94 RBI. According to FanGraphs' auction calculator, he was the 25th-highest producing position player last season. There is a perception that Hosmer is inconsistent from season-to-season. This really…

The Baseball Show, S2.E9 Mike Petriello [Video]

A total joy to welcome Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) of MLB.com this week to The Baseball Show! Mike is best known for his coverage of Statcast, which is the technology being employed that is revolutionizing the game of baseball. How fast players run, the angle of a batter's swing, the velocity and spin rate on a ball slung by a pitcher, and so much more. Mike walks us through what exactly it all means, and how it is growing and being integrated into today's game. We got into some specific examples, including the recent…

2018 Fantasy Baseball Rankings: First Base

After covering the catcher position last week, we break down the position that usually has the most power each season. First base was a very busy position in 2017. We saw powerful debuts from Cody Bellinger, Rhys Hoskins, and Matt Olson, breakout seasons from Logan Morrison and Justin Smoak, and the worst season of Miguel Cabrera's career. All of this played a huge part in how these rankings were constructed. Most of the names in the top-10 are household fantasy names, but a couple of youngsters join them after…

MLB Hot Stove Preview

Now that the Houston Astros have won the World Series, we have officially entered the "hot stove league" portion of the baseball season. According to MLB.com, "In the early days of baseball, Hot Stove Season referred to an actual baseball season: Hot Stove Leagues, in which MLB players would stay in shape by playing baseball in their hometowns while staying warm with actual hot stoves. The term soon expanded to become a kind of predecessor to the water cooler -- on a cold day, fans would gather around the hot stove to…

ESPN Player Rater Retrospective

It can often be difficult to place into context how well (or how poorly) certain players have performed recently. A glance at ESPN’s Player Rater, which attempts to quantify a player’s overall fantasy value by analyzing their performance in each facet of the game, can focus targets for fantasy owners looking for help on the waiver wire. Of course, when dealing with small sample sizes, a player’s results can be fluky, but placement at or near the top of these lists could be indicative of a substantive change to a player’s…