Re-ranking the closers - 棒球

Nate Ravitz

Posted 4/25/2005 5:03 PM

Re-ranking the closers

No position on a baseball team carries more importance for the fantasy value of
a given player than the closer role. Don't think so? Imagine this scenario.
It's a beautiful Sunday morning in Baltimore. Miguel Tejada is mowing his lawn,
thinking about his game later that night on Sunday Night Baseball. Without
warning, three escaped circus lions attack. Tejada survives, but he pays a
terrible price. His left arm is gone. He'll never play the piano again, nor
will he ever hit another major league home run. With a gaping hole at shortstop
, the Orioles turn to journeyman Chris Gomez.

Now, in that above scenario, the fantasy community would barely take notice of
Gomez. We'd recognize that stepping into Tejada's role wouldn't change the fact
that Gomez is a repugnant hitter with nothing to offer us. But play out the
same scenario and replace Tejada with Braden Looper and Gomez with Mike DeJean
(the lions can stay), and fantasy players lose their collective minds. If
Looper blew out his elbow tomorrow - or had his arm chewed off by lions - and
DeJean was named the new closer, DeJean would be a hot commodity, commanding
bids upward of $30 in leagues that use standard $100 free agent acquisition
budgets (FAAB). The fact that DeJean is a repugnant pitcher would be lost on
the average fantasy player.

The problem is that there are a finite amount of closers. So as soon as a new
one is added to the pool, we pounce like Michael Jackson at a . . . (legal
counsel has advised me not to complete that sentence). Luckily, most of the
name closers have stayed healthy this season, so we haven't yet had a
free-for-all over Chad Qualls. But even though the injury front has been
relatively quiet, the closer landscape has changed quite a bit since spring
training. On a whim this morning, I flipped open to the relief pitcher rankings
of The Roto Times Guide to Winning Fantasy Baseball. The top five were, in
order: Eric Gagne, Brad Lidge, Mariano Rivera, Francisco Rodriguez and Keith
Foulke. Yikes. So far, that group has combined for just 15 saves - the same as
the venerable Brandon Lyon/Danny Graves duo. With that in mind, I decided it
was time to re-rank the closers - with the focus being fantasy value from today
through the end of the season. To make things a bit easier, we'll split it up
by league.

American League

...(略)

National League

...(略)

14. Chin-Hui Tsao - After starting the year on the DL, Tsao has two saves in
the last eight days. The jury is still out, but there's no clear alternative in
Colorado.


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