My All-Star Team: National League Pitchers

So far we've covered the hitters from the American League, the hitters from the National League, and the American League pitchers, so now we'll try to tackle the National League pitching. Again, we'll use some of the same criteria we used in the American League to dwindle down the competition until we find the winners. 8 starters, 5 relievers. And since I may have erred in leaving Jose Valverde out yesterday, we'll start with the relievers today (for some reason, Baseball-Reference hasn't updated from last night so we're missing the Arthur Rhodes blow-up and any other pitching performances from last night in the analysis):

Relievers: Again, 25 innings pitched qualifies you for our All-Star pickings so 66 National League relievers are in our mix to start things out. We'll start as we did yesterday by eliminating anyone with a 3.50 ERA or higher. So say so long to 20-save man Francisco Cordero (4.25 ERA), 15-save Octavio Dotel (4.85), Wilton Lopez (0.88 BB/9 but 3.52 ERA), Rafael Betancourt (6.6 SO/BB but a 5.33 ERA), Joel Hanrahan (13.07 K/9 but 4.26 ERA) or Arizona's closers from 2010 Chad Qualls (8.88 ERA) or Aaron Heilman (3.51 ERA). That eliminates 31 players to quickly chop the relievers list to 35 as we try to get down to 5.

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Ubaldo Jiminez 2010 vs. Mariano Rivera's Postseason Career

Ubaldo Jiminez has been the best pitcher in baseball so far in 2010. He may be the best player in baseball so far in 2010. Jiminez is doing things on the field that haven't been seen before and making it look easy as he does it. But how does he compare to the master of making things look easy: Mariano Rivera? I took the 2010 numbers from Jiminez and matched them up with Rivera's postseason numbers. Here was the result (Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs with the statistics):

	Ubaldo Jiminez's 2010	Mariano Rivera's Postseason	Mariano Rivera 1996
W-L Record	11-1	8-1	8-3
Innings Pitched	87.1	133.1	107.2
ERA	0.93	0.74	2.09
WHIP	0.927	0.773	0.994
H/9	5.4	5.5	6.1
HR/9	0.2 (2 HR)	0.1 (2 HR)	0.1 (1 HR)
BB/9	2.99	1.42	2.84
K/9	8.04	7.22	10.87
SO:BB	2.69	5.10	3.82
FIP	2.72	2.23	1.88
xFIP	3.96	3.14
BABIP	0.229	0.229	0.293
LOB%	92.4%	90.1%	78.1%

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Biggest Fantasy Baseball Surprises: Outfielders, DHs and Pitchers

Yesterday we looked at the biggest fantasy baseball surprises in the infield, today we'll look at those that play the outfield, are solely utility, starting pitchers or relief pitchers. All stats and rankings courtesy of Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball. Here we go:

Utility (AKA DH)

Biggest Surprise - Vladamir Guerrero. Former Angels made popular fantasy baseball draft picks from John Lackey to Chone Figgins. But who would have thought that the best former Angel was going to be Vladamir Guerrero. He was ranked the 145th best player coming into this season and is now the second best player in baseball and looking like his MVP form of the past (as well as a sure-fire candidate to go back to Anaheim for the All-Star Game). He's hitting .339 with 29 runs, 12 HR, 42 RBI, and 4 SB.  Two points to make. One is that the weather hasn't really gotten hot so the balls are going to start jumping out even more in Texas this summer. And two, the craziest point about this whole thing is that if the Rangers had completed their trade for Mike Lowell in the off-season, Vlady may be sitting with Jermaine Dye at home still looking for work. Picture from USA Today 

Biggest Disappointment - Pat Burrell. This is pretty bad. Burrell was drafted in a fair amount of leagues for those hoping to get a bounce-back year from the Tampa DH. But he rewarded those people (and the Rays) with a .202 average, 9 runs, 2 HR and 13 RBI in 84 ABs before being released. Ouch. For a small market team such as Tampa, that's gotta hurt.

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