RotoSavants

While doing research tonight, I found an interesting note in the fan projections on Fangraphs for Billy Butler that prompted me to go check out his current ADP. Interestingly enough, while I agree with Butler's possible breakout this year, I found it quite depressing to see Lance Berkman, a fantasy stalwart for the past few years begin his decent into "old guy" rounds.

While exceptions like Manny Ramirez still exist in the early rounds, most of your 34ish and older crowd slowly start to drop off in production. A big chunk of these players end up clogging the mid to late rounds with their expected safe production but nagging injury risks. Let's look two of them.

Lance Berkman, ADP 79
Berkman has had an undulating career path, with two distinct power peaks flanked by sharp decreases. Berkman has been a typical all or nothing corner infield candidate, giving one manager a mediocre season followed by a huge breakout, and vice-versa.

One stable piece of production for Lance has been his plate discipline. His walk and strikeouts rate have hovered right around +-2% of his career values from year to year, but we still haven't uncovered any clues surrounding his suddenly superman HR/FB% that seem to creep out every 3 years or so.

Provided Lance is healthy again this year, his production shouldn't continue to decrease in the degree his injury shortened 2009 did. I'd be more optimistic his lands right around his career line, basically repeating his 2008 performance, but without the steals. Until Berkman puts up another year of decrease that is accompanied by a degradation of his plate discipline, I'm not quite a non-beliver yet.

At his price, I think I would prefer to gamble on Berkman than Justin Morneau (ADP 37) since the idea of vertebral stress fractures absolutely frighten me.

Chipper Jones, ADP 101
Chipper has always been a pet project of mine, especially in my local OBP league. Consistently underrated, Chipper provided a huge return on his draft slot until last year's flameout.

Chipper was plagued by the lowest BABIP of his career since a previous shaky campaign in 2004, his worst strikeout rate since 2004, and also experienced his lowest HR/FB% since batted ball data was available in 2002. While most projection system are putting a lot of weight on his 2009 production (and they should) Chipper had posted three straight years where he eclipsed a 1.000 OPS. That has to account for something, outside of his nagging injury concerns.

While I wouldn't be leaning on Chipper for production at 3B, I would select him in the 9th round, in lieu of any of the run of the mill closers available. Even a possible return to the mean of his 2008-2009 could be a great selection, as a corner infield swing candidate paired with a decent low risk average corner infielder. Would I expect more than 20-25 homeruns? Probably not, but it'll definitely be an improvement over the 5th round bust he was last year.