Footprints in the Snow is FanHouse's look at the paths to be forged by MLB teams this winter as they look ahead to 2010.
At $149,373,987, the New York Mets had the National League's highest payroll in 2009. Their fourth place finish in the NL East, 23 games back in the standings, might suggest that the cash Omar Minaya dished out wasn't money well spent. A closer look reveals a team harassed all season by injuries and a group of hitters that could never find a long-term answer to produce runs.
In the outfield, Carlos Beltran had a potential All-Star season broken up, playing in only 81 games due to a knee injury. In fact, only Jeff Francoeur amassed more than 500 at-bats among Mets outfielders, and he was a mid-season import from the Atlanta Braves.
The infield wasn't spared either as mainstays Carlos Delgado and Jose Reyes had their seasons cut extremely short due to injuries. Even staff ace Johan Santana ended his season early with elbow issues.
The good news is that most of these players are expected to be healthy and ready to go for spring training.
The Arizona Fall League is chock-full of young prospects looking to make their mark. Desert Diaries is your twice-weekly look at which of these up-and-comers could make a fantasy baseball splash in 2010.
In case you missed it while you were at that pesky place called work on Thursday, Washington Nationals prospect and first overall selection in the 2009 Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft, Stephen Strasburg, made his second appearance in the Arizona Fall League. He didn't do well.
Strasburg pitched 2.2 innings on Thursday, striking out four, walking one and giving up a whopping three home runs which lead to seven earned runs against him. According to Chico Harlan of The Washington Post, the seven earned runs he gave up in his outing yesterday were almost half of the number he gave up in his entire junior season at San Diego State.
New York Mets manager Jerry Manuel announced that he's making some lineup changes for Thursday's game. The biggest deal is the fact that he plans to move David Wright down two slots to bat fifth, while moving Beltran up to bat third.
A move from batting third in the batting order to batting fifth doesn't seem like much, but batting order studies have shown that the fantasy devaluation that Wright could take might be dramatic. If the switch is long term Wright could miss out on about 5% of the plate appearances he'd see in the third slot. He would also be subject to a 5% drop in RBI and a 10% drop in home runs. The biggest hit, however, could be in stolen bases, where he could possibly see a 40% drop-off. Does anyone want to see David Wright with these kinds of drop-offs in production?
As neatly as it turned out, it's tempting to wonder if the Mets scripted it just this way. A one-run lead after seven innings. J.J. Putz pitches a scoreless eighth. Francisco Rodriguez a scoreless ninth.
The 2009 bullpen holds a lead to which the 2008 'pen would have set fire. Sure, they might rather have plated some of those 11 runners they left on base in the first six innings, but they got the Opening Day win anyway, and they did it in a way that sends their fans a message.
NEW YORK -- Only the bobbing Home Run Apple beyond the outfield walls seems familiar, which is probably just as well. There wasn't much anyone wanted to lug from the festering dump next door -- not the roaming feral cats, not the stench of overflowing toilets, and certainly not the wretched string of September collapses and dashed hopes.
Good riddance to Shea Stadium, now a pile of rubble.
From now until the regular season begins, Fantasy Flings is where you'll find interesting story lines about your favorite teams from Spring Training. If there is a position battle, a nagging injury, a comeback story or a youngster making a surge for the "big club" we'll let you know the fantasy implications.
Atlanta Braves Omar Infante and Matt Diaz are popular kids in camp as Spring Training winds down. They're popular not so much for their talent or spring numbers (although both have great spring stats) but for who they will be replacing in the starting lineup if mending time stretches into the regular season. Chipper Jones is nursing an oblique injury and Garrett Anderson a calf problem. Both are expected to return to action this week. If that doesn't happen or further set-backs occur, Infante and Diaz gain some NL-only value.
Every season, right around this time, there is a large flock of prospects all trying to prove to themselves and the front office that they belong in big league baseball. The key to fantasy baseball success when speaking of these prospects is to know whether or not they are going to make the team out of Spring Training. If not, you need to weigh the time line of each player and figure out if he should be a selection in your fantasy draft or if you'll be spending FAAB money or using waiver priority status on him.
Choose wisely when considering the acquisition of prospects. Most of these guys have bright, rocket-ship upside. But, not all will become effective fantasy assets.
Tommy Hanson, Braves - Unless a string of injuries occur to the Braves rotation this spring, Hanson will start the season at Triple-A Gwinnett. He'll, most likely, be the first starter called up as he was a strikeout machine in the Arizona Fall League and is still showing off his arm this spring. He's good enough to make a front-of-the-rotation impact almost instantly.
FanHouse continues its 2009 MLB Preview with a look at the New York Mets.
The Mets have taken their fans on a fast and loose joy ride for the last three seasons. Unfortunately for those fans, each season has ended with the car going off the cliff, starting with a heartbreaking end to the 2006 NLCS and continuing through two straight years of blown division leads in September. They hope to change that this season with a new and improved bullpen, designed to keep the car from going off the cliff on a daily basis.
Once we stumble into the first few weeks of fantasy draft season, we have the luxury of trolling through some average draft position charts (ADP, henceforth). One of the problems is that most of the early-to-mid February drafting is being done by hypothetical fantasy fanatics, so there aren't a ton of skewed averages.
Of course, recently-retired Jeff Kent has found a way to get drafted in 1.6 percent of the leagues on Mock Draft Central (MDC, henceforth), so they're worth a look. We'll use the ADP per position* on MDC for the rest of our analysis here. Most of the guys listed are not to be targeted in shallow to medium-sized leagues, as they are later-round steals for the deepest of fantasy leagues.
Daniel Murphy burst on to the major league scene rather quickly. He went from decent prospect to top rookie last season, as he had some very good splits (.313/.397/.473) in his first 131 major league at-bats.
Manager Jerry Manuel thinks so highly of him that the original plan to have him platoon with Fernando Tatis in left field has been scrapped. Murphy has impressed so much that the left field job is now his to lose.
Footprints in the Snow is FanHouse's look at the paths to be forged by MLB teams this winter as they look ahead to 2010.
The Arizona Fall League is chock-full of young prospects looking to make their mark. Desert Diaries is your twice-weekly look at which of these up-and-comers could make a fantasy baseball splash in 2010. 
As neatly as it turned out, it's tempting to wonder if the Mets scripted it just this way. A one-run lead after seven innings. 
NEW YORK -- Only the bobbing Home Run Apple beyond the outfield walls seems familiar, which is probably just as well. There wasn't much anyone wanted to lug from the festering dump next door -- not the roaming feral cats, not the stench of overflowing toilets, and certainly not the wretched string of September collapses and dashed hopes.
Once we stumble into the first few weeks of fantasy draft season, we have the luxury of trolling through some average draft position charts (
