FanHouse MikeGonzalez

It's always nice to know how secure a closer's job is and who's next in line if somebody loses their 9th inning job. The Closer Report will give you that info. And if that wasn't good enough, we'll rank the closers from top to bottom.

As you'll see, Heath Bell has taken over the top spot on this edition of The Closer Report. A few big-name, top-of-the-charts closers from years past have fallen off quite a bit. How weird is it to see Brad Lidge near the bottom of the closer rankings and Joe Nathan stuck in the middle?

It's always nice to know how secure a closer's job is and who's next in line if somebody loses their 9th inning job. Each week The Closer Report will give you that information. And if that wasn't good enough we'll rank the closers from top to bottom.

Here's an interesting statistic. Somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent of the closers who are listed as the the team's official closer will not be in that role by the end of the season. It's the case every year. Whether a closer loses his job due to injury or just plain can't get the job done, you're going to learn that you can find saves on the waiver wire throughout the season. You just have to know where to look.

I got my start in this industry at a now-defunct site called The Talented Mr. Roto. The namesake for the site, Matthew Berry, now does his thing over at ESPN. One hard and fast rule he always lived by -- and I'm sure he still does -- was this mantra: Never pay for saves.

It's just as simple as it sounds. If you play in an auction league, let everyone else bid on Francisco Rodriguez. Your money can be better spent elsewhere. If you draft, just find your relievers in the last few rounds. I'm not as hardcore into the theory, but it certainly has merit.

When drafting in fantasy baseball, I often find rankings are a lot less useful than using the tier system. Simply group guys together with others who will perform similarly, and you won't focus on single players. Being frazzled when that single player is taken immediately before your pick is a good way to ruin your draft.

We're definitely not proponents of drafting closers high, but getting the last member of a tier at good value could work in the right situations.

Fantasy baseball draft season is coming, so you best be prepared by delving through every major player on each team. Fantasy FanHouse is here to help with a quick once-over.

Meet the ...

Biggest offseason losers. At least that's what pessimists will try and tell you, anyway. The Braves -- and new GM Frank Wren -- seemingly made blunder after blunder in 2009, losing Rafael Furcal at the last minute, whiffing on A.J. Burnett, letting John Smoltz walk and failing to land Jake Peavy. But the reality is that Wren actually did a pretty darn good job assembling a talented squad that can certainly compete in the NL East in 2009. Oh, and they'll provide some nice fantasy value as well.

I won't go over the dead horse that is the injury-riddled Atlanta Braves bullpen. I will, however, point out that Mike Gonzalez is returning tonight for the first time in over a full calendar year, after a lengthy bbq eating stint, to pitch for the Braves.

It seems pretty, pretty likely, given that John Smoltz and Rafael Soriano are both currently disabled, that Gonzo could be the closer until he gets hurt too for the remainder of the season.

'He's throwing good, they say,' said Cox, who envisions using him in key situations late in games from the get-go. 'Hopefully we can count on him for the very end - eighth and ninth. If he's back to his old form, it's a huge plus.'

The news is finally positive for a Braves team that has endured watching Rafael Soriano return to the disabled list this week with the same elbow problems that kept him out for the first two months and John Smoltz's attempt to return as closer end in season-ending shoulder surgery.

See? Gonzo could close out of the gate. Or simply tear his rotator cuff on the first pitch. The latter is the most likely scenario if you have followed the Braves at all this year.

Fantasy Spin: Grab Gonzalez now -- the Braves are somehow still potent despite dealing with tons of injuries, and he could provide nice saves totals, if he can stay healthy. Soriano might still nab the gig when he comes back, but if Gonzo deals immediately, there's no guarantee.

Deep breaths are necessary to ensure the absence of obscenities. That's what the "serenity now" voice in my head keeps telling me as I scramble to withdraw fantasy league trade offers and to keep hitting refresh on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's webpage, hoping they screwed up and John Smoltz really isn't out for the season.

Obviously I know that's all delusion and the longest tenured Brave on the roster (and my favorite baseball player in the history of my reasonably short life, for whatever that's worth) is done for the season and maybe for his career.

The repercussions on this are varying, and while tacking on "vast" to that might be a stretch, for a Braves fan, it is pretty painful to come to the realization of how this season -- which still has a lot of promise -- could quickly be unfolding into a freefalling nightmare.

We are -- to play the schizophrenic optimist here -- just three and a half games back of the surging Phils in the NL East. We have the second best home record in the bigs (despite the worst road record). Our pitching staff has allowed, as Jon Bois points out, the least runs in the bigs, despite being classified, at best, as patchwork. (No offense to the guys who have stepped up this year. Acting like injuries haven't ravaged this staff would be denial though.)

But losing Smoltz changes everything. Maybe I'm insane, but he seems like the string that holds everything together through some combination of talent and leadership. And frankly, I'm blanking terrified that it's all going to really unravel now that he's gone.

Oh, and he's really, really itching to get back on the diamond. Which is good for Braves fans. Nice find in the Atlanta Journal - Constitution by Velcro Vernacular, whereby we learn that Mike Gonzalez is a very big fan of Smokey Bones barbecue in Atlanta.

Gonzalez ate dinner at Smokey Bones barbecue every night in early April so he could catch Braves games on satellite. But he'd see late inning collapses and want to rush himself all the more. A maturing Gonzalez - who turns 30 on May 23 - decided to read boxscores over his morning coffee instead.

His eagerness dates back to May 16, when after six weeks as a Brave, he succumbed to the disabled list. He couldn't pitch through the pain that bothered him just putting gel in his hair.

So, to recap: Rich baseball player can't watch team in his own home because for whatever reason he doesn't own a satellite or computer or get the local Sports South Station. So rich baseball player -- recovering from an injury and trying to get back in tip-top shape -- spends every freaking evening of early April at a barbecue joint, generally hanging out there for three to four hours at minimum while watching baseball. Color me pessimistic, but this can't possibly be considered "healthy" in any sense of the word.

Still, Gonzalez "matured", finally kicking the barbecue habit in late April, and appears to be on track for a mid-May return to the bullpen. The bad news for him is that with John Smoltz' impending shift from the rotation, he's unlikely to see closing duties any time soon. Still, barbecue addiction or not, he'd be a very welcome addition to the Atlanta bullpen.

Fantasy Spin: Gonzalez is a sleeper for saves (deeeep sleeper) but will make a nice cheap MR add in most leagues.

The Braves' bullpen was so lousy in 2006 that they felt that they had to make bold moves to shore it up for 2007. One of those moves was to trade their starting first baseman for a Pirates closer to turn him into a set up man. It worked for a while. But now, the Braves have to go to plan B as Mike Gonzalez is out for the season, after it was learned that he's going to have to have his elbow ligament replaced.

"This is the worst news you can get," Gonzalez said.

A first MRI in Atlanta found no serious problem, but the Braves and Gonzalez remained concerned after an unusually sharp drop in the velocity of his pitches. "I hadn't thrown 82 (miles per hour) since high school," Gonzalez said. "I was feeling something uncomfortable. You just don't drop 10 or 15 miles per hour."

No date has been set for the surgery, but Gonzalez said he expects to have the procedure next week. "I'm not down in the dumps or anything," Gonzalez said, adding he is bracing for a long rehabilitation.

Whatever happens with Adam LaRoche (and it should be noted that LaRoche was hitting .196 coming into play on Friday night), the trade was still the correct thing to do for Atlanta. Increasingly, teams win with bullpens. And I don't care how many straight division titles the Braves had won, they're never going to win with a bullpen like they did coming into '06. So the Gonzalez for LaRoche trade, especially with Scott Thorman waiting in the wings to take over for LaRoche, was a chance worth taking.

But this is a hit for the Braves. They should still be all right with Rafael Soriano and Bob Wickman at the back end of the 'pen. However, great bullpens win ball games, and the Braves, without Gonzalez, have merely a good bullpen.

Jayson Stark of ESPN fame is coming out with a new book called "The Stark Truth", which chronicles the most overrated and most underrated players in baseball history. If you're a Braves fan, you might want to skip over this at your local bookstore.

Why, because there's a whole excerpt on Andruw Jones, and not on the underrated side ... in fact, Stark calls Jones the most overrated center fielder of all time:

He peaked at 493 putouts in 1999. He was still slurping up 461 in 2001. But by 2005 he was down to 365. In 2006 he was at 377. I tried looking at his total chances per game. Still way down. We're talking about 100 or so balls a year he wasn't getting to that he used to. A hundred. I thought: that can't be right. A friend suggested maybe it was a function of the Braves' pitching staff. Maybe they were just throwing fewer fly balls than they used to. Great point. So I checked. Fortunately, there's a stat that measures that, too -- zone rating (the percentage of balls fielded by a player in his typical zone).

So I called up the 2006 zone rating of all qualifying major league center fielders on ESPN.com. Guess who was last on the list? Yessir, Andruw. He also finished last in 2004. And fifth from the bottom in 2005. I kept checking. As recently as 2001, he led his league in zone rating. So obviously, we had a definitive trend on our hands. I then went back to the scout who started all this to report my findings. "I first noticed it two or three years ago," he said. "Just from sitting there, scouting, watching balls dropping in that should have been caught. I'm not talking about balls that needed to be dived for. I'm talking about balls that should be caught."

Jones' defense isn't the only aspect of his game dissected in a negative way, just the most eye-opening. Jones' best offensive season is devalued as well after the jump: