2010 Adjusted ESPN First Base Rankings

First base always seems to be deep and this year is no different. There’s a handful of elite first-basemen with very few questions and the position’s about 14 players deep before questions start popping up.

The only problems you’ll run into with first basemen is getting enough of them before they start falling off the board into UTIL spots across your league.

The Box-Plot to the left contains a total of 27 first basemen, all of whom exceed the minimum required for a beneficial UTIL-spot.

You’re almost guaranteed to get 30HR out of your first basemen and should be planning a contingency plan if you’re drafting a light-hitting first-basemen like James Loney.

As ESPN refuses to allow us access to their H/AB and rather just throws us a bone with AVG, we have to use CHONE’s AB guestimates.

Presented below are the standardized total points (Tts) and as you can see, the difference between Pujols’ and Howard’s batting average is large, but almost eliminated by Howard’s impressive HR and RBI totals.

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As you can see in the Histogram to the right, there’s one or two players in each tier after 300pts.  At 300pts, it becomes a complete and total crap-shoot.  If you care to compete, you absolutely need to get a first baseman no later than this tier.

Kevin Youkilis, Justin Morneau, Joey Votto, Derrek Lee, Billy Butler, Kendry Morales, Carlos Pena and Adam Dunn are all very capable starters at first base.

The Differences:

In the ESPN Rankings, Ryan Howard is the fifth overall first basemen despite crazy projections.  It’s become fairly clear that ESPN over-values batting average and what a .270 Batting Average means in the overall scheme of things.

Assuming we have 9 positions with 600 AB each, the difference between Howard’s .270 average and Mark Teixeira’s .300 Average is about 20 Hits over the course of 600 AB.  With Ryan Howard as your first baseman on a team that hits .300 — You end up with a .2965 or almost a .297 Average.  With Teixiera on a .300 Hitting team, you end up with .300 obviously.  Whether or not you think 3pts in BA is equal to 9HR and 20 RBI is up to you…

Pablo Sandoval also takes a huge hit for the opposite reason.  In order to take advantage of Sandoval’s .323 Projected Average, you’ll have to live with the San Francisco Giants inept offense.  Sandoval’s ability to play third definitely helps his overall value, but in the first base rankings, he’s just too high.  I find it hard to believe that he hit line-drives less than 20% of the time, considering that he wasn’t smash-killing homers.

Teams made it abundantly clear that they have absolutely no problem pitching Sandoval outside the zone by throwing 60 percent of pitches off the plate.  Teams will continue to pitch Sandoval way out there until Sandoval actually stops swinging at ‘em:  Sandoval’s 41.5% swing rate on pitches outside of the zone is 16% higher than average and trails only Bengie Molina in the overall standings.   It’ll come down to whether or not you think Sandoval has the type of plate coverage to back it up.  I’m not sure if I throw Sandoval into the Guerrero/Suzuki realm of plate coverage at this point…

He did show the ability to take a walk last year, which is a good sign when you’re 2008 BB% was not even 3%.  In a nutshell, Sandoval absolutely kills the fastball-changeup combination.  Last year, he improved dramatically against the old uncle charlie, but that was more than likely statistical error in 2008– the kid can hit, but just how far he’ll chase pitches off the plate remains to be seen.  At this point, there’s just no reason to throw him anything even remotely close to the strike-zone.

Here are the averages and standard deviations from Pujols to Helton:

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With the Z-Scores, or standard deviations away from the mean, for just first basemen.   This is a great reference point for how much a first basemen will hurt vs. help you in any given category –  We’re assuming everyone get’s the same number of AB in this chart, which is different from the overall rankings which uses projections for AB.