Is there a more boring team to write about than the Nats? I actually chose to write about them today rather than the Mets because trying to narrow down all the Mets stories this year into just the top 5 is quite a task!

1. Has Lastings Milledge been a fantasy bust? Nope. Lastings is having the type of season a savvy fantasy owner loves; one that has received little attention and includes a slightly harmful batting average, contributions to both HRs and SBs, but not huge ones, and R and RBI numbers deflated by a poor offense. Mix this all up and you get a player almost guaranteed to be undervalued next year. However, he has not been a bust. First comes the missed time due to injury. It wasn’t much, but it has caused his projected AB total to be only 514, obviously hurting his counting stats. Second, if you pro-rate his numbers to a 550 AB season, you get a player worth almost exactly what was projected of him, well by me at least. A 17 HR, 24 SB pace cannot be undervalued, even if it does come with light R and RBI numbers and an unhelpful batting average. It’s possible that expectations for him were so high that simply not reaching them would cause the bust labels to fly, but that’s not really fair. His home run outburst last year when he sent 7 balls over the wall in just 184 ABs couldn’t possibly be expected to continue, and sure enough, his HR/F has regressed to a more reasonable 10.6% this year (from 17.1% last year). His BABIP is a low .289, despite a 19% line drive rate, giving him some upside to his average and he’s cut down on his strikeout rate, as he’s made contact at a respectable 83% rate. 

2. Introducing: John Lannan. In what is sure to be a theme in many of these Top Five Fantasy Stories articles, here’s yet another surprising performance by a starting pitcher. I have officially never been more determined to go with the $9 pitching staff strategy in my auction league next year. Back to Lannan, I can’t see how a sub-4.00 ERA is sustainable. Not a strikeout artist, not good control, not a pitcher I want on my fantasy team. His only saving grace is a 56% groundball rate. He might maintain some minimal value in an NL-Only league the rest of this season and in 2009, but really, he’s likely to only be a 1-category guy (ERA) and he might even barely help there.

3. Austin Kearns: Perennial Underachiever. Is there any other hitter who fantasy owners have expected to truly break out as many times as Kearns? This year he’s rewarded owners who took the plunge hoping this was finally the year with a .616 OPS and just 6 HRs in 295 ABs. Moving to a new park that everyone assumed had to play better for hitters than RFK Stadium, it wasn’t unreasonable to project a big year. The elbow issues that resulted in surgery earlier in the year is the likely culprit for his terrible season, and is probably a similar situation to Victor Martinez’s who also had elbow surgery after a curious power outage. A positive sign here is that he’s basically held onto his contact rate gains that he made last year and his BABIP is only .253, despite a 21% LD rate. His HR/F actually took the first plunge last year, as it dropped from 15.3% in 2006 all the way down to 9.5%, suggesting he was dealing with elbow issues then as well. If the surgery did indeed fix him and he gets further away from the surgery going into next season, he could prove to be a bargain, especially in NL-Only leagues, as most everyone has probably just given up at this point.

4. Nationals Park. As I alluded to in the Kearns point above, the Nationals have moved into a new park and given how pitcher friendly RFK was, everyone expected the new stadium to give a boost to the hitters, while reducing the pitchers’ values. Let’s check in on how ESPN indicates the park has played so far. The one caveat however is that I’m really not sure how accurate ESPN’s park factor calculations are, and 1-year park factors to begin with could fluctuate greatly, so this isn’t a definitive conclusion on the new park. Anyhow, the park ranks 13th in Runs with a PF of 1.058 (increases runs by 5.8% compared to a neutral park). This is a dramatic difference from RFK that ranked 27th last year, 23rd the year before, and 29th the year before that. So this does confirm that the new park is indeed pretty neutral, but a welcome change for Nats’ hitters. The interesting thing about ESPN’s park factors for the new park is that the park actually benefits the pitcher for each component (HRs, 2B, 3B, BB), with the exception of hits which are increased by only .5%, yet overall the park has benefited the hitter! I really have no explanation for this, but it’s quite the mystery.

5. The emergence of another solid catching option in Jesus Flores? Picked up by the Nats in the Rule 5 draft, injuries and poor performance by Paul LoDuca and Johnny Estrada have allowed Flores to take the starting catching job and run with it. Pro-rating his current stats to a typical-for-a-catcher 400 AB season, he’s posted a .271-12-81-33-0. That RBI/R differential is quite Bengie Molina-esque. He’s hit .382 with runners in scoring position, so clearly that has inflated his RBI total and shouldn’t be expected to continue. Some more negatives: although his average is a mediocre .271, his BABIP is .343, suggesting more potential downside, and he is only walking 5.5% of the time, so that low runs scored total might not get any higher. Following up on that high BABIP is a positive in that he’s actually hitting line drives like crazy, at a 25.5% rate. That number alone justifies that .343 BABIP, but can we really expect all those liners to continue when that would rank him 4th in LD% in all of baseball and he hit them at only a 16.8% last year? I’d value Flores more like a Rod Barajas in the near term, rather than a poor man’s Bengie Molina. 

Questions, comments, criticisms, praise, expert league invitations? Email me at FBGeneralsMike@gmail.com.