Last Player Picked

The Price Guide’s composite projections said Zack Greinke would be worth $9 in 2009. That’s what you would pay for a 4.15 ERA and 1.32 WHIP pitcher — one with a middling strikeout rate on a bad team for wins.

Zack Greinke currently sits at $52 of value in a standard mixed league — tops for any hitter or pitcher. He’s turned himself into a dominant strikeout pitcher (9.7 K/9) who is giving up so few runs per start that he gets wins even as a Royal.

The composite projections put Raul Ibanez down as a $14 player. That’s a 20 HR, 80 RBI, outfielder who is about to turn 37 years old.

With 17 homeruns already this season, Ibanez looks like he could match his full-season homerun projection (22) by the end of May. He’s flipped that $14 projection into a $41 value so far this year — leading all hitters.

Does that mean anything going forward?

At this point, I’m much more sold on Greinke’s breakout than on Ibanez’s. I could envision Greinke as a top 10 pitcher next year much easier than I can see Ibanez as a top-tier hitter.

Most of that confidence is due to their respective ages: Greinke is 24 and Ibanez, 36. It’s much more likely for a 24 year old pitcher to take his game to the next level than for a hitter in his “decline” years.

Wild guess for end-of-year values: Ibanez $26, Greinke $37.

Even wilder guess at 2010 projections: Ibanez $17, Greinke $34.

We’ve played about one month of games so far. For a standard league, here are the players with the largest gap between their year-to-date performance and their preseason dollar values according to the composite projections:

While the top of the list is SP-heavy, there seems to be a reasonable representation of hitters and pitchers here. Brandon Webb and Vladimir Guerrero get a partial pass because of injuries, but everyone else here has earned a spot on this list fair and square.

Should any of these performances have been expected?

There were plenty of concerns this spring about the 2008 workloads for CC Sabathia and Cole Hamels. The Brewers rode Sabathia hard down the stretch, not afraid to pitch him on short-rest. Including three rounds of postseason play, Hamels had a frighteningly high number of innings pitched last year.

Those were concerns that the projections didn’t really account for, but I imagine smart owners factored in some extra risk and lowered their max bid for those two pitchers. (I didn’t draft Sabathia or Hamels in any of my leagues this year, for what it’s worth.)

On that list, I see no reason to hang on to either Chien-Ming Wang or Rafael Perez at this point in the season. Wang didn’t even project above the replacement level, and Perez is the sort of middle reliever that only gets drafted while you’re waiting on guys like Scott Downs and Ryan Franklin to emerge.

Other than Wang and Perez, I don’t think you can bail on any of these players. I would imagine that most of those players end the season closer to their projected values than their current values.