Creeper of the Week: Kiermaie(r)king Me Crazy, and the Top 100 Hitters, Week 2

The title of this post is more indicative of what the fantasy baseball season does to us than to what this player will do for you. How nutty was week 1? I’m loving drafting Adrian Gonzalez in the 4th round of the Razzball Pert’s league, and pissed at myself for not drafting J.D. Martinez anywhere. I really liked J.D. coming into the year and yet got sniped on him every time I was ready to draft him. Same goes for Matt Harvey. I heart you two and will look to trade for you at premium prices if I must. Wait! What? No I won’t. Yes you will. Okay, maybe I will, but sometimes you have to pay a price to get the toys you want. The bills on my Impala can attest to that. Before I move into this week’s creeper, I want to thank all the commenters that came out for the Easter Creeper. What a great kick off to the MLB season…thanks guys. It was a great opener for the baseball season.

This week, the 4.8% owned Kevin Keirmaier has me licking my chops as I see a hot start getting some nice ballparks and lots of right-handers. The regular readers here, which you all should be, and how dare you if you are not, know that he was not a buy this past Friday for the fantasy master lothario. That makes me feel the need to pick up the slack and throw Kev’s hat into the ring. Our resident numbers game bear/bull/trash-man Big Magoo grabbed him in the writers league, damn you BM, and catcher-question-hater commenter Cram has been screaming his undying love of the K-dog in the comments and took him in one of the leagues I play in. I kinda hate you two, but who would I be if I wasn’t hating?

This week he opens with a tasty four game set in the home run friendly Rogers Centre, where he gets three right-handers and one lefty. The lefty is the one day I’d sit him this week, for his left-handed bat over the past three years has supplied a paltry .203 BA vs. his .280 against right-handers. After Toronto, he goes to lefty friendly New York and gets three more right-handers to finish off the week. He’s never been a big power guy, but let’s look at a few batted ball profile percentages for fun. He had the 30th best HR/FB (13%) among outfielders last year with at least 350 AB’s, just behind Carlos Gomez and ahead of Michael Brantley and Starling Marte. His GB% is quite high (10th highest OF at 52.6%), which was just ahead of Hunter Pence, but not even close to ground ball specialist Christian Yelich (61%). His ISO of .187 was 20th among OF with the same parameters above. You can point out his minor league numbers don’t quite line up with that, but with 364 AB’s its also hard to write it off as an outlier. His glove will always keep him in the line-up (he is one of the best defensive right fielders in the game), so playing time shouldn’t be a problem if any of you have that worry. He’s been batting lead off and looks locked in so far putting up a 5/2/4/0/.385 line the first week and as this sounds like a buy, it is. Buy him for week 2 and be prepared to hold as this creeper can turn into a keeper.

Frankencatcher: Yes, I changed the name this week as I want to promote the Frankenplays. It really should be in the glossary at this point. I’m not the only one who uses it and it’s going to be a part of your fantasy vernacular whether you like it or not. I’m quite bummed out last week’s play John Jaso got hurt early and went on the DL. Now before I move on to my play I want to give some parameters I’ll be using with the Frankencatcher play. The top-12 owned are obviously off the board, and I will never put a % on it but will try and be reasonable on guys you should be able to grab. The 0.4% owned Chris Iannetta has been off to a slow start so far this year but has the chance to breathe some life into your line-up this week. He is the highest rated under owned catcher play on the Hitter-Tron this week at 7th with a $7.7 dollar value. He gets three games at Houston and three at Texas. He favors lefties (3 year average of .259 vs .228 against RHP) and gets three of them this week. It would be hard to assume what the Sciosciapath will do so take all of this with lots of grains of salt, preferably around the rim of a glass, and alcohol in said glass. If you own Yan Gomes, who got hurt on Saturday, then you might want to plug in Chris because he should be available while you wait on the fate of my favorite Brazilian major leaguer.

Bonus Creeper: My other favorite under-owned plays are the lefty Baltimore duo of Alejandro De Aza (7.4) and Travis Snider (10.2). They are both liked by HitterTron and who can blame that oversexed Buick loving bot. They get five right-handers out of their six games with three at home and three at Fenway.

Top-100 Hitters for Week 2

•  I dropped out all the DL and NA players from this list as I try to keep it filled with guys playing or about to play. I’m looking at you Brandon Belt.
• The biggest leap was J.D. Martinez. I was blown away with how he has picked up where he left off last season, and is bringing back memories of a Bautista-esque run. His 22 spot jump is the most significant one here.
• Steve Pearce, Pedro Alvarez and Anthony Gose are a few of the players to enter the list. Pearce and Pedro look sharp, and wow, does that sentence sound all about a hundred times wrong. I don’t want the words sharp and Pearce anywhere near my Pedro.
• Billy Butler and Matt Adams = DOUBLE MOOBS… BRRRRRRRRRRITTSKY
• Am I the only one seeing a crazy quietly huge year out of Howie Kendrick. 90+ RBI’s? Can I get a please and thank you?

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