My Three Sons: The Three Keepers who’ll make my Family

Written by: on 7th March 2010

My Three Sons: The Three Keepers who’ll make my Family | read this item

In the actual show, My Three Sons, starring Fred MacMurray, his character played an aeronautical engineer. Not a bad job. You actually have to be smart to do all the work it entails. It’s very finite, like all math-based work, and the process is closer to unilateral thinking than one might well, think. I mean, how many ways can you really go into space?

However, in the realm of fantasy baseball, you actually need to be smarter than a rocket scientist. You need to have a sixth and seventh sense (or a 6 ½ sense medium). You basically need to be the boy from The Shining and the boy from The Sixth Sense. Only instead of being able to communicate with old black men, you’ll be able to communicate with your inner keeper. And instead of being able to see dead people (what a creepy-ass kid), you’ll be able to see living people (like usual) only they’ll be on your team for years to come (until they die, in which case you can still see them).

In a normal keeper league you’re probably allowed to keep 3 players. This is extremely difficult considering you’ll probably be saying goodbye to a lot of top banana players. Sometimes it works out, especially if the player is near the end of his career. The tough decisions usually come when you have either too much hitting or too much pitching. There are just those time when you have to sit down, open your Mac and say goodbye to…Ryan Howard?

Yes, he is one of the many players who will not be one of My Three Sons starting in 2011. And here’s why.

1.)

Hypothetically, if I have Ryan Howard and Adrian Gonzalez at the end of the 2010 fantasy season, I’ll be keeping Gonzalez. Not an easy choice, and some would even say it’s crazy given Howard’s track record, but he’ll be 31 at the start of the 2011 season, while Gonzalez will be 28. Howard’s numbers have hit a wall and in some areas like OPS and batting average, have come to a grinding halt. Gonzalez’s hits and doubles have decreased, but his walks, homeruns and slugging have gone up every year the past four years. His strikeouts have dropped as well. All this tells us is that he’s comfortable with the strike zone, while Howard has struck out a whopping 765 times in four years, or twice as many times as Joe DiMaggio did for his entire career.

With Howard seeing more breaking balls by the season (more than anyone in 2009), he’s bound to have a funk, and not George Clinton style either. And as the years pass I don’t expect Howard to get stronger. In fact, he’ll get weaker, especially when you have to lug around 260 lbs, and when his body breaks down, so too will his ability to workout. He may be “good” for another three seasons, but Adrian Gonzalez has a good chance at going to the friendlier confines of Fenway with a right field fence a whopping 302 feet away and a Green Monster begging to be knocked down by Gonzalez’s lasers.

Age is a huge factor in a keeper league and sometimes you have to dump a great player one year for a soon-to-be great player for the next three.

2.)

We want a pitcher, not…Brandon Webb? Nope, we don’t want Brandon Webb. However, if you’re stuck with a team that doesn’t have any pitching, then you should keep Brandon Webb. Like, if your second and third pitchers are Tim Spooneybarger and Tomo Ohka then you simply don’t have a choice. But if you have a player like, oh, I don’t know, Phil Hughes, then I’m keeping Phil Hughes. Again, here’s why:

In keeper leagues I often look for upside. In a three year keeper league I’d just keep Brandon Webb, but if I were only in a three year keeper league I’d also listen to Coldplay and wear “Vote for Pedro” shirts (remember that stupid friggin’ movie?). No, I’m a man…a hairy man. We do long-term, frozen in Han Solo carbonite, forever keeper leagues.

Brandon Webb has become every owner’s worst nightmare: an ace pitcher with a fat softball player’s injury prowess. He started one game last year and looks like he’s headed to the DL to start the season this year. While a shoulder injury isn’t a death sentence, it sure can feel like it when you’re a former Cy Young Award winner and runner up the past two seasons. He’ll be 32 by the time 2011 rolls along and Phill Hughes will be 25 ½.

Hughes’s body of work is clearly incomplete, but his “stuff,” meaning his pitches, is getting to ace level. I actually believe that Hughes is one of the few Yankee prospects that will pan out to be great. When you consider his 2009 campaign and look at his SO/9 and his WHIP, it’s not farfetched to envision a season similar out of the fifth starter position in 2010 and then the third or fourth slot in 2011. The best thing going for Hughes is that he has ace stuff and only has to pitch at most in the third spot in the next 3-5 years when he’ll be 28 years old!

As far as Brandon Webb is concerned, he might scrape together some 15 win seasons, but long-term I’m taking Hughes. It also doesn’t hurt that Hughes will always benefit from run support. Webb never had the run support he needed and with less-than-ace stuff heading into the second half of his career, I don’t foresee anymore 20 win seasons or strikeout totals past 150. Remember, a pitcher coming off arm surgery who throws a nasty sinker is only as good as his other pitches allow him to setup that sinker.

Take Hughes and get on with your life!

3.)

The all important third keeper. Do I take another pitcher or another hitter? In the a keeper league like I play in the question of whether or not you’ll have enough pitching or hitting isn’t necessarily correlated to how much you have on your team. There’s still a draft to be had and sometimes people give you gifts, like the time I got Tim Lincecum and Matt Cain in back-to-back picks. That rarely happens and in a hypothetical situation where it’s an even split of pitching and hitting, I’d keep a Wild Card.

Let’s say you’ve finished 5^th in your league out of 12 teams. Not bad, but not good either. You’re keeping Adrian Gonzalez and Phil Hughes (because you’re smart) and now you need to decide on that all important third player. You’re down to two choices: Washington National’s future pitching star Steven Strasburg or 21 year old Met’s relief pitcher Jenrry Mejia.

Let me give you a fictional stat line of 2010:

Strasburg: 6-4 3.95 ERA 100 IP 100 SO and 1 CG

Mejia: 2-1 3.30 ERA 55 IP 71 SO 3 SV and 7 Holds

“It looks pretty even,” said the cross-eyed man on the teeter totter. And in some leagues this would be about a split if you counted holds and complete games.

I’m taking Mejia, if for nothing else but besides his tremendous talent. He’s raw and by 2011 he’ll still be sushi, while Strasburg will have been promoted to live bait. What I like about Mejia is the team he plays for. The Met’s don’t have any type of plans for the rest of their rotation or their bullpen, so Mejia will have free reign in the next three years to discover if he wants to be an ace or the next Mariano Rivera, which is what people have prematurely compared his stuff to. It’s all hype, but someone must’ve seen something to make them say such a thing. His versatility is a key ingredient, especially on a team that hopefully has learned its lesson on trading young prospects (where have you gone Mr. Kazmir?).

It’s funny, because I dislike Strasburg for the opposite reason I like Mejia: his team stinks and will continue to stink. His career, despite his upside, will be dictated by an anemic offense and an awful defense in an even worse park. Not to mention a bullpen that couldn’t get out Timmy Lupus from The Bad News Bears.

Strasburg’s potential will not overcome Mejia’s talent over the next five years. And perhaps in five years I’ll be wrong. Maybe sooner! But simply speaking from a Wild Card perspective, it couldn’t get any wilder than a completely unproven rookie, on a 4^th place team with pitches comparable to the greatest closer of our generation and any generation, could it?

Those are my three sons: Gonzalez, Hughes and Mejia. They might not always behave but in a few years they’ll be mowing my lawn and putting paneling in the den where I keep all my first place trophies and cheap, cheap whiskey.

Stephen Okawa is the College Baseball Editor for Gotham Baseball and the Co-Executive Producer of Gotham Baseball LIVE. You can contact him here, or follow him on Twitter and add him on Facebook.

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Topics: 2c, 99s, adrian gonzalez, Aeronautical Engineer, Batting Average, Black Men, C2, Career Decisions, E2, Easy Choice, Fantasy, Fantasy Season, Fred Macmurray, Grinding Halt, Hypothetically, Keeper League, Math, Ops, Realm Of Fantasy, Rocket Scientist, Ryan Howard, Seventh Sense, Sixth Sense, Top Banana