Alex Rodriguez, his Injury, and what that does to his fantasy value.

It was made official today, Alex Rodriguez has a torn labrum in his right hip and reports range from him being out anywhere from 10 weeks to 4 months. Nobody likes to see a player get hurt, but it’s especially hard to see it happen to Rodriguez. As evidenced by his discomfort in talking about the recent steroid saga, Rodriguez cares deeply about his public image, which has been severely damaged by the steroid situation and allegations of him cheating on his wife and possible links to Madonna. The one thing Alex Rodriguez wants to do right now is get back on that field and play baseball, and this injury will deprive him of that opportunity. The silver lining is that maybe his down-time will shield him from the hype and (mostly negative) attention that will be directed at him all season long. This injury has obvious impacts on the Yankees this upcoming season, but I will look at how this impacts his fantasy value.

This analysis will be based on a 5x5 rotisserie league with OBP substituted in instead of AVG, which in this case will not make a big difference because A-Rod’s relative OBP is just as good as his relative AVG. First, let me explain my fantasy rankings, and only the hitting portion as that is all we are concerned with. Step One was obtaining reasonable projections for the upcoming season from an obscure online source. The obscurity of the source was just to make my rankings different in some way than others. Next, I standardized the HR, R, RBI, and OBP stats of every hitter, because those categories are all normally distributed. “Standardized” just means that each hitter was given a relative score based on their stats for a given category. Most scores are between -3 and 3, and the higher the score, the better. 68% of scores will be between -1 and 1 for a given category, and 95% will be within -2 and 2. For example, Albert Pujols is projected to get 115 RBIs this upcoming season, giving him a standardized RBI score of 1.985, meaning he will get more RBI’s than about 97.6% of the population. For SB’s I just divided their projected SB’s by 15, as they are far from normally distributed and would yield unrealistic values for hitters with large SB values. The total of the standardized values were summed up to give a player a final score. These were approximately normally distributed, but right skewed, with a range of -6.857 (Kenji Johjima) to 9.910 (Albert Pujols). (Note that only values for players who are in the top 30 of their position (90 for OF) were taken into account). Alex Rodriguez had an overall score of 9.687, second only to Pujols.

Alex Rodriguez	R	HR	RBI	SB	OBP
Projected Value	114	39	120	19	0.388
Standardized Value	2.210	2.331	2.222	1.267	1.656

To determine the impact the injury will have on Rodriguez’s fantasy value, we will scale down his stats based on how much time he will be out. Because of the uncertainty in that time, let us estimate it at both him missing 7 weeks of the season and him missing 3 months of the season. First, the 7 weeks case (The change in Standardized OBP takes into account that his OBP will hold less weight as he plays less games):

Alex Rodriguez	R	HR	RBI	SB	OBP
Missing 7 Weeks	83	28	88	14	0.388
Standardized Value	0.434	1.108	0.707	0.933	1.210

This gives Alex Rodriguez an overall score of 4.392. This is good for 35th overall among hitters, or right around Adrian Gonzalez. Taking pitchers into account, this makes him approximately an early 4th round pick in a 12 team league.

Now if he is out for 3 months, cutting his stats in half:

Alex Rodriguez	R	HR	RBI	SB	OBP
Missing 3 Months	57	20	60	9	0.388
Standardized Value	-1.056	0.218	-0.619	0.600	0.828

As you can see, this devastates his numbers, giving him an overall score of -0.029, or on par with Troy Glaus and Luke Scott at 120th overall among hitters. This is near undrafted range, but in reality, you should use a pick on him because he’s more than worth the sacrifice of a pick any lower than 14th round or so.

So in conclusion, Alex Rodriguez will still be a fantasy force this year, and there are many variables that play into where he should be drafted. If you have a keeper league, it would be smart to take him as soon as you reach a round where you are able to keep a player, because Alex Rodriguez at any later than the first 5 picks will be an absolute steal in future years. If you are in a keeper league and players are already kept, then that makes “adjusted” Alex Rodriguez a little bit more valuable as well. Generally, anything around 3rd or 4th round if the injury is not serious and as early as round 13 or 14 if he is going to be out for an extended period of time is (statistically) appropriate.

Interesting Baseball Fact of the Day: Alex Rodriguez has the only 50+ HR seasons in Texas Rangers history, with 57 in 2002 and 52 in 2001.