Major League Baseball clubs often pride themselves on being aggressive on the basepaths. While the scope of this article isn’t to examine whether this strategy helps win ballgames, we can say with absolute certainty that being aggressive on the bases is the favored approach among fantasy owners. Stolen bases can be difficult to come by, so finding unexpected sources of steals can make a big difference for a team looking to win a championship.

One way to come across such bargains is to look at players who are changing teams, going from one with a passive organizational philosophy to one with an aggressive philosophy. Lots of teams claim to be aggressive, but as with most things in this game, you can’t always take people at their word or reputation.

On Wednesday, I obliged a reader request to go over the various factors that impact the value of a player who is changing teams. We’re currently in the thick of the free-agent signing period, so this couldn’t have been a more topical request. After receiving a lot of positive feedback on my look at the things that affect a pitcher’s value, I decided to look today at the things that can affect a hitter’s value.

Role
The most important piece of the puzzle, if also the most obvious, is role. All else equal, the more at-bats a player gets, the more valuable he’s going to be. For a guy like Josh Hamilton, this is a non-issue—he’s going to start as many games as he’s physically capable of wherever he goes—but for fringier players, this is important. Is the player going to be a starter, a bench player, a platoon player, or will he have to compete for a role? We could be talking the difference between $0 and $15 or $20 here.

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I probably don’t say it enough, but BP readers are the best. I love hearing from you guys and talking baseball, and occasionally I’ll get an article request, which I like to oblige whenever possible. I received such a request from a reader this weekend:

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How the closer market develops is always one of the most closely-watched facets of the offseason for fantasy owners. Saves are of the utmost importance for those who play the sports version of Dungeons & Dragons, and openings are closing up now that we’re approaching the Winter Meetings. In the past week, three closers have signed, another was essentially traded and then untraded, and a rookie was named as the front-runner for another job. Today we’ll catch up on these goings-ons.

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Welcome back, everyone! I hoped you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving (if you managed to make it through the weekend without seeing that video, my sincerest apologies for spoiling such a feat). I’m getting a late start on it, but throughout the offseason I’ll be reviewing the various trades and free-agent signings through a fantasy lens. I’ve got a random assortment today with more of the backlog to follow in the coming week or two.

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While we might be in for quite a wait before another Yu Darvish comes over to the States, this offseason does bring us an interesting arm from the Eastern Hemisphere. As you’ve heard, southpaw Hyun-Jin Ryu was recently posted by his Korean Baseball Organization team, the Hanwha Eagles, and the Los Angeles Dodgers won negotiating rights with a $25.7 million bid. While the Dodgers have not yet decided whether they will sign Ryu or allow him to return him to Korea for another year, there stands a real chance he will be coming to Major League Baseball for the 2013 season. Today, I’ll be discussing what we should expect in the case that he does become a Dodger.

By the Numbers
We won’t spend too much time on Ryu’s numbers because the context of the league he plays in can obfuscate a player’s true talent level. The KBO is interesting in that the talent level is very diverse. From what I’ve heard, there are players ranging in skill-level from American collegiate ball all the way up to MLB-caliber talent. In terms of overall quality, the league is said to be a bit below Nippon Pro Baseball (where Darvish came from), but naturally, this wide range of talent makes KBO numbers hard to directly translate to Major League Baseball. Still, they’re worth a look, so here’s what we have on Ryu over the past four seasons in the form of percent better than average—so for 2012, his ERA was 30 percent better (i.e. lower) than league-average. (2009-2010 data collected from Baseball Reference, 2011-2012 data collected from MyKBO.net):

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Before the season began, I went on record with 10 Bold Fantasy Predictions. More a fun exercise than anything else, “bold” was defined as events that had no more than a 20 percent chance of occurring. Today I wanted to take a look back on these crazy and potentially ill-fated predictions to see which worked out and which couldn’t have been farther from reality.

Clayton Kershaw maintains a BB/9 below 2.75
Noting his “shift away from a tougher-to-control, big-breaking curve and toward a tighter pitch that he can spot more easily in the zone,” I predicted that Kershaw would keep most of his 2011 control gains (2.1 BB/9 following years of 3.6 and 4.8 BB/9). Indeed, Kershaw’s 2.5 BB/9 was very good and well within the limits of this prediction.

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A couple weeks ago, I looked back over my best and worst predictions of the 2012 season, but I held off on examining the guys I singled out in my preseason Fantasy Tier Rankings as “value picks.” I thought it would be interesting to look at them separately, which I’ll take the time to do today. I’ll focus solely on guys from the one-, two-, and three-star tiers; that’s where you’re going to find the most value, since everyone knows that Albert Pujols is good, even if he was technically one of my “value picks.”

In each of the tables below, you’ll find my value picks along with their stats, their final value in mixed and AL-/NL-only leagues according to our PFM, what the player cost in Tout Wars (Mixed for three stars and AL/NL for one and two stars), and how they performed relative to their Tout Wars price. Keep in mind that when making these tiers I wasn’t attempting to beat Tout’s prices. Tout Wars is made up of some of the smartest fantasy baseball players on the planet and is a rigorous standard to hold oneself to. Instead, I was calling a player a “value” based on my subjective notion of how they would be valued in a normal, non-expert league. I’m using Tout Wars because it’s the only objective standard I have to compare to (and because I love challenges), so keep in mind that in a non-expert league, it’s likely some of these players would have cost less on draft day (and the profit margin would have been higher).

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This weekend, I had the opportunity to chat with MLB Network star Brian Kenny, in-season co-host of the Emmy-award-winning “MLB Tonight” and off-season host of one of my personal favorites, “Clubhouse Confidential,” television’s first sabermetrically-slanted baseball program. “Clubhouse” debuted last offseason and will return for season two tonight at 5:30 p.m. ET, airing weekdays at 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. EST. Last year, I spoke with Brian ahead of the premiere and reviewed the show after the first week on the air. Today, I give you my most recent chat with Brian about what we should expect for season two, how they expect to take more curmudgeons to task, and how they’ll look to further the sabermetric dialogue.

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Last week in this space I looked back on my best preseason predictions.  While I think my hits far outweighed my misses, it is important (and fair) to look back at the lesser advice I gave this year.  For each player, I’ve listed his mixed and AL/NL-only auction value in Tout Wars and LABR (only Tout has a mixed auction, but AL/NL-only values are an average of Tout and LABR) as well as his actual value for the 2012 season according to our Player Forecast Manager. Also take note that I’ve excluded most of the “value picks” from my preseason tier articles, as they’ll get their own review article.

Justin Upton
Mixed: $40/$21
NL-only: $38/$27

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I bet most teams wish they could sandwich a good-but-not-great year in between two World Series appearances, as the Giants have now done over the past three seasons. What’s most incredible about that three-year stretch, however, is the roster turnover that has taken place. Their lineup is almost completely different, and their non-Cain rotation is now made up of Ryan Vogelsong, a mature Madison Bumgarner, and a how-did-he-manage-to-weasel-his-way-back-into-relevance version of Barry Zito—oh, and one fewer Lincecum. Yes, that was the sound of 2010’s jaw dropping.

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