It might be time to sell Robinson Cano and cut your losses

The Fourth of July is nearly upon us and with it comes just about the one-third mark of the season. At this point, we all have a player on a team that is letting us down. This week’s By the Numbers takes a look around at the slumping studs at every position and puts some numbers to the feelings of disappointment they have instilled upon us.

.620 – Robinson Cano’s June OPS

Cano was a consensus first round pick this season and hasn’t even performed like a draftable player so far. While a lot of players have been mired in a funk this year, there isn’t a lot about Cano’s results that inspire any confidence. He’s just playing poorly all around, and there isn’t much about him that shows that he’ll be getting out of this funk anytime soon. To whit: his .620 OPS is actually worse than his March, April and May OPS (.639). See what you can get for Cano, Maybe someone will buy into him at close to his full value. At this point, it’s been 12 weeks of disappointment.

.244 – Jonathan Lucroy’s BABIP

Most of Lucroy’s peripheral numbers remain relatively unchanged since last year, except two statistics: Lucroy’s BABIP and Lucroy’s isolated slugging percentage (ISO). His ISO has dipped dramatically to .071, which is less than half of his career .147 ISO. While the ISO drop is disappointing, Lucroy’s value isn’t greatly tied up in his power, but his average. Last season he hit .301 and this year he has only managed a lackluster .220 average. The majority of Lucroy’s value at catcher is because of his batting average and stolen bases. Not only has Lucroy’s BABIP betrayed your average stat, he hasn’t even stolen a base this year.

.637 – David Ortiz’s lefty-righty OPS split

Ortiz hasn’t produced nearly as well this season, and that’s understandable, given that he turns 40 in November. Father Time is yet to lose a race with anyone, and it’s entirely possible that Ortiz’s career-worst OPS is mostly due to this fact. However, his .725 OPS comes with a massive split, .277 versus lefties compared to an absolutely raking .914 OPS versus right-handed pitchers. With this in mind, you can see that Ortiz is still an incredibly valuable fantasy asset as long as you’re paying attention to the platoon splits. This makes him even more intriguing in daily fantasy formats, as well.

19.6% – Adrian Beltre’s soft hit percentage this season

Beltre has been mostly disappointing this season, and the worrying part is that his underlying statistics support that his disappointing results will be maintained. The hardness of hits goes a great way in determining whether they are hits or outs. Think about how many slow rollers you’ve seen that have weakly rolled directly to a player, and think of how many hard hit shots you’ve seen fly past a diving fielder. That difference is the reason the hard hit versus soft hit percentage is important. Beltre’s soft hit percentage has gone up six percent, which is incredibly significant when you understand that it is a 50% increase over his 2014 soft hit percentage. Beltre’s set to put up his worst season since his disastrous 2009 season in Seattle.

8 – Combined home runs and stolen bases for Ian Desmond

This is good for sixteenth in the majors for shortstops. Last season Desmond was first, with a combined 48 homers and steals last season, which was the most for any shortstop in the majors last year. A great majority of Desmond’s value was tied up in his 20/20 production while playing in a powerful lineup. So far this season, Desmond has fallen mostly flat and has failed to produce. At the root of his dip in production is his poor results at the plate: his walk to strikeout rate is the worst of his career by a significant margin and his hard hit percentage is down 7.5%. He’s just plain not playing well this year, but it seems to be something Desmond can hit his way out of.

62% – Percentage of Dodgers games Yasiel Puig has missed this season

It’s hard to hold injuries against players, and easy to use the drop in counting stats due to missing games as a reason to call someone a bust. It’s difficult to stay away from this analysis, and it was a point of emphasis when creating this article. However, the nature of Puig’s injuries have made him extremely disappointing to his owners. He has hit the DL twice with a nagging hamstring injury, but not before being in and out of the lineup. This has been indicative of the nature of Puig’s injuries. They keep him unreliably in the lineup for a while before he lands on the DL. He makes the bust list due to injury and is the only player to do so. This is because of the massive number of goose eggs weekly league players who could not swap out Puig consumed from the Dodgers not immediately placing Puig on the DL when he was hurt. The injury bug doesn’t seem to be behind Puig either, as he missed two games last week from a callous forming on his hand and was only available to pinch hit in another game.

1.50 – Stephen Strasburg’s ERA since returning from DL

Strasburg had been a disaster this season, but his performance had been tied to a series of maladies. The Nationals even went as far as to send Strasburg to a chiropractor to try to deal with his injuries. Before his trip to the disabled list, Strasburg rocked a monstrous 6.55 ERA with a 1.72 WHIP. Since getting back, Strasburg has pulled a much better ERA in his two starts, allowing all his damage in both starts to be done by Jeff Francouer. Run out and nab Strasburg from the owner in your league before he realizes that Strasburg is back.

Jeff Krisko is a correspondent at FantasyPros, and he also writes for Fantasy Sports Warehouse. To read more from Jeff, check out his archive and follow him on Twitter@jmkrisko and Fantasy Sports Warehouse @FantasySportsWH.