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Fantasy Baseball Impact: Yankees Acquire Giancarlo Stanton

Fantasy Baseball Impact: Yankees Acquire Giancarlo Stanton

Giancarlo Stanton is now a Yankee. No matter how you feel about the trade on a Major League Baseball level there certainly was an impact on Stanton’s  fantasy baseball value. After playing in an average of 126 games per year for the Marlins from 2011-2017, Stanton now has the chance to utilize the DH slot with his new AL club and potentially keep his body healthy for a second straight full season. While no one would tag him with the injury-prone label after taking a fastball to the face from Mike Fiers or even perhaps after the freak hamate bone break while facing Pedro Baez, Stanton certainly has missed a great deal of time over his career with various hamstring, knee, groin, shoulder, and abdominal injuries.

When I first saw the Steamer projection for Stanton’s 2018 season I must admit that my initial reaction to his 146 GP, 630 PA forecast was enough to immediately toss it aside, but now I’m leaning toward using a similar set of appearance data for my initial rankings. While the standard deviation on what you could expect from Stanton in terms of games played used to be quite large (+/- 54 games at 2σ), we can use this transaction as a way to solidify his playing time estimates and perhaps a few more statistical categories now that he’s joined the potent Yankees lineup. Rather than projecting him for ~126 +/- 54 games, something in the 140 game range seems reasonable even for the risk-averse owners among us. This cements his first-round status for 2018.

I used 2018 Steamer estimates and some assumptions around lineup construction to determine how the lineup around him in New York compared to the lineup around him in Miami the last three seasons to see how much of the R and RBI production we could realistically count on in 2018. Shown below is the part of the Yankee lineup that will most affect Stanton’s counting stats in fantasy baseball.

Lineup Slot Player OBP SLG
1 Brett Gardner 0.345 0.413
2 Didi Gregorius 0.314 0.435
3 Aaron Judge 0.368 0.516
4 Giancarlo Stanton 0.376 0.639
5 Gary Sanchez 0.333 0.513
6 Greg Bird 0.344 0.494

 
Giancarlo Stanton accumulated 692 plate appearances batting mostly second in the Marlins lineup in 2017. The Marlins as a team accumulated the sixth-most plate appearances in baseball last year while the Yankees lead Major League Baseball with ~2% more than the Marlins. With a move down the order to hit fourth for the Yankees, it’s likely safe to project him for ~650 plate appearances. This will keep his R+RBI total in the 250-270 range if the home runs continue to fly like last year. While his Marlins lineups actually got on-base at a slightly better clip in front of him than this projected lineup with Gregorius’ .314 OBP, this is projected to be the best slugging lineup he’s ever had behind him.

Year Most Prominent Lineup Slots (PA) OBP Ahead Of Stanton SLG Behind Stanton Stanton OBP Stanton SLG Stanton HR/FB R / PA RBI / PA
2015 3rd (253); 4th (65) 0.359 0.396 0.349 0.606 32.1% 0.148 0.211
2016 4th (331); 5th (126) 0.353 0.446 0.326 0.489 22.7% 0.119 0.157
2017 2nd (493); 4th (155) 0.344 0.488 0.376 0.631 34.3% 0.178 0.191
2018E 4th (~650) 0.342* 0.504* 0.376* 0.639* 33.0% 0.184 0.206
*Steamer 2018 projections

 
Jim Melichar is a correspondent at FantasyPros. For more from Jim, check out his archive and follow him @JimMelichar7.

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