This season, filling the shortstop position in daily fantasy baseball is like looking for fruit in the desert; there’s just usually not a whole lot out there. Tulo’s numbers certainly aren’t bad, but I don’t think many of us are paying for him away from Coors. DraftKings at least has Hanley still eligible at SS, but FanDuel has him at OF. I won’t go too far into the position as a whole because much of what Corey wrote in his article from a few weeks ago still applies.
With the state of the shortstop position as a backdrop, I want to put the spotlight on Brandon Crawford – someone who is having a very good year and maybe a little under-appreciated around the league.
Within the shortstop position, here are the leaders to date in 2015. As an aside, I will not be including Hanley in this study because he doesn’t actually play SS and it’s possible that DraftKings removes his eligibility at the position:
| Player | HR | RBI | ISO | wOBA | BABIP |
| J Peralta | 10 | 35 | .194 | .379 | .356 |
| B Crawford | 9 | 40 | .198 | .359 | .327 |
| T Tulowitzki | 7 | 34 | .178 | .348 | .356 |
| A Hechavarria | 3 | 32 | .113 | .323 | .349 |
After these guys, it gets real ugly real fast. Anyway, Crawford is right there in each of the categories listed above and has even done so with the lowest BABIP of those listed. Let’s go further and see where specifically Crawford has excelled and which matchups are the best to deploy him.
The most obvious thing Crawford is doing this year as opposed to previous seasons is putting the ball in play more. He’s never finished a season with an AVG over .250 or a wOBA over .325, but this year he is well above those marks. Splits-wise, Crawford has always been a lefty that sees lefty pitching really well, but just look at his FanGraphs heat map against lefties this year (right), compared to last (left). As a pitcher, you’re basically hoping you can paint the bottom right corner or…good luck:
Brandon Crawford isn’t just good against lefties…for a shortstop, he is good against lefties, period. Here are the top lefty/lefty bats this season. He finds himself in pretty elite company within this split:
As a lefty playing for San Francisco, Crawford faces the same disadvantage as Brandon Belt, trying to generate power to AT&T Park’s cavernous right field:
So it’s no surprise that, also like Belt, his power numbers look much better on the road:
And Fantasy Labs confirms this to be true in terms of Plus/Minus as well:
The one thing I’m not crazy about with Crawford is that he almost always bats toward the bottom of the order. Looking at the Giants lineup, there isn’t really an obvious candidate to be demoted in the order. Crawford is still getting plenty of RBI opportunities from his spot behind Posey and Belt. Still, if injuries force Bruce Bochy’s hand, it would be fun to see what kind of damage he could do batting cleanup one day.
