July 15, 2017

RotoBaller's updated fantasy baseball shortstop (SS) rankings and tiers for July, looking at rest of season ranks.

With the first half of the season in the books, it’s time for one last RotoBaller rankings update. As with our May edition, these rest-of-season rankings come from yours truly and my favorite bandwagon Red Sox fan, Nick Mariano. We're tackling each position individually, and today we finish up the infield with a look at the shortstop landscape.

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2017 Fantasy Baseball Rankings: Shortstops (Midseason Update)

Midseason Shortstop Rankings Analysis

Shortstop has seen more than its fair share of busts this season, but the names at the top have remained mostly constant from our first batch of rankings back in December. Carlos Correa has bounced back from a somewhat disappointing sophomore season and emerged as perhaps the best player on an absolutely stacked Astros team. While he hasn't even attempted a stolen base, Correa's production in the other categories is elite for any position, let alone shortstop. And he's only 22! That's incredible.

Corey Seager is only a few months older and on pace to basically repeat his award-winning rookie campaign. Both Manny Machado and Francisco Lindor have underperformed in the first half, but Nick and I remain confident in their abilities and the likelihood of big second halves for both. Xander Bogaerts rounds out the top tier; he hasn't shown as much pop as a year ago, but he remains a five-category asset. None of these guys are over 25, so we should be in good hands at this position for years to come.

Of course, there's always the potential for disappointment. Look no further than the two players who have fallen out of the top six in our rankings since the season started. Both Jonathan Villar and Trevor Story were amazing in 2016, but they've busted big-time this year. Both have carried awful batting averages all season and taken big steps back in their best categories (home runs for Story and stolen bases for Villar). Their struggles are a painful reminder of the risk fantasy owners assume when they invest heavily in players with limited track records of success, and the fact that progression is rarely linear.

Nick has completely given up on both, a shocking turn of events for the man who was once president of the Trevor Story Appreciation Society. I'm not quite throwing in the towel yet, particularly on Villar, but obviously their respective stocks are way down. Addison Russell hasn't taken the next step as a hitter, and he represents the largest gap between our rankings today.

The bottom two tiers are littered with disappointments as well - Jose Peraza, Dansby Swanson, Brad Miller, and Tim Anderson have all failed to build on their 2016 performances. The most precipitous fall of all, however, belongs to Aledmys Diaz. Our preseason staff rankings pegged him as a top-10 shortstop and top-100 player overall, but he played poorly enough that he's not even in the majors right now. Ouch.

It's not all doom and gloom here, though. Elvis Andrus has already set a career high with 11 homers and is on pace to steal 35 bags, all while hitting .300 for the second straight season and remaining one half of the most entertaining duo in baseball. It seems like he's been around forever, but he's still only 28 years old. Chris Owings, Zack Cozart, Didi Gregorius, and Andrelton Simmons were all draft-day afterthoughts who have emerged as key fantasy contributors. My counterpart and I diverge on how sustainable we think these performances are, but they've likely helped eased the pain of the owners who were saddled with a bust at short.

I confess that I had no idea how to appropriately rank the injured Trea Turner, so it's amusing to see that Nick's placement of him was virtually identical. He's likely out until early September, but the potential for a huge impact down the stretch in roto leagues, or in the H2H playoffs, keeps him in our top 10.

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