Cabrera, Asdrubal

One of the common ways for traditonal baseball people to deride a team's lineup and the game of Roto is to say "it's a rotisserie" line-up (or player). Experienced roto players find this a little amusing because the very lineups used to illustrate this (those terrible old and slow Orioles squads of years ago for example), are precisely the lineups that Roto players avoid - old, slow and injury prone are an anathema to fantasy players.

But if there is an area in which roto really doesn't appreciate real baseball adequately, it might be the cases of Asdrubal Cabrera and Yunel Escobar. No one is saying that this guys are more important to a team than a Grady Sizemore or Chipper Jones as the Indians and Braves found out last season (to their chagrin), but's almost certainly true that teams don't win championships without these kind of players at the tops of their orders. The Yankees stopped winning championships at the end of the 90's because of a lack of Derek Jeters, they started losing because Chuck Knoblauch wasn't getting on 40% of the time any more.

There's nothing in his production that makes Asdrubal "necessary" to a fantasy team - decent average and a few Stolen bases and if Size and Peralta bounce back and he is batting second, perhaps 90-100 runs. But for a real baseball team his skills are invaluable. He gets on base, makes good contact so is an aid to the running game. Hes' not going to be mistaken for Rickey Henderson, but you can't ignore him or he will steal over 80% as he did last season which makes the batters after him effective as well.

I wish our game reflected this value more, and it's not "intangible" the way announcers like to say, it leads directly and measurably to runs scored. Last I checked, the team that scores the most runs still wins. .285-95-8-65-20. 575ABs