Keep or Cut: Miguel Montero

At this point, i've basically gone far enough down the list of free agents to the point where people I would be discussing are getting less and less likely to see regular playing time or to make an impact.

Last week, Yahoo opened up their Fantasy Baseball feature for the year. This year, i'm going to be in a couple leagues. The main one that i'll mostly be discussing during the regular season is one that I got invited to play in with my friend Diego.

The other one is one that I let Yahoo auto-draft for me (yeah I know, lame) but i'm using it to primarily study up on players (and to have baseball to write about). I'm going to go through one of the players on this team at a time, up first

Starting Catcher:

Miguel Montero:

Pros:

He has hit double figure home runs in the last three seasons (in a position where there isn't much power), He has a good eye at the plate (even if OPS isn't considered a traditional fantasy stat) and he has four seasons of above average production at the plate.

Cons:

He's coming off his worst season offensively since 2007. After hitting .230 last year, there is the real possibility that his batting average could hurt fantasy wise and he's only played in 130+ games twice in his career indicating a reasonable possibility of having to scrounge the waiver wire for a replacement at some point. He would have more value 

Comparative Analysis:

His most similar batter through age 29 is Ramon Hernandez. My main memory of Ramon Hernandez is of him hitting a walk-off home run against John Axford on opening day of the 2011 season. While Hernandez is now a back up with no fantasy value, he had decent value in his age 30 season (2006). In that year, he had a career high in Home Runs (23) played in the most games of his career (144) and had an 111 OPS+. Certainly not a star player numbers but I would be very happy to get similar numbers from Montero.

Keep or Cut:

For now, i'm going to keep Miguel Montero. I came into this not sure whether or not I would. I think that he'll have a nice bounce back season in 2014 but i'm going to keep an eye on some of the other available catchers just in case.

Catchers that i've added to the watch list in the event that Montero gets hurt or struggles:

Jarrod Saltalamacchia
Yan Gomes
Travis d'Arnaud
Mike Zunino
Devin Mesoraco
Josmil Pinto