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Premium Tease - Rafael Furcal: The Next-Best Shortstop? PDF Print E-mail
The Premium Tease
Friday, 13 March 2009 10:42
As the start of the season approaches, and fantasy drafts are in full swing, Rafael Furcal has emerged as a consensus pick as the next-best shortstop to Hanley Ramirez, Jose Reyes, and Jimmy Rollins. Furcal figures in one of FP911's top burning questions for the coming season, and most of the articles that mention Furcal here--whether from Mike Podhorzer or from Eric Stashin, or as part of our preseason position preview--are cautiously optimistic about Furcal's prospects for 2009.
At Mock Draft Central, Furcal rates an ADP of 63, and has rarely been picked much later. Mike's excellent Top 500 rankings--which I can't fail to mention are an extremely valuable resource--put him at 38, well behind Rollins (13) and far ahead of J.J. Hardy (88), the next shortstop on the list. These rankings are based on Mike's just-as-valuable hitter projections, which foresee a .298 average for Furcal over, crucially, 575 at-bats.


The Injury-Risk Bogeyman

Those 575 at-bats are more than what any other projections expect from Furcal in 2009, as can be seen at Furcal's FanGraphs page, where the expected at-bats range from 151 to 560. Furcal's 2008 season was cut short by back pain and a microdiscectomy procedure. That surgery and the ensuing four-month recovery are responsible for the great (and justified) worrying over Furcal's playing time, and yet Furcal remains the number-four shortstop pick.

I can't offer any insight on whether Furcal is entirely healthy or not--there's not much reporting available either way--but I would like to highlight an excellent series of articles by THT's Derek Carty on the value of drafting players with injury risks. Derek says it much better and more thoroughly than I can, but one point of his article is that even a shortened season from an excellent player can be more desirable than a full season from an inferior one, even if the rest of that short season is filled with the stats from a replacement player.

The Value of a Shortened Season

If we assume that Furcal will be worth a draft pick even if he doesn't play a full season, we should know how good he might be when he does play. For that we will need to see his peripheral stats:

Season PA AVG HR SB OBP BABIP
2004 632 .279 14 29 .344 .299
2005 689 .284 12 46 .348 .310
2006 736 .300 15 37 .369 .335
2007 643 .270 6 25 .333 .298
2008 164 .357 5 8 .439 .380

Season BB% K% LD% GB% FB% HR/FB%
2004 9.3% 12.6% 16.5% 49.6% 34.0% 8.8%
2005 9.1% 12.7% 23.9% 46.5% 29.6% 8.0%
2006 10.0% 15.0% 20.9% 49.9% 29.2% 9.6%
2007 8.6% 11.7% 18.7% 49.7% 31.6% 3.8%
2008 12.3% 11.9% 19.3% 48.7% 31.9% 13.2%

As we can see, while Furcal's skill set has been relatively stable over the past five seasons, he did show a big spike in his HR/FB rate and BABIP last year. Of course, they are products of a pretty small sample size, but nonetheless, they help explain why Furcal was able to post a .357 average and almost match his 2007 home run total in less than a third as many games.

On the plus side, Furcal has a superior set of batting skills. His walk rate has been about league-average in recent years, and can be expected to return there in 2009. His strikeout rate, meanwhile, gives him a very good contact rate (it's 85% over his career), and it's very encouraging that he's been able to keep his strikeouts down to about 12% in five of the last six seasons.

Those skills, along with his speed, are going to help Furcal maintain a high batting average, even if it won't be above .350 again. And though his HR/FB rate isn't likely to stay at 13%, it is likely to return somewhere around his usual 8%, which should be good enough to help him hit around 15 home runs again.

Compared to What?

It might help to see Furcal's prospects in comparison to those of the shortstops ranked around him (I should also note that FP911's draft guide rankings put Furcal behind Hardy, as well as behind Stephen Drew). Here are Mike's projections:

Player AB BA HR RBI RUN SB $Value
Rafael Furcal 575 .298 14 55 100 30 21.49
J.J. Hardy 575 .288 27 80 85 2 13.14
Stephen Drew 600 .289 23 70 90 4 11.91

As we can see, Mike's projected advantage in value for Furcal comes partly from his slightly better average, and largely from his much better speed. This valuation may be a surprise to you if you're not familiar with how Mike--rightly, I think--values stolen bases and home runs, but it reflects the greater promise Furcal offers in relation to the other shortstops available.

Rafael Furcal is an injury risk, and no amount of projection analysis will negate that fact. But risk can be acceptable if you know how good the payoff can be. In Furcal's case, the risk for a premium player seems well worth it. This is a position where excellence is so rare that even a shortened season of it is better than the alternatives.

What do you think? Is Furcal worth the risk?


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Furcal Distant 4th
written by mph, March 15, 2009
Furcal, now 31, is a distant 4th behind the big 3 Shortstops in the NL-- If Joe Torre was serious when he said he was going to rest Furcal once a week, then he's not worth such a high selection or more than 18-23$ in auction style leagues-- Plus with Manny batting 3rd all year-- is he really going to be doing much running?? I say probably not-- he still should be good for 12-15 Hr's 15-20 sb's & a nice BA, but the bulk of his value comes from the 30+ SB's that Furcal owners are paying for---
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written by NBH, March 13, 2009
No, he isn't worth the risk. ADP of 63 means you need to draft him in the 5th round if you want to ensure that you get him and that is much too early for someone who missed almost all of the prior season with a serious injury. He's not a young guy and there's plenty of better health gambles later on in the draft (Harden, AJ, Carpenter, Hafner). Gamble with health/upside after round 10...not before.

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