Alfonso Soriano - Another Bust in Another Year

When playing any sort of fantasy sport, drafting based on name value will no longer do the trick. Many fantasy owners are prone to choosing a player simply by name value and omitting the statistics that go along with the player. And by the end of the season you wonder why you didn't win your fantasy league even though you had a 'stacked' lineup. These are the kind of players that look good on your team but do not produce as much as you think.

Enter: Alfosno Soriano.

When we hear Alfonso Soriano, we think of the 30 homeruns and 30 stolen base potential that he will provide us each year. There is no doubt this young stud has talent as he provided us with 46 homeruns and 41 stolen bases in 2006. However, that was 3 years ago. For the past two seasons Alfonso Soriano has been plagued with injury prone seasons with only playing 135 and 109 games. He sat out many games last season due to leg injuries from running.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Soriano has said that he does not mind moving away from the leadoff spot and he wants to continiue running like he did in his magic 40/40 season. However, with all this said, Soriano isn't exactly a great hitter when he does not leadoff. He is a great fastball hitter and that is why leading off for him is great because pitchers tend to want to throw fastballs to start the game to get into their groove. Soriano has always had a high strikeout rate and there is no reason for it to not continue this year. His walk to strikeout ratio for the past two seasons are .24 and .42. He has never been a hitter to take walks which means he does not have patience at the plate, which has led to his high strikeouts each year. Soriano has alot of trouble hitting the breaking stuff as he has never really been able to accelerate in the third spot or cleanup, he has always displeasure hitting anywhere but leadoff, which has caused many distractions with his tenure in Washington and Chicago.

Soriano has said that he has a team first approach now and is willing to not leadoff, but we will not really know how he will feel once he finds that it is more troublesome to hit later in the batting order rather than leadoff. Pack this with him saying he wants to run like he did in the past, trying to nab about 40 stolen bases again this season, this will only pack trouble for fantasy owners. He has stolen 19 stolen bases each of the past two years and his number of games continue to decline. If I were Lou Pinella, I would want Soriano to run less and swing the bat more. However, we have also seen player rejuvenated before which is a factor we may want to consider, just take a look at Milton Bradley last year who is another injury prone player with great upside. But with Soriano, the risk is simply too high for a late 1st and 2nd round pick.

Projection: 110 Games, 27 Homeruns, 85 runs, 84 rbi, 19 sb, .283 avg