3 Veteran Corner Infielders Worth Targeting in Fantasy Baseball
Justin Turner, 3B, Los Angeles Dodgers
Following microfracture surgery on his left knee in November of 2015, Turner recovered in time for Opening Day the following season. By mid-May, Turner was sitting on a .233 batting average with a .636 OPS. And the counting stats were just as ugly, just one home run with nine RBI's.
Then, over his final 112 games, Turner went back to hitting like the player he was during his 2015 breakout, mashing to the tune of a .288 batting average, .894 OPS, 26 home runs and 81 RBI's during that span.
The oddity in Turner's numbers are his reverse splits. Despite being a right-handed hitter, Turner's supposed platoon advantage against lefties was nowhere to be found, marked by a .209 batting average against southpaws. Compare that to a very healthy .305 average against righties. Lifetime, Turner is .248 against left-handers and .298 when it's right on right. Reverse splits are generally considered fluky, but they are appearing more and more real for Turner.
Even though he's yet to capitalize on left-handed offerings, the 32-year-old Turner will likely continue hitting in the prime three hole for a very good Dodgers team. In addition, his fly-ball rate is climbing, and so is the hard-hit rate.
Over the last three years with the Dodgers, his fly-ball rates have been 28 percent (2014), 36.2 percent (2015) and a career-high 40 percent (2016). Last year's hard-hit rate of 37.6 percent is more than 8 percentage points ahead of his career average.
On FantasyPros, consensus rank for Turner has him 14th among third basemen with the largest standard deviation among the rankers when it comes to their top 24 players at the hot corner. The results coming in from the NFBC have Turner going 15th with a wide swing of 111 picks between his earliest and latest landing spots thus far in early drafts.
Like Daniel Murphy, Turner is a former New York Mets player who took a while to start hitting, needing to make adjustments along the way. While Turner is unlikely to flash an elite batting average like Murphy did a year ago, he's now a similar undervalued source of above-average offensive production.
