Adam Dunn is prominently featured as a high draft player who has grossly underperformed, by ESPN.com's Tristan H. Cockcroft:
http://sports.espn.go.com/fantasy/baseball/flb/story?page=hitparade110608Adam Dunn, Chicago White Sox (Ave. Draft Pick: 31, Current Player Rater: 290): Like Uggla, Dunn is 31 years old, with many of the same problems. Stark also addressed the Dunn topic, as did Eric Karabell on Monday; I generally agree with Eric on the "you've got one more week" approach with Dunn, but I bet we'd both admit it might be our tendency to preach patience talking.
Tom Szczerbowski/US Presswire
Dunn, again like Uggla, has had fastball issues in 2011; he's a .165/.310/.243 hitter against them this season, after .309/.399/.652 in 2009-10 combined. There's a key difference between the two, however: Dunn isn't improving in that department with time, and as a result, he's actually seeing an increased rate of fastballs in recent weeks. Through April, 54.4 percent of the pitches he saw were fastballs, 6.9 percent sinkers; since May 1, those numbers have risen to 59.3 and 9.5. Dunn is also a .197/.351/.311 hitter against fastballs since May 1, only marginally improved upon his .174/.309/.261 rates before that date. And surely you've heard all about his miserable performance against lefties, 1-for-42 (.024 avg.) so far. Clearly he's not adjusting, and American League pitchers are challenging him more as a result.
Nevertheless, just like Uggla, Dunn's problems are unlikely a decline in skills, and in his case, he actually has a wider array of explanations for them: the league change, the adaptation to designated hitter -- though his .296/.449/.648 rates in 16 career games as a National League DH during interleague play suggest otherwise -- and his hasty return after an April 5 emergency appendectomy. Those make me slightly more confident in Dunn's ability to bounce back than Uggla's, but at the same time, there aren't any hints that such a bounce-back is imminent.
That is what presents a dilemma, and it's why Dunn and Uggla are so perfectly linked, both in terms of their age and comparably poor performances to date: They're names so familiar in fantasy, so trusted over multiple seasons, and probably so sensible to keep around if you drafted them merely because of their track records and the fact that their numbers really can't go anywhere but up. They're also players with whom patience could mean another three weeks of terrible statistics before a modest rebound -- one that might merely be a "law-of-averages" product, and a so-so one at that -- and those three additional weeks of bad stats would only cut even deeper.
