Jose Valverde

So I just read a discussion thread over on Rotojunkie about who will take over as Arizona's closer when Valverde falters. What?!?!? Why do we think Valverde is going to falter? He had 69 strikeouts in 49 innings last year. He's had a dominant strikeout rate every year in the majors. Sure, he's a little wild, but not enough to cancel out the extremely low number of hits he's generally going to allow. He hasn't even had a really bad home run rate. So we're basically assuming that his luck when it comes to hits allowed on balls in play will continue to be bad, despite the fact that every study that looks at that finds that it mostly really is just luck and players' success or failure in that area doesn't tend to repeat from one year to the next. If Jose Valverde falls anywhere near the later rounds of your draft (let's say after round 12 of a CBS Sportsline standard league) draft him. Don't hesitate to draft him a little higher than that if you need a closer.