Toby Hall

Hall injured his shoulder while diving for a ball at first base in a spring training game and never recovered. It turned out to be a torn labrum and it effectively ended his season. He avoided surgery and worked his way back through rehab but he never got back on track, finishing with a .207 average and slugging .241 in 116 at-bats. He'll be back as the backup catcher and will certainly improve on those numbers. He'll give you plus-power as an endgame catcher if he's healthy.

Hall saw his playing time dwindle to next to nothing after moving to the Dodgers in a July trade from Tampa Bay. He'll now back up A.J. Pierzynski after signing with the White Sox. Hall has some pop (12 HR per 162 games in his career), so you can't ignore him for fantasy purposes, but there are far better options out there.

Hall turned 30 in October and put up the best full-season batting average of his career, but still posted a sub-.700 OPS, as he's done in each of his four years as a regular. He has a growing (and deserved) reputation as a defensive catcher, but will hurt a club's offense a good deal. Bid on Hall as if he'll revert back to a .255 BA or so, because that's what's likely to happen.

Over the last three seasons, Hall's best single-season OPS was .675 in 2003. In that same time, Mike Matheny's was .676 and Brad Ausmus' was .675, so forget Hall's gaudy minor league numbers in 2000 and 2001. Defensively, he was in the top third of the AL in 2004 in throwing out base runners with 28% success, but he's not considered a great handler of pitchers. Presuming he remains with the Rays, he'll be one of the lesser AL fantasy catchers with a full-time job.

Hall has become one of the best defensive catchers in baseball (throwing out 41 percent of base stealers last year, best in the AL). Unfortunately, if you took him in a keeper league four years ago, you're still waiting for his bat to make it to the bigs. If he's going to have a breakout year at the plate it had better be now because Pete LaForest is waiting in the wings. In AL leagues, Hall should go no higher than eighth among catchers, and that may be optimistic.

Hall hit .314 (55-for-175) over the last three months of the 2002 season; the early-season demotion to Triple-A turned out to be a very good move for him. Hall's awful start last year masks that good second half of his, so he's likely to be rated low on many draft charts. Some of you probably got burned by drafting him early last year and may not want to consider him at all this year. But remember, in mid-2001, he was thought of as probably the best catching prospect in the game. Since then, he made his big league debut, had an awful two-month slump, and then bounced back; he's now not that far away from being one of the best fantasy catchers in the league. Only Posada may rate higher among AL catchers.