ESPN

With two months of baseball already in the books, the ESPN.com fantasy staff has been tasked with re-ranking its top 340 players for the rest of the season. That means that we're only counting production from this day forward. That means that if Chipper Jones goes 1-for-his-next-10, he's batting .100, not .392. It also means that we expect Alex Rodriguez to play every game for the balance of the season and aren't penalizing him for time missed, but David Ortiz loses a third of his value -- or more -- with the news of his wrist injury.

Why do we do it this way? Because unless you play in a league in which you can acquire stats that have already been accumulated, looking back only serves to put things in perspective, and that's what the Player Rater is for. Use these rankings as a barometer of what ESPN's fantasy experts, as a group, think will happen from this point on. (We refer to these as our GroupThink rankings because we're Orwellian like that.)

The nine rankers for this round, covering June through the end of the season, are Matthew Berry, Tristan H. Cockcroft, Jason Grey, Christopher Harris, Will Harris, Eric Karabell, AJ Mass, James Quintong and Brendan Roberts. For the purposes of providing the most accurate gage of our GroupThink, the "average" you see does not include the highest nor the lowest rank. However, because we embrace free will and want to encourage debate and outside-the-box thinking, we've identified whose rankings were the highest and lowest and what that rank was.

Our next ranking will be published at the All-Star break, with a final edition being produced the first week of August, after the trade deadline.