Sometimes you just get bitter. Like when your FanGraphs ottoneu Experts League team has just been staring at fifth place for a month and a half in a keeper league and there’s absolutely no way to know which way to go. Sell or buy? Well, let me have a healthy week or two and I’ll decide, eh?

The David Wright injury will hurt me, but it’s a situation in my outfield that has me most upset. Nelson Cruz went down – that was obviously a risk going in, given his history. Then Angel Pagan went down, and really that’s a ditto. And Grady Sizemore? That’s on me too I guess. Travis Snider was a backup plan, though, and that went out the window with all the strikeouts. Hey maybe I deserved it?

That doesn’t help me be any less bitter. So I head over to the new leaders team, the one belonging to Tim Heaney and the crew from KFFL. I should be able to find some sell-high guys there, right?

Uh, not so much. Alex Avila, Mark Teixeira, Brandon Phillips, Starlin Castro, Aaron Hill, Evan Longoria, Juan Pierre, Ian Desmond… looks fine here. On the staff? Dan Haren, Tommy Hanson and Jhoulys Chacin are all pre-season favorites and are strong bets to continue their fine performances. Huston Street, and Jordan Walden are his only official closers, but Kenley Jansen and Daniel Bard make for fine future closers. This is a nice team.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t a couple players on the team perhaps performing beyond their capabilities. Drew Stubbs is striking out 27.5% of the time and has a .349 BABIP supporting his .281 batting average right now. Once that BABIP returns to earth – and we’re talking .325ish territory, since he does have good speed – he won’t have a real-nice looking batting average. He’ll still have power and speed, though, as his .181 ISO is right in line with career norms and he stole 46 bases at his last stop in Triple A (in 472 PAs). So, yeah, still a good player.

Same theme with Curtis Granderson. Sure, he won’t slug .643 all year and his .364 ISO will return to earth some. But he’s also hitting the ball in the air more and squarely in his power prime at 30 years old. Even with a little power regression, KFFL should be able to bank at least 35 home runs from their $14 player. Not so bad. Once money is considered, does it even matter if the $1 Brennan Boesch is a platoon player with an inflated BABIP? He’s playing well enough to fill in for the suddenly resurgent Adam Lind. Can you sense the bitterness?

Dudes even got Alexi Ogando for $2 so that takes the sails right out from any mention of his .193 BABIP or continued platoon split (4.85 FIP against lefties). Well, at least they spent $18 on Delmon Young, amiright. Even some BABIP love won’t help if he continues to pound that rock into the ground 50% of the time. Gotta get em up to get em out.

What really gets me, though, is this graph from the new ‘Reports’ tab in ottoneu. Check my team going in the wrong direction, and KFFL going through the roof. It’s enough to eat your hat.

Maybe I should have scrapped the deep league waiver wire and started a new weekly, nay, daily, series entitled “I need a @$%^&*# third baseman!!!!” Unfortunately, since I am one of those poor owners who screams that every morning, I am afraid I cannot offer other owners any help. So instead I will once again point to some meh players who might be available in deeper leagues and might generate some value.

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Last year, the Texas Rangers shifted lefty C.J. Wilson from the bullpen to the starting rotation. The results were superb: Wilson racked up 4.4 Wins Above Replacement, playing a prominent role for the 2010 AL West Division title winner and Junior Circuit representative in the World Series.

This past spring, the Rangers made another ‘pen arm a starter. No, not Neftali Feliz. Texas didn’t change its closer’s role, but rather decided to see how Alexi Ogando’s power fastball/slider combo played while facing lineups multiple times. Through seven starts, Ogando’s results look spectacular. He’s got a 2.06 ERA in 43.2 innings pitched, making the Rangers’ brass look like geniuses.

Ogando has enjoyed more breaks and friendly bounces than perhaps any other pitcher in the game this season, and he still must answer questions about how he’ll handle a starter’s workload and combat opposite-handed hitters. That said, his underlying performance is strong enough to suggest that Texas could have another successful bullpen convert on its hands.

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After stumbling last year following his 2009 breakout season, Jason Kubel is quietly having a really strong start to 2011 — bet you didn’t realize he’s currently fifth in batting in the AL — so why, exactly, is he a potential a sell high candidate?

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When Dan Haren was traded to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, many referenced the handy research from the Hardball Times which presented us with some data on the statistical effect of switching leagues if you’re a pitcher. In general, the move from the NL to the AL for a pitcher was expected to have a slight negative effect almost across the board including a deleterious effect on strikeouts, ERA, walks, and HR rate. What happened after the trade as you surely recall, was that his ERA dipped to 2.87 and his HR rate dropped almost by half, but his strikeouts fell pretty dramatically. This year, Haren is apparently out to prove he deserves “Mr. Outlier” as a nickname as he’s bucking the evidence that switching from the NL to the AL is universally a bad thing.

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It doesn’t seem like we’re already a quarter of the way through the baseball season, but here we are. The player rankings are headlined by familiar names like Jose Bautista, Ryan Braun, Dan Haren, Jeff Weaver, Roy Halladay, etc. Even names like Lance Berkman, Curtis Granderson, and Matt Kemp have had success recently enough that seeing their names among the best players in fantasy to this point doesn’t seem like that much of a shock.

However, there are a few players who appear in the upper echelon of nearly every player ranking that are proving to be serious bargains at the quarter way mark. I guess depending on where you drafted Jose Bautista he could be considered a bargain as well, but he’s on another planet right now. I’m talking about players who were drafted in AL or NL only leagues but rarely made a roster in standard mixed leagues.

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Twice in the last week I was asked if the concussion that David Wright received on August 15, 2009 from a Matt Cain fastball was the cause of his recent drop in production. I decided see what if anything has changed in David Wright from before getting hit in the head and after.

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Today, we’ll focus on one National League outfielder instead of the entire class. We know from his twitter feed that 24-year-old Logan Morrison is an excellent young man worth paying attention to, but it’s hard to know exactly how excellent he is with respect to his fantasy value without unpacking his power potential.

Right now, Mr. Morrison has a .313 ISO which would be fourth in baseball if he had played enough to qualify for the batting title. We can’t hold his foot injury against him, but we do know that it means that he’s had fewer PAs than his competitors and his sample is even smaller than average. For a guy that showed a .164 ISO last year, and a .174 ISO in his minor league career, we can remain skeptical that his power will last, and the size of the sample doesn’t help matters.

We do know that isolated power doesn’t even really stabilize over a season, so maybe we don’t really know what his major league power looks like on a reliable level. He’s only played for 366 major league plate appearances. Players don’t usually put up power numbers that trump their minor league work, but certainly young men put on weight and become more powerful as they age. Could Morrison out-do his rest-of-season projections that have him dropping back down to a .177 ISO? That projection would mean only ten more home runs the rest of the season even though he’s managed five in his first 79 plate appearances.

One piece of good news is that Morrison has changed his batted ball profile slightly. After putting up groundball rates over 50% regularly in the minor leagues, Morrison is showing what would be a full-season low in that category right now (40%). Correspondingly, he’s hitting more fly balls (43.6%) than groundballs for the first time in his life. If these changes hold, he could very easily outperform his previous power work.

How far are we from being able to reliable predict that these changes in his batted ball profile will hold? Some might say never because of stringer bias, but Pizza Cutter tells us the ground-ball rate numbers that we have stabilize around 40 PA. So Morrison has shown us that he’s willing to hit the ball on the ground a little more in the major leagues. According to his work, we’ll have to wait another 100 PAs to believe the fly ball rates, but we do know that he’s hitting fewer ground balls.

You have to get the ball in the air to get it out of the park. This is true even if your home park suppresses home runs between one and five percent depending on your handedness. It would be folly to believe a .300 ISO from Logan Morrison, given his minor league career numbers, but a .200 ISO now seems possible with his new ground-ball rate. With the average major league ISO now down to .139, Morrison’s power looks better in comparison even if he doesn’t sustain a .200 ISO, though.

It’s clear that Mr. Morrison is an excellent play even if he doesn’t ever hit 30 home runs a season. His modest power is being boosted by what might turn out to be a real change in approach at the plate.

A good story and a good leadoff hitter (for a bad offense)…

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In today’s look at the Deep League Waiver Wire, we have one outfielder from each league.

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