Whatever it is they do in St. Louis, it works: The Cardinals are 33-18, the best record in the majors, and if the past decade is any gauge, we might as well go ahead and put them down for another postseason berth in 2015. With such success, let’s see if two little-owned position players on the team, both of whom have recently come into playing time, can provide help to deep-leaguers.

As usual, the players discussed in this space are better suited for mono leagues, and the ownership percentages are by way of CBS.
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Yesterday, I discussed the players fantasy owners in CBS have been scurrying to pick up over the last week. Today I’ll look at the opposite side of the coin, those players you’re dropping like a hot potato. In general, fantasy owners seem to be far too quick with their mouse clicking, willing to drop players after a week-long slump. Even if they are near replacement level to begin with, there’s no benefit to such churning and playing the “hot hand”. It will just increase your stress level, without actually improving your team. So let’s see if that’s the case with the top dropped players this time, or if the moves are justified. I have excluded players on the disabled list.

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Eleven years ago today Ken Jennings began his incredible 74-game winning streak on Jeopardy! His first AMA on Reddit is, in my opinion, one of the best ever done (warning: language; it’s the Internet after all).

On today’s agenda:
1. Quick thoughts on Andre Ethier
2. Matt Moore watch
3. Welcome to the big leagues, Joey Gallo
4. Streaming Pitching Options
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Hoping you all had a nice Monday, enjoying my birthday. Here are a few quick updates from the weekend before we get into tonight’s action:

• Since being removed from the closer’s role, Addison Reed has made a few adjustments, leading to increased velocity on his slider. He’s put up zeroes in his last four appearances and he might be inching his way back into saves in Arizona.  Brad Ziegler has been a little shaky of late, and while he’s still closing in Arizona at the moment, it might not be long before a change is made as Chip Hale hinted at using Reed in the ninth again. This situation has now been upgraded to Code Red.

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Check out last month’s rankings here.

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No more bland, rote tiers from this guy! Thanks to the urging of commenter “Urban Shocker,” my eyes are now open to the fun that can be had with ridiculously labeled tiers. You see, I used to just write these monthly second-base columns with boring old numbered tiers. That is, until Urban Shocker convinced me in the comments section of my April rankings to name my tiers from then on.

To be perfectly honest, the task of doing these monthly rankings can get rather stale — for both me and you — as the season wears on. Eventually, it gets to the point where the rankings barely change, because 30-day samples don’t substantially change the way I/we think about a certain player.

Furthermore, there’s only so many ways I can say “Jose Altuve had a good month again,” or “Dee Gordon steals lots of bases,” or “Holy crap, Dan Uggla is so incredibly terrible!” (Actually, never mind on that last one. I will never get sick of making jokes about Uggla, who got paid $13 million last year to post a weighted offense 72% below league-average.)

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• Quite a few players are coming off the DL today including Jonathan Lucroy and Brett Oberholtzer.

• Stephen Strasburg is on the DL with neck tightness and/or back issues.

A day after pitching one-plus innings against the Reds, Nationals right-hander Stephen Strasburg was placed on the disabled list because of what the team termed “neck tightness.” Nationals manager Matt Williams cited “back issues.”

“We have to get to the bottom of what’s going on,” Williams said. It’s perplexing. It’s not anything you can point to. We have to get this thing worked out so he can be back in 15 days.”

Seems a little fishy to me. I would not be surprised to see him throwing right away and working a through a few things after his struggles so far this year.

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We’re making our way around the diamond with our updated rankings and today we are onto the hot corner. Here are the positions we’ve done so far and you can also access them via the Positional Rankings in the right sidebar:

• Catchers
• First Basemen
• Second Basemen
• Shortstops

If you feel we missed someone, please let us know in the comments.

FYI: the table is sortable! Also, these are updated as of 6:20p CT on June 1st w/Beltre & Gallo news as well as adding Paredes into the mix.
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In looking through my three annual league rosters this morning, I noticed there were two players I have in each of those leagues. Those two are Marcus Semien and Rubby de la Rosa. To give some perspective, one of these leagues is a deep, 20-team industry dynasty league and the others are keeper leagues. I made a trade during the offseason for de la Rosa in the dynasty league because I love his velocity and think he has the potential to be one of those Garrett Richards type post-hype breakout pitchers.
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Prior to just a few weeks ago, Chad Bettis was an absolute after thought; he had struggled in previous chances in the bigs, even when pitching in relief, and didn’t seem to be a part of Colorado’s plans. A couple Rockies injuries and some ineffectiveness later, and Bettis has a sub-3.00 ERA in four MLB starts and a near 4/1 K/BB ratio. In order to get a better sense of what Bettis has been doing, I watched his start from last Sunday against the Giants, where he struck out seven in over eight innings of work.

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According to both ESPN’s Player Rater and the Zach Sanders z-score method, Brandon Crawford has been the top fantasy shortstop so far this year. But in today’s post, Crawford is playing the role of Aaron Rodgers in the 2005 NFL Draft. Let’s see how far he falls. Read the rest of this entry »