If you’re a H2H league owner, September could be a frustrating time. It’s when veterans sometimes take a seat as their out of contention teams choose to give young hitters a look and young pitchers reach their innings limits and get shut down. The worst part of it is that these may have been the players that helped you achieve the best record in your league, yet come playoff time, you can’t even count on them to contribute to your championship run. So let’s discuss some of the pitchers who are definitely or possibly on an innings limit. Whether their teams decide to skip a start here and there to keep the innings down or just shut him down with two weeks or so to go, I don’t know. But either way, an innings limit would take a bite out of the pitcher’s value the rest of the way.

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There are a scant three Daily Shows with Jon Stewart manning his role as host. Today’s Roto Riteup was penned while watching the first episode of his final week.

On today’s agenda:
1. Jason Kipnis to the disabled list
2. Matt Moore sent down
3. Lance McCullers gets a breather
4. Streaming Pitching Options
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• Carter Capps (and his jump throws) has been one of the best, if not the best, relievers in the majors on a per inning basis this year. But, as Darren mentioned last night, Capps had a MRI on his elbow and he’s now been placed on the DL. There is no major damage to the elbow and it’s expected that Capps will resume throwing soon and he could return around when his DL stint is over in two weeks. While that’s good news after a MRI, you obviously never like to hear about pitchers having elbow issues. I’ve moved Mike Dunn to the next-in-line and added Bryan Morris to the chart. A.J. Ramos has been shakier of late but with Capps going down, Ramos’ job should still be quite strong.

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• Steven Souza will supposedly miss four-to-six weeks with a broken wrist.

“Certainly wasn’t [the best news on Saturday],” Rays manager Kevin Cash said. “We got a phone call [after Souza’s hand was X-rayed] that it is a fractured hand. Four to six weeks. Obviously not an ideal thing for us or him, because his at-bats are crucial right now. But he’s going to go back to Tampa, probably get re-evaluated there in two or three weeks and we’ll go from there.”

With wrist injuries, the average return to MLB time is over two months. I had this same argument when Giancarlo Stanton hurt his wrist (median 56 days)

Stanton estimates low IMO @soumyajeetghosh Avg. historic return time for a broken wrist is 77 days. If fractures included, down to 65 days

— Jeff Zimmerman (@jeffwzimmerman) July 16, 2015

Now news comes out that Stanton will take longer to return than originally estimated.

The recovery for the broken hamate bone in Giancarlo Stanton’s left hand is taking longer than initially expected, the Marlins’ All-Star right fielder admitted prior to Saturday night’s contest against the Padres.

“Definitely slower,” Stanton said of his progress from June 28 surgery.
….
He added that while he has been hitting off a tee recently, he still feels pain and is swinging “as strong as it allows.”

“Getting decent — the ball’s coming off OK,” Stanton said. “It’s just the pain level of it.”

If I can come up with a reasonable return estimate, I am not sure why teams can’t.

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Seeing as my usual Monday beat is second base, I decided to write a piece on minor-league second sackers who could make a fantasy impact down the stretch. As it turns out, that was an entirely fruitless endeavor. There just aren’t any players at the position that I’m excited about for the remainder of 2015, who aren’t already at least on the major-league club.

However, during my 90 minutes or so of dead-end research, I noticed Danny Worth’s shockingly productive stat line. In case you forgot, Worth is that guy the Tigers would always call up for some reason in each of the last five seasons, despite the fact that he owns a career .230/.293/.295 slash in 292 major-league plate appearances.

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Today at The Freshmen Report we take a look at a few interesting — and surprisingly productive — athletes (both hitters and pitchers) from around both the National League.

Jung-ho Kang, IF, Pirates: Cuban players have been all the rage for a few years now but players from South Korea may be the new cool thing, thanks to Kang. He’s gone from an $11 million gamble to saving grace for the playoff hopeful Pirates — who have a left side of the infield that’s been ravaged by injuries. Kang has been the second most valuable position player on the Pirates in terms of WAR, right behind Andrew McCutchen and in front of Starling Marte. The rookie is a well-rounded player who can do a little bit of everything on the field and has actually gotten better as the year has progressed.

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With two months to go, we’ll do one more reboot of the tiered shortstop rankings. Perhaps next month we’ll do some keeper rankings. The rankings below were derived by running our rest-of-season depth chart projections through the z-score method with a few names getting moved around by moi. Read the rest of this entry »

Agenda

1. Keeper League Leverage
2. Daily DFS – Godley
3. Tomorrow’s Targets – Owens, Nuno, Montero, Barnes, Stubbs
4. Factor Grid

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Episode 82 – I <3 Logan Forsythe

The latest episode of “Field of Streams” is live!

In this episode, Dylan Higgins and Matthew Dewoskin discuss Dylan’s struggles with scheduling, checking out Tyler Wilson, welcoming Logan Forsythe to U.S. Cellular Field, remembering Crede’s Crew, balancing competing split advantages in a matchup, the arrivals of Henry Owens and Luis Severino, and Matt’s rants about grocery store queue etiquette.

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One of the more unique parts of the ottoneu format is the arbitration process. It has a huge impact on the entire off-season (as it should), but far too often owners allow arbitration to cast a shadow on the regular season.

Owners considering acquisitions, particularly via trade, worry about what will happen to the player in the off-season arbitration process, rather than focusing on the player’s immediate value. When you do this, you are just hurting yourself.

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