Tomorrow marks the start of September, which means expanded rosters and frustrating lineup cards from managers. For the month, it’s likely you’ll want to stack your picks with the same start time so that you can easily go in at the last minute and adjust as guys are benched or started. It also means occasionally my picks, which go live at 10 a.m., will have a guy on the bench. Be forgiving.

It also means there are a few more interesting names to dial up. Zach Sanders has started to write up the interesting names who could be getting call ups. I’ll highlight a few notable names below so you can be prepared to move on them next week.

Danny Duffy – Sanders highlighted his strikeout potential and he didn’t disappoint in his debut on Thursday night, striking out seven over 6.7 shutout frames.
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Over the weekend, I made the mistake of mentioning the wind at Minute Maid Park on a day when the Astros would be closing the roof at the stadium (and that had been the case for several home games in a row). Honest mistake in my mind, and it actually wouldn’t have changed my recommendation on that day, but let’s have a look at what kind of impact the roof’s presence or lack thereof has on offense in Houston.

As always with these exercises, I pulled B-Ref data from 2010 to the present and placed them in buckets based on wind and temperature.
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Adeiny Hechavarria has a problem.

He can’t steal bases. He’s been caught nine times in just 20 tries this season, a terrible success rate well below what any team, even an offensively inept team like the Miami Marlins, would consider their “break-even” success rate.

In the minors, Hechavarria stole 42 bases and was caught 23 times, a rate that’s a bit better but still largely unimpressive. If there was hope that 2013 might be an anomaly, his 2011 minor league season likely kills that hope, as he went 20-for-37 across three levels.

Hechavarria can’t steal, and it’s basically kept him from having any fantasy potential.

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There are a few nuances in the DraftStreet scoring system that are worth remembering when setting a lineup – “best hitter” isn’t always the same as “best fantasy pick” for several reasons.

That is, you can’t just look at, say, OPS to gauge a player’s daily value. Instead, things like strikeouts (bad), stolen bases (good) and how they get their slugging points all have a major impact. If we compare the list of top OPS earners to the list of top DraftStreet earners, a few things stand out.
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Make hay while you still can.

It’s getting to be about that time where baseball gets really unpredictable, with rosters expanding and teams experimenting with young players and odd lineups. It means there might be more opportunity for bargains in daily leagues, but it also means there’s far more uncertainty.

Consider the graphs after the jump that show the amount of batters and starters used month by month over the past few years.
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Last night at Miller Park, five home runs jumped off bats with the retractable roof open. Miller Park generally has a reputation as a hitter’s ballpark, but the five-homer output made me curious as to the difference in how the park plays with the roof open and closed and with different wind conditions.

So, let’s head to the ol’ Baseball Reference Play Index and pull all games from Miller Park since 2010.

The first thing of note is that it appears the Brewers don’t close the roof strictly for temperature reasons – there have been 11 instances of games being played with 90-degree temperature or warmer. We also know that temperatures have ranged from 60- to 71-degrees with the dome closed, so we would expect the park to play more hitter-friendly with the roof open versus closed.
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Despite being first among all qualified shortstops in wRC+ over the past 30 days, you don’t see Yunel Escobar’s name pop up as a waiver wire recommendation very often.

After all, in that same time span, he’s just 18th among shortstops in fantasy value according to Baseball Monster. He’s just 15th overall for the season despite a wRC+ of 101, seventh among qualified shortstops.

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I don’t have much in the way of a pre-amble today as it’s quite a busy day/week/month right now. Apologies for a non-research blurb here, then, but trust I put in the requisite time on The Daily Five.

I came fifth the other day in a DraftStreet daily pool. I’m still yet to take first in one but I’ve had so many near-misses now that I think I’m done with the “double-up” format. At first, those were my preference because the bar to returns was so low (roughly 40 points), but with so many spots paying out in “winner take all” formats, it’s hard to justify one fifth place finish versus five top-half finishes paying out the same (give or take). I can always just demand Eno pay me more if I run out of DraftStreet cash (note: this will lead to my termination).

You gotta risk it to get the biscuit.
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A few times recently in this space I’ve highlighted the impact that multi-home run or multi-stolen base games can have on your daily fantasy output. Well, after the day Joe Mauer put up yesterday, I thought I’d pull the same data for four- and five-hit games.

Believe it or not, there have been 265 instances of a player notching four or more hits in a game already in 2013. That’s more than multi-home run games or multi-stolen base games, though the fantasy impact falls somewhere in between.

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You know how we pick on the Houston Astros and Miami Marlins a lot in this space? Basically, daily leagues allow you to “stream” starters against opponents every day, but instead of worrying about waiver availability we instead worry about prices. If a match-up is too obvious, it’s likely been factored into the price.

That’s why sometimes a safe match against the Marlins maybe isn’t worth it, because DraftStreet knows a match against the Marlins is safe. The same goes for the Astros, who hit a little better but strike out a bunch more.

I wanted to pull some data to see whether these match-ups are still “worth it” and if perhaps the public perception of the poor offenses has overshot the efficacy of facing them, so to speak.
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