Jarrod Parker

Even though the A’s didn’t take Parker with them on their trip to Japan, no one expected him to languish in Triple-A for very long. After 20 innings in Sacramento, Parker finally rejoined the A’s, just in time to make a start against the White Sox, winners of their last four heading into Tuesday night’s game. Welcome to majors, kid, don’t hang a breaking ball to Adam Dunn! It isn’t the worst assignment Parker could have gotten, the Rangers are a division rival after all, but it will be a nice test. One game, good or bad, isn’t going to yield a ton of useful information, but at least Parker will face a team that approximates an average or slightly above major league offense. If he were facing either the aforementioned Rangers or the Pirates in an interleague game, interested observers would have even less useful data with which to work. Read the rest of this entry »

Francisco Liriano (ESPN: 13 percent owned, Yahoo!: 37 percent owned)

I get the sense that if I were to go on a 2500 word rant about Liriano’s inconsistency and how frustrating it is to own a pitcher who can either make or break a rotation I’d probably find a fair amount of support in the comments. For sanity’s sake, I’ll save that for another time, but that doesn’t change the fact that Liriano’s last 8 weeks are the kind of puzzle that makes me want to swear off fantasy sports. Read the rest of this entry »

While the disabled list is starting to fill up with in-game injuries and Tommy John surgeries, we’re finally reaching the point in the season when players are actually coming off the DL to fill in some of the gaps being left by newer injuries. Here are a pair of starters who started the season on the shelf, but either have already or will soon rejoin their respective teams. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s still too early to say whose hot starts are real and whose are going to evaporate like a puddle in the sun when the weather warms up, but there are injuries to account for and high risk draft plays that are clearly not going to pan out. In that spirit, here are a pair of outfielders that should be available in all but the very deepest leagues.

Cody Ross (ESPN: 10 percent owned, Yahoo!: 11 percent owned)

It isn’t as though Jacoby Ellsbury was keeping Ross out of the Red Sox’s lineup before he got hurt, but having one fewer body in the Sox’s outfield for the foreseeable future does make Ross a more appealing property. Carl Crawford is almost ready to rejoin Boston’s lineup, and it can be reasonably assumed that once he’s major league ready, he’s going to get his job in left field back full time. If Ellsbury were still available, that would leave Ross fighting with Darnell McDonald, Ryan Sweeney, and Jason Repko for the right field spot, and while I think he’d get the majority of the starts in that situation, it becomes much easier for Bobby Valentine to rest Ross more often when he has so many other workable options.

With Ellsbury on the shelf, Sweeney no longer threatens Ross’ playing time, since Sweeny can’t play center field. Repko is really a fourth outfielder and/or defensive replacement, and if Ross can’t outhit McDonald to keep the center field job, well, things will have taken a turn for the worse at Fenway. At this point, Crawford can take back his left field job when he’s ready without pushing Ross anywhere.

Ross’ upside is in both his power and his position in the Red Sox order. ZiPS has him down for 18 HR, which seems reasonable to me, though 83 of his 102 career home runs have gone to left field, meaning he’s going to be playing a lot of wall ball with the Monster. Hitting behind Kevin Youkilis and David Ortiz should give Ross plenty of RBI opportunities, even if he loses a HR or two to the Monster. He’s not worth shoehorning into a good outfield, but he’s definitely worth grabbing as either a bench option or as a backend starter in deep leagues. His walk rate — which has climbed steadily since 2009 — makes him an even better option in OBP leagues than he is in traditional leagues.

Nolan Reimold (ESPN: 2.5 percent owned, Yahoo!: 16 percent owned)

To call Reimold one of my sleepers would be disingenuous; he was one of my cicadas: very deep and very asleep, mostly due to playing time concerns. He has played in eight of the Orioles’ 10 games so far, though he came in late in two of those games, so those concerns may not be totally misplaced. That said, if he continues to hit .323/.323/.613 with home runs in three consecutive games, he shouldn’t have to worry about Endy Chavez continuing to take over his playing time.

He won’t, of course, continue to hit that well, but if he can hold the line for even a week or two more, it may make him a more permanent fixture in the Orioles’ lineup and relegate Chavez to a bench role. Unfortunately for Reimold, with Adam Jones and Nick Markakis locking down the O’s other two outfield spots, he may be battling Chavez constantly whether he hits well or not. For that reason, I don’t love him as a weekly league option for the time being. Daily players will obviously have the flexibility to move him in and out of the roster as necessary — this is one of those times where following beat writers on twitter becomes almost requisite — but I fear for the week where the O’s have six games and Reimold only starts four of them.

ZiPS likes Reimold’s power potential, listing 20 home runs as a reasonable total for him, and I tend to agree. He doesn’t bring a ton of other categories to the table, but if he can hit in the .265-.270 range instead of the .254 ZiPS projects him for, I think he brings enough to the table to be worth rostering for those in need.

One of the most interesting things about playing across multiple fantasy sites is just how different ownership rates can be. As a postscript to yesterday’s piece, I noted that Chad Billingsley — who pitched well again last night, not walking a single Pirate over six innings — was available in 22 percent more Yahoo! leagues than he was ESPN leagues. In 2010, Jeff Zimmerman took a look at ownership rates across the two sites and concluded that ownership rates are slightly higher for Yahoo! leagues on average. Slightly larger leagues combined with difference in how the staff preranks players can lead to gulfs in ownership rates in the neighborhood of 50 percent. Read the rest of this entry »

Edinson Volquez

Part of me is still uncertain about whether Volquez is the type of pitcher who will see a big change pitching in PETCO, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years playing and writing fantasy, it’s that Padre pitchers are usually worth giving the benefit of the doubt. Volquez pitched well in his first two starts this season, both at home, notably striking out 15 hitters between the two starts, but perhaps more importantly, he generated a fair amount of groundballs in both starts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Through the first weekend of the season, a whole bunch of questions have been totally and permanently answered. The Braves and Red Sox are both terrible, the Twins are going to score 243 runs this season, and the NL Cy Young is going to be a tight horse race between Chad Billingsley and Jeff Samardzija.

As laughable as some of those things sound, looking over the most common transfers they’re the type of judgments it seems that some owners are willing to make. I can’t argue much with the most dropped player this week, Alfredo Aceves, not because I think his performance this weekend was indicative of what he’ll do the rest of the season, but because I think Bobby Valentine has lost confidence in him. I’m of two minds about both Jason Hammel and Kyle Lohse, nowhere near sold on either enough to drop someone like Max Scherzer or Daniel Hudson to pick one of them up, but both were added in over 2000 Yahoo! leagues yesterday alone. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve finally made it through the offseason.

We survived the 3 am games in Japan, the Marlins’ home run statue didn’t come to life and vengefully destroy the new stadium last night, and the reward for our patience is back-to-back days of real, meaningful baseball from morning to evening.

While most owners probably aren’t looking to revamp their rosters just yet, injuries and spring swoons may have some looking for an early season ringer. So, with the pageantry of Opening Day as a backdrop, here’s the season’s first Waiver Wire.

Jose Tabata (ESPN: 9 percent owned, Yahoo!: 47 percent owned)

Tabata fits in a category of player I’ve mentioned before, namely the guys who feel like they’ve been around forever, even though they aren’t that old. Tabata is just 23, he has fewer than 200 major league games to his credit, but because of personal issues, his name has been around since he was in the low minors. He lacks the power to be a 20/20 threat, but he easily has the speed, as he swiped 16 bases last year despite playing in just 90 games.

Health is key for Tabata this season. He’s part of the Pirates long-term plans, so playing time won’t be a concern as long as he’s physically able to take the field. He missed 50 games with a right hand contusion last summer, and then broke his left hand in September, which ended his season. Neither injury should linger into this season, so he’s a clean slate.

He’s certainly not going to replace someone like Michael Bourn, but the choice between Tabata and, say, Austin Jackson (53 percent owned on ESPN and 59 percent owned on Yahoo!) is pretty close. Jackson is almost certainly going to be driven in more often, but Tabata is going to provide a better average.

Lorenzo Cain (ESPN: 44 percent owned, Yahoo!: 45 percent owned)

Spring training produces two major batches of sleepers. The first group is the guys who start out red-hot, produce a ton of hype, and then have their draft stock rise to the point that they’re really no longer a bargain: Delmon Young is probably this year’s best example. The second group is the guys who just have a strong spring from tip to tail or who really start hitting at the end of camp. There tends to be less time for the hype machine to inflate their value, which means they can be had for a value price. Cain belongs to the second group.

His spring numbers were fantastic: .371/.450/.743 with 5 HR and 11 2B, but since he didn’t go on a huge HR binge or do anything except play consistently well, he didn’t get the overwhelming push of coverage, which means he went undrafted in about 50 percent of leagues across both ESPN and Yahoo. Like Tabata, Cain is part of the Royals future and he shouldn’t’ have trouble getting playing time as the team’s best center fielder. ZiPS has him set for a .259/.314/.370 season with 17 SB, which strikes me as overly conservative. I don’t quite buy Cain as a guy who will carry that .700+ slugging percentage into the season, but he’s a career .295 hitter in the minors, so I think he’ll provide a better average than a .260 to go with the steals he’ll provide. He is an inexperienced player, so there may be some growing pains, but he should be a great option in leagues with 4-5 OF slots or as a potential bench option in shallower leagues.

When Spring Training opened, the top of the Cardinals’ rotation was set and whatever controversy there was, was about whether Jake Westbrook would be able to keep his spot in the rotation. For the second season in a row, an injury has thrown the rotation into some flux. Westbrook’s spot is secure — at least for now — Kyle Lohse is tonight’s Opening Night starter, and Lance Lynn finds himself in the rotation after having thrown just over 10 innings as a starter last year. Kyle McClellan may have been the more logical choice, but he wasn’t nearly as effective in that role as the Cardinals had hoped last season, so it isn’t much of a surprise that they would choose to keep him as a reliever all year as they see if Lynn can be productive over a wider sample of innings. Read the rest of this entry »

There will be something of a change from last year’s NL SP tiered rankings, namely, I’m going to be more flexible with the number of pitchers in each tier. I hate lists where tier four has 13 pitchers and while each isn’t that different from the one above him, the last player listed is nowhere near as good as the first. I tried to combat that by sticking with rigid size on the tiers, but it really just created the opposite problem and I was stuck with the bottom of one tier and the top of the next looking awfully similar. C’est la guerre, but it’s not a mistake I’m going to make again this year.

Tier One

Clayton Kershaw
Roy Halladay

I go back and forth on which of these two I’d rather have, but at the end of the day, it’s a coin flip you can’t lose. I’m giving Kershaw the slight nod here because of his slightly higher strikeout rate, but he needs to keep his walk rate low to keep pace with the notoriously stingy Halladay. Read the rest of this entry »