Jon Lester was pretty terrific in his last outing, throwing a complete game with six strikeouts while giving up eight hits (seven singles) and one earned run. Owners across the fantasy landscape collectively breathed a sigh of relief. And yet, it was against the Seattle Mariners who have a tendency to make starting pitchers of questionable quality look like Cy Young.

Over the last four seasons, Lester, 28, is ranked 5th among qualified starters in K/9 at 9.17, just a tick behind Tim Lincecum, Yovani Gallardo, Clayton Kershaw, and Justin Verlander. Over the same time span, he’s fourth in overall WAR at 16.9, ahead of Kershaw, Chris Carpenter, Cole Hamels, and Matt Cain, among many other great arms. In most fantasy drafts, Lester satisfies that “staff ace” slot for managers who like to lean on someone to anchor their pitching staff.

But this season, Lester started out with a couple decent outings, a couple of real stinkers, and then a couple middling starts. All along the way, he’s demonstrated an inability to re-create the swing-and-miss stuff that allowed him to breeze through similar tight situations in years past. In general, Lester has just lacked that polish that made him such an effective pitcher for the past four seasons.

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Wasting time with the proverbial series of tubes one day, I stumbled upon one of the dumbest questions I’d seen in a Yahoo! forum. Some sad human being actually asked “how many dimes are in a dollar” on Yahoo, the top response was “How many do you want there to be?” No fooling.

Now, as dreadfully Homer Simpson as that might sound, I actually found sort of a terrifying similarity when looking at one of my fantasy squads. I’ve had such a run of terrible luck at third base that I rather feel like I’m getting about five dimes on the dollar in return for my investment, and well, I’d like there to be more. While I’d prefer to have a neat-and-tidy lineup where I’ve got a stalwart at each position, I’ve had to scramble in a way that has forced me to think well outside the box. Like taking the blue pill kind of outside the box.

Enter the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad home/road split for Chase Headley.

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Just a month in and we’ve seen players like Danny Valencia and Lonnie Chisenhall lose their jobs, kids like Kyle Seager and William Middlebrooks defy expectations, and we’ve seen big guns like Evan Longoria and Pablo Sandoval go down to injury, among others. Third base has had a degree of volatility that has made it a particularly difficult position to manage.

While I’ve typically been more conservative in May in the past, there are definitely some movers early on. I wouldn’t say this is a list that represents “if the draft were held today” kind of a sentiment, it’s more a melding of injuries, expected future performance, but also performance to date.

Tier one is pretty unsurprising.

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I almost wince when I get my handy text messages from the variety of baseball-update services that I’ve subscribed to. The news on my pitching across fantasy baseball leagues has been so bad that I actually have a physical reaction to the little jingle my Samsung Galaxy makes when there’s a text incoming. Now what?

The referrals to Dr. James Andrews and other associated arm experts have been so frequent that it’s sent me to the waiver wire early and often, and in a couple situations, I’ve turned up golden. For instance, Ricky Nolasco has been quite successful through his six starts, and while I haven’t owned him for all of these outings, he was nonetheless free. Assuming I won’t be able to trade him, knowing he was free will make it easier to cut him. Cutting him might seem downright goofy, but I’m not sure I’m too comfortable starting him right now.

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Third base has been hit pretty hard by injuries recently. Evan Longoria, Kevin Youkilis, Ryan Zimmerman, and now Pablo Sandoval are on the shelf, and a couple of them are going to be there long enough to collect some substantial dust. So it’s likely that there are many of us scrambling for answers at third base while we work the phones for any trade possibilities (okay, nobody talks on the phone anymore, but I can’t really say while we work the Google can I?).

When I was interviewed by the intrepid Carson Cistulli on Fangraphs audio a couple weeks ago, he asked me if I thought third base was a deeper position that it was a year ago and at that time, I still said no. With so many of the typical top 10 struggling to produce, when you start looking down the list, it gets ugly pretty darn fast. Now that we’ve lost several of them to the disabled list, it makes third base a particular challenge — so you might want to get creative. Or perhaps you have to.

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We’ve posted several articles hypothesizing whether certain players might be had on the cheap or if you might be able to sell high on others. Typically, comments are mixed inasmuch as actually believing you could buy low/sell high on Players X, Y, or Z. This is pretty standard fare for fantasy baseball in April. But the uncertainty of what opposing managers might think about particular players got me wondering what the actual value of players might be if the draft were held today.

Enter Yahoo! and their rather archaic in-season drafts. Drafting at the tail end of April always seemed like a pretty silly notion to me. But with their new pay leagues, I thought the results of a draft where other managers are actually competing for cash prizes might provide a bonafide pulse on whose stock has already risen and whose has dropped. You have to account for the fact that we’ve had some injuries not to mention relievers who have lost their jobs already, so the pool of players has changed a tad, but not significantly.

So yes, for you dear fantasy baseball enthusiast, I reluctantly joined a draft this past Sunday just so I could pass along the results. Note that there were no auto drafters up until the last three rounds. This was a standard 5×5 roto league with 12 teams and a snake draft format and the average draft positions I’ll reference are those found in Yahoo.

The first round went almost as expected. Guys like Albert Pujols and Jose Bautista still went #3 and #6, respectively, which is about where they were going in February and March. The biggest mover early on was Josh Hamilton, who was selected 11th overall while his ADP was 33. Hamilton is already nursing a sore back, so perhaps owners missed any opportunity they might have been looking for to peddle him at his highest value — but his hot start rather catapulted him up the draft list on this day.

Not far behind Hamilton was Pablo Sandoval, whose current .311/.361/.500 slash line had some manager all in a dither so as to draft him with the 16th overall pick whereas his ADP was 42. My guess was he’d go somewhere in the 3rd round, but holy cow — this was either a real reach or Sandoval’s mother is now playing fantasy baseball. I’m not saying he’s not worth an overall 16th pick at his current clip, so perhaps this manager has a more reliable crystal ball than I do.

The 3rd-6th rounds had Stephen Strasburg going 28th (ADP of 54), Jay Bruce 38th (56th ADP) and Yu Darvish 52nd (83 ADP). In the case of Strasburg and Bruce, it could be that their value might never be higher. At 70 overall was Kevin Youkilis, who had an ADP of 64, so while his stock has dropped some, it’s not quite as much as I assumed.

If you’re in a buy-low mood, some of the gentlemen selected well past their initial ADP include Ian Kennedy at 93 (79 ADP), Mat Latos at 126 (109 ADP), Ike Davis at 165 (137 ADP), Ubaldo Jimenez at 171 (150 ADP), Dustin Ackley at 169 (148 ADP), Carlos Marmol at 189 (145 ADP) and Justin Masterson way down at 264 (198 ADP). Of the group, I’d probably be most interested in Kennedy, Latos, and Marmol if you can find them at a significant discount. Masterson is already finding himself on waiver wires.

On the other hand, if you’ve got glaring needs and you’re thinking of trying to sell high, there were a good number of players that were drafted much higher than expected just a month ago. There was a real believer out there in Emilio Bonifacio and his nine steals as he was selected 88th despite an initial ADP of 142. David Freese went 108th (135 ADP), Jesus Montero went 112th (157 ADP), J.D. Martinez went 131st (242 ADP), Edwin Encarnacion went 140th (203 ADP), and Mark Trumbo went 171st (194 ADP).

In the case of Montero and Trumbo, it might have a lot to do with position eligibility as Montero now qualifies in most leagues at catcher and Trumbo at third base. But the hot starts by Freese, Martinez, and Encarnacion definitely impacted this draft — and if you own them, it’s your call as to whether or not they’ll be able to keep it up or if it’s time to strike while the proverbial iron is hot.

With my many fantasy baseball squads, sometimes I feel like I’m in complete control, and sometimes I feel like I’m flying down a snowy mountainside on a bike at near 60 miles per hour, surely destined for an epic crash (click on the link, it’s must-watch stuff). Owning Josh Johnson on a couple squads, I’ve felt a little of both.

Coming off of a serious shoulder injury in 2011, Johnson,28, had a strong enough Spring with 24 strikeouts over 22.1 innings pitched that indicated he ought to be healthy, and when Josh Johnson has been healthy, he’s typically been a guy you want in your fantasy rotation. As soon as the stats counted though, the results were sorely lacking. That is, until his start on Tuesday where he looked much more like the guy we either loved or coveted throughout all of 2010. So is it time to trust Josh Johnson going forward?

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In early February, I wrote a post for “FG+” that endeavored to sniff out starting pitchers who either over-performed or underperformed their inherent strikeout ability. Inspired by Zack Greinke, Tommy Hanson, and Anibal Sanchez, among others – there were many starters that saw pretty massive fluctuations in their strikeout performance between 2010 and 2011. Being the curious human I am, I wanted answers. Or at least a direction on the path of finding an answer.

Specifically, this little study sought out to create an “expected” strikeout rate by controlling for their prior year K%, current year (2011) K%, SwStr%, and fastball velocity (definitions of correlations and the r-squared of the model at the bottom of this post). The results were pretty interesting, should you happen to have access to the full piece.

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Injury and ineffectiveness have a way of creating opportunity for players many of us have never even heard of. Or at least if we’ve heard of them, we never thought we’d actually consider putting them on our fantasy baseball squad. Enter Matt Carpenter, A.J. Pollock, and Kirk Nieuwenhuis.

All three are either short-term or speculative grabs at the moment, but it wouldn’t take a whole lot for each of them to fall into regular playing time – and given than none of them have ownership rates north of 5% (alright, Matt Carpenter broke 5% overnight), they’re at the right price. Call it “extreme” deep league waiver wire if you like.

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It seems every team I’m running this year has a glaring issue. I have some with issues at catcher, others with some pitching issues, but there’s one in particular where I have just no solution at third base. We’re just a handful of games deep into the season, but there might already be fertile ground for trying to cherry pick brutal starts to the season by few old dogs. Yes, the small sample size applies throughout, but I like these guys as fantasy targets early on since there were enough question marks about age, health, and/or production before the season began which likely gave their current managers pause when they ultimately selected them. Now that the stats count, you might find a second-guesser willing to listen.

Aramis Ramirez

Ramirez has been a slow starter for the last few seasons, but he’s taken it to new levels so far. His .114/.179/.182 line is so bad it makes it hard to see beyond the fact that it’s just 39 plate appearances. He’s hit no home runs, two doubles, and he’s struck out eight times and generally been useless on the real and the fake field. He’s had little fortune from the bouncing ball with a paltry .143 BABIP, his swinging strike rate isn’t completely out of control at 11%, his contact rate is down a tick, but not overwhelmingly so. Aside from having a detached retina or something, I’d fully expect the proverbial pendulum to swing the other direction and he’s either going to start getting a little luckier, he’s going to start driving the ball, or both. It has typically taken him until June to really put things together — and that has been exacerbated in the last couple of seasons — but another week of falling on his face and you might have a real opportunity on your hands.

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