In response to my fan mail as a preschooler, I once had Tom Paciorek of the Seattle Mariners write to me on a 4 inch by 6 inch piece of cheap Mariner notepad and tell me, “Kid, in baseball, you’re either the hero or the goat”. It took my folks a good number of days to explain why being a goat was a bad thing to a 5 year old, but to this day I often marvel at the wisdom of that singular line.

As I look at performances this season, I imagine Casey McGehee has a sense for this in 2011 where he’s mostly been of the two-horned variety.

McGehee was so bad in June that his triple-slash line was .177/.214/.208 for a whopping .422 OPS. His wOBA was .192. That’s just horrific. In all of June and July, he had 36 hits in 171 at bats, six going for doubles, one triple, one home run. He was as bad as any regular in all of baseball.

And then August happened.

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The Pittsburgh Pirates had a rather nice problem on their hands headed into Spring training as both Joel Hanrahan and Evan Meek had spectacular 2010 campaigns and both arguably deserved the right to close out games. This battle presented fantasy managers with the proverbial high risk/low cost option for late-round-save-sniping and in many leagues, both players were drafted as the situation played out. Although Hanrahan was a disaster in Spring with an ERA near seven and giving up several gopher balls, he no doubt bought Meek a steak dinner when Clint Hurdle handed him closer duties. What has happened since has been a pretty fantastic season for Joel Hanrahan.

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Edwin Encarnacion was signed in the off-season to a pretty club-friendly deal with the expectation that he would DH and occasionally play some first base. After the Toronto Blue Jays made a rather surprising announcement about his starting at third base based on a small sample size and his being perhaps the single greatest omission on the best shapers list, Encarnacion’s bat struggled and his defense was as his nickname advertises. And the vultures started to circle.

In April, Encarnacion had a triple-slash line of .257/.282/.365 and followed that up in May with a .236/.257/.333 line. It was the combination of the same old glove defensively and the ineptitude offensively that thrust Jose Bautista back to the hot corner, and if not for Brett Lawrie’s injured hand, Encarnacion may have found himself without much of a role at all.

What has happened since the break is a brand-new-shiny version of Encarnacion as he’s gone .328/.438/.566. Whether or not he was motivated by the prospect of shopping for a new condo I don’t know, but what’s really interesting is to look at how he is a very different hitter in 2011 than he has been in the recent past.

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With Kevin Youkilis taking his familiar place on the disabled list, it seems an appropriate time to reflect on what has been a bit of a strange season for him, and what better way to do that than to badger you with graphs?

The season started rather ominously as Youkilis struggled to keep his batting average above .200 through March and April and yet was still looking a lot like the walk-machine we’ve all grown used to. Much was made of an uncharacteristically low BABIP to begin the season that left his triple-slash at .218/.392/.487 headed into May. He was still hitting for power, but simply wasn’t getting much in the way of lucky bounces for a guy that has carried a pretty robust .330 BABIP on his career. With a BABIP rise and a concomitant batting average lift, his first half line represented classic Youkilis home cookin’ at .285/.399/.512.

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Among the plethora of blue-chippers that the Kansas City Royals can call their own, Mike Moustakas was by most accounts the most anticipated Royal prospect to arrive on the major league stage (with due respect to Eric Hosmer). His 36 home runs and 124 RBI over 118 minor league games in 2010 had fantasy managers salivating for a call-up. After making mincemeat out of opposing minor league pitchers early this season, the Royals didn’t waste any additional time. He immediately singled in his first major league at-bat, hit a 391-foot home run off Joel Pineiro in his fourth at-bat, and it seemed the Moustakas era was off and running. But that’s pretty much the entirety of the good news.

What has gone wrong? Well, just about everything.

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We’re down to about the last seven weeks of regular season baseball and entering into a period where managers start to tweak their teams in reaction to categorical standings (thinking rotisserie style, that is). Due to any combination of injury, ineffectiveness, or incompetence, you may be looking for a little lightning in a bottle off the waiver wire to boost a category here or there. What follows are more deeper-league options, but a couple of these guys even might provide value in standard league formats depending on where you need a shot in the arm.

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The trading deadline is behind us and we’re knocking on the door of the stretch run. Somehow, it’s already August. And it was just a few short months ago that Evan Longoria was the consensus #1 third baseman and just a couple months ago that Aramis Ramirez appeared to have lost his eyesight. It’s been said more than once on this platform that the one constant is change, so with that in mind, I give you the updated third base rankings for August.

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It has been just about a year since Jhonny Peralta was dealt from the Cleveland Indians to the Detroit Tigers. It was July 28th, 2010, and Peralta was continuing his slide from the previous season where he saw his production fall in every meaningful category. His work ethic and conditioning were often criticized and given that his listed weight had gone from 180 pounds to a suck-in-your-tummy 215, his future at shortstop seemed rather dubious.

Cleveland had decided that Peralta wasn’t going to be worth the $7.25 million option they had on him for 2011 and the Tigers decided that having half their team on the trainers table wasn’t getting them any closer to a pennant. And thus, the “other” Giovanni Soto was sent to Cleveland for an underwhelming Peralta, hitting just .246 with seven home runs over 91 games. The general reaction was a bit of a shrug of the shoulders.

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Scott Rolen found himself riding pine for the second consecutive day yesterday and the narrative out there is that Dusty Baker thinks he is playing through a sore shoulder, so he’s simply making the decisions for him. But Rolen, 36, has probably been playing with a sore shoulder for the better part of a decade, so reading the proverbial tea leaves makes the fantasy owner wonder if this “rest” has more to do with his recent ineptitude at the dish. While he’s surely going to return to the lineup soon, considering a triple slash line of .242/.279/.399, you have to wonder if there’s more unscheduled rest in his future.

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Just when you were getting used to the “new normal,” it normalizes on you.

A lot has been written about Mark Reynolds this year, and rightly so, as he’s had one of the more head-scratching performances of the season. Back in May, he looked like he was on a “designated for assignment” path as he was hitting 9th in the batting order and every single one of his offensive statistics were just laughable. Many people pointed to his increase in walks and decrease in strikeouts as improvement and yet the results only got worse.

In an earlier post, I observed that pitchers seemed to have changed their repertoire versus Reynolds, that he was having somewhat rotten luck on batted balls, and that he was struggling mightily versus left handed pitchers, and I’d like to revisit both charts, as well as delve into the remarkable turnaround he’s seen in the last two months.

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