I suppose it could be Ryan Zimmerman or Brett Lawrie or Manny Machado, but I tend to pick on David Wright so why not be consistent. Third base has been kind of a minefield lately and no doubt there are many of you headed into your championship stretch runs and that’s going to be difficult without a third baseman. Your trading deadline has very likely passed so the best you can do is try to dredge the muck on the waiver wire and hope you can find some decent short term production. Guys like Juan Uribe are probably free. Maybe Mark Reynolds. Probably Will Middlebrooks. But scanning the ownership rates, there are a few other bats I’d recommend with more confidence.

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The non-waiver trade deadline is now more than a month past, and when bullpens are subject to a shakeup due to new personnel or new opportunities, there’s always that scramble to salvage the save and holds scraps. With few exceptions, an ironclad master plan for who picks up the holds seems rare and the back end of the bullpen frequently goes through a series of trial-and-errors until roles start to coalesce. With holds in mind, it looks like a couple of those roles have emerged.

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It’s late August. Real life baseball enters into pennant races and playoff chases. Fantasy baseball is filled with stark reality. I’ll challenge in one league, I’ll flirt with prize money in a couple others. I got killed in a few. I’m sure that sounds familiar. But around this point in the season, I start to look back and marvel at the picks which were clearly steals and the picks that almost singularly destroyed title dreams.

Nobody expects every pick to work out. Injuries are practically unavoidable, and certainly we’ve seen the name Tommy John tossed around aplenty this season. But what confounds me are the players who aren’t obviously hurt — at least inasmuch as their team putting them on the disabled list. And perhaps this is more of a venting of sorts, a cathartic calling-out of players who didn’t miss much time this season and just failed to live up to any reasonable expectation. And for our purposes today, I’m just going to focus on offensive players who were slotted to go in the first five rounds of a standard 12 team snake draft.

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Drew Smyly and Bud Norris aren’t unknowns. But you may not realize that both have been among the elite performing starting pitchers over their last month or so. And yet Smyly is owned in about a third of Yahoo leagues while Norris sits at 14%. In ESPN, ownership rates appear to be about 50% for Smyly and 5% for Norris. So there’s a good chance that one or both of them are available at little to no cost. Should you find yourself behind in innings or you’re trying to eek out a spot-start win, keep these guys in mind.

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I find mining for holds to be a pretty thankless endeavor. While one might gripe about wins and saves being particularly fickle (and of course, potentially meaningless), every time I feel like I have a grasp on my holds for the season, the ebb and flow of late inning talent wipes it all away. With that in mind, there are a few guys I’d like to draw your attention to relative to holds.

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He’s 27 and been a role player for the Chicago Cubs minor league system and more recently the Pittsburgh Pirates over the course of a seven year career. Drafted in the sixth round, Josh Harrison was kind of classic organizational depth — a stocky yet speedy guy who could spot start in a pinch in the infield or the outfield should the need arise. And even when the need did arise over the last several seasons, the results have certainly not been worthy of attention in fantasy baseball.

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It’s probably safe to say that the Tampa Rays and Anaheim Angels didn’t draw up their bullpen plans like this in March. Both teams have had numerous players close games — or rather, attempt to close games — since the beginning of the season. They’ve both had the dubious “closer by committee” approach. They’ve both tried reclamation projects and they’ve both tried some kids. But what falls out of focus is how this shifting impacts the arms trotted out there in the 7th and 8th innings for those of you in leagues which value the hold. And over the last month, there have been two very valuable late inning arms whom you may want to employ.

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The not terribly accurate “second half” starts today. If you’re anything like me, the All-Star game doesn’t do a helluva lot to satisfy the need to fill up those multiple box scores and follow the ridiculous number of rosters I have in fantasy baseball. So thank goodness the break is over and we can move on to more important things other than whether a pitcher not-so-gracefully curtseyed to a living legend. Who cares, we have titles to win here.

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Head over to the leaderboards, sort by third basemen over the last 30 days and filter by line drive rate and a really unexpected thing happens. There are 29 qualified third basemen on that list. Dead last is the leading All-Star vote getter at the hot corner in Josh Donaldson, who has a 6% line drive rate over the last month. Six percent. If that didn’t surprise enough, at the top of this list is none other than maybe-back-from-purgatory David Freese, who has hit almost 35% line drives over the last month. Go figure.

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Earlier this week, I suggested some names to buy and sell at third base and today I’ll turn my attention to the bump. There are actually a lot of pitchers who occupy my “sell” list, but a couple names jump out as prime candidates that you might want to jettison before they turn into pumpkins.

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