Streaming pitchers here at the end of the season can often be a treacherous affair.  You scout the pitcher, you check the match-ups, you pore over the data and then you bite your lip, close your eyes and pray that you didn’t make a mistake.  Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes…it rains.  But the bottom line is that the risk involved is usually pretty high because, well, if these guys that you’re sifting through were really that good, they wouldn’t be sitting out on your waiver wire here in mid-September.  So why not tap into some new blood?  Cast aside the tired, lower-tiered starters with their low-5.00 ERA and grab yourself something young; something fresh and exciting.  Get yourself some Jake Odorizzi. Read the rest of this entry »

There is always such a fuss made up over small sample sizes that often times a player is overlooked from year to year as fantasy owners in keeper leagues become hesitant to protect a player with merely a half a year’s experience in the majors. However, despite the increased depth at the catcher position, due to a heavy influx of young talent over the last few seasons, protecting Salvador Perez at this time might just be a shrewd move you can’t afford to pass up. Read the rest of this entry »

While we sit here on the site and talk about September call-ups, streaming pitchers, and potential waiver claims to help for the final few weeks of the season, there are some that are forced to just sit and wait it out; helpless to their cause after months of intense work.  There are waiver claim limits, innings caps, games-played restrictions, and sometimes just a constrictive set of rules that prevents any more tweaking of what you hope will be a championship team.  There’s nothing you can do but stare at your live scoring each night while hoping and praying your place in the standings is either secure or on the upswing.  It’s truly an agonizing situation. Read the rest of this entry »

While most people spend a lot of their time scouting and researching a lot of these September call-ups, looking for even the slightest bit of fantasy contribution, players that are returning from extended stays on the DL are often overlooked by most owners.  And as often the case may be, plenty of them can still be of valuable service to you in your quest for a championship.  If players were dropped a while ago, chances are, some of these guys have slipped through the cracks and are available to you via the waiver wire.  Here are two who have been recently activated and have fairly low ownership percentages. Read the rest of this entry »

Just three weeks left to go in the regular season and all that hard work you’ve done over the last five-plus months will have finally paid off, so long as you’re staying on top of things.  And that means making the tough decisions at the end of the year.  Let’s face it…we’ve got great players that just aren’t producing right now and you need to make sure you fill in the blanks with guys who are.  Our own Michael Barr wrote a piece discussing the idea of cutting Brian McCann and then there are guys like Alex Avila who should have been cut even longer ago.  Even Matt Wieters is struggling to keep his average over the Mendoza line for the last 30 days.  If it’s a keeper league, you’ll probably have to bite the bullet.  But if it’s a re-draft league, it’s time to cut the dead weight and get a catcher in there that can help. Read the rest of this entry »

With the season winding down, I thought now is as good a time as any to ‘fess up and have a little it of accountability.  I usually do a full article at the end of the season that includes all of my picks and pans for the season, which will come at the conclusion of the season, but this year we all did a piece in a series called 10 Bold Predictions.  It was “go big or go home” for many of us and we wanted to be as bold and as brazen as possible while still maintaining certain bounds of sensibility.  In looking back at mine, perhaps I was a bit overzealous… Read the rest of this entry »

With just three and a half weeks to go in the season, you should be targeting specific categories in which you can move most easily. Even if it’s just a couple of points, if you can take them, take them now.  In looking at the standings of my roto leagues, stolen bases still looks like the easiest category in which a move can be made in a short period of time, so here are readily available two guys who you might consider picking up to get a quick speed boost. Read the rest of this entry »

Can it be considered ironic that at a time when Moneyball is being run 24 hours a day, seven days a week on cable, the Oakland A’s are contradicting their methods by using Derek Norris behind the plate over George Kottaras?  Has the curmudgeonly Phillip Seymour Hoffman taken over the body of Bob Melvin and ignored the wishes of Brad Pitt Billy Beane who brought in an underrated Kottaras at the end of July?  Hasn’t Jonah Hill interrupted with his classic line, “Because he gets on base,” yet?  And can we please get that little girl to stop singing that stupid Lenka song which has invaded my subconscious and emerges at the most random parts of my day? OK, so that last one is a personal problem, but in looking at the numbers, seeing Norris in the lineup four or five days a week seems to not only be a very un-Oakland like move here, but also one that makes little sense as the A’s make a move towards the playoffs. Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you like it or not, it’s time again for me to throw a tantrum reminiscent of a nine-year old sore loser, stomp my feet, and threaten to take my ball home as the real baseball world, once again, ignores my fantasy needs this season. It is the savvy fantasy player that does the necessary research and scouting to put together a strong list of potential September call-ups to supplement their fantasy roster in an effort to either stave off challengers for first place or to make a strong late-season push for a championship run. You not only look for talent but opportunity as well and assuming it’s the MLB bottom-feeders that will likely turn to their youth late in the year, you select a strong group of young up-and-comers. But apparently an organization’s desire to win a minor-league championship trumps their desire to see their youth face big-league competition and now my bench is littered with promising names that may never see any action at the major league level this year, thus rendering my list of September stashes useless to me in a fight for a title. Read the rest of this entry »

All too often, players get dismissed in fantasy leagues because of a low batting average. Owners are paranoid that a player with a low average is going to siphon off points in that category and no matter how productive he may be, will always be a drain. But then they get so caught up in avoiding these players and only see the aggregate numbers that they miss when one of them turns things around. Here are two players to check out for the home stretch. Both are turning their average around, both can hit for tremendous power and even if they do start to slump again in the average department, there’s simply not enough time for them to accrue enough at-bats to completely kill you in the category. Read the rest of this entry »