It’s getting time for some teams to start making a single category move to improve in the standings. Today, I am going to examine speedsters owned in less than 5% of ESPN leagues for owners looking for a few extra steals.

Alcides Escobar (4.7%): Escobar has nothing going for him (.230/.254/.316) except the chance he could get back to stealing bases like he previously. Since he’s a complete statistical black hole otherwise, he should probably only be used in the last week or so of the season to not kill the other categories.

Adam Frazier (4.6%): Frazier is one of the more balanced choices to help with steals going forward. Steamer has him with only five more over the rest of the season.

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The Giants traded Eduardo Nunez to the Red Sox for minor leaguers Shaun Anderson and Gregory Santos.

It’s tough to see how this trade will eventually affect Nunez’s value. On the positive and known front, Nunez is going to a better hitter’s home park. Additionally, the Red Sox’s lineup (4.7 R/G) is better than the Giants (4.0 R/G). That is about where the certainty ends.

The biggest questions are when and where will Nunez play. He’s played third, short, and the outfield so far this season. Additionally, he’s played at second as recently as last year. The Red Sox don’t have any major holes across their lineup especially after promoting Rafael Devers to play third.

Besides Devers, the other weak spot in the lineup may be Mitch Moreland at first base. The team could bench Moreland and move Hanley Ramirez to first. Or possibly move Devers to first and let Nunez play third.

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Jacob Faria

• For Faria, I watched his July 6th game against the Red Sox. The game was the most recent with a decent camera angle.

• The nearly 24-year-old righty used a 3/4 release with decent command and control of his pitches.

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It’s time to check in on my preseason bold predictions.

Note: For all the rankings, I used ESPN.com’s Player Rater.

BOLD prediction #1: Trea Turner will perform 20 spots worse than his ADP suggests.

I’m going to luck into getting this one eventually. Turner was going way too early compared to my projections. I saw him more as a 2nd to 3rd round talent.

He was proved me wrong by stealing 35 bases until he fractured his wrist in late June and will likely miss all the 2017 season. He currently ranks 7th overall but his value will continue to drop as others continue to rack up the counting stats.

Batting 1.000

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Within the past 24 hours, two substantial trades have occurred. The Yankees sent Tyler Clippard, Ian Clarkin, Blake Rutherford and Tito Polo to the White Sox for Todd Frazier, David Robertson, and Tommy Kahnle. Additionally, the Diamondbacks sent Dawel Lugo, Jose King, and Sergio Alcantara to the Tigers J.D. Martinez. Here are the players who will likely see their fantasy value change because of the move from the most value gained to least gained.

Yoan Moncada: The game’s number one prospect gets called up to replace Frazier. The 22-year-old switch hitter has the chance to post both double digit home runs and stolen bases over the rest of the season. I could see him post 20 stolen bases as the White Sox may let him run wild with nothing to play for.

Now, Moncada does come with some batting average and on base concerns. Steamer has him projected at a .230 AVG and a .310 OBP. These values, especially the batting average, could be a drag on a team. His owners may want to consider moving him as his value may never be higher and he could bring back a more rounded player.

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I was wrong a few weeks back when I wrote:

With the new juiced baseball, home runs rates are up, and they are the main driver for the scoring increase. If a pitcher can limit home runs, they will be affected less and the easiest way to do this is to generate ground balls.

By using OPS for and against, the production flyball pitchers have gotten worse over the past 2.5 seasons. By examining the problem using the difference between both FIP and xFIP to ERA, I found the opposite answer and can’t explain why.

I expected this article to go a different route than it did. When I wrote that owners should focus on groundball pitchers, I knew I wanted to eventually determine how much the difference between ERA and both FIP and xFIP shrunk for extreme flyball pitchers.

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I’m sure no one noticed but I took last week off and am now back in the saddle. I needed to catch up on starting pitchers to see who is or isn’t performing as expected. Here are some my thoughts while catching up on the news.

Joe Ross and Michael Pineda will need Tommy John surgery

I was a little surprised to see both of these injuries happen during the All-Star break. After reading the news, Ross’s injury shouldn’t have been a surprise for someone paying attention with him exiting his July 9th start early. His fastball velocity for the start was down 3 mph compared to earlier in the season.
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For my next few articles, I am going to examine batters and pitchers who have changed their approach from the second half of 2016 to the first half of this season. Today, I will start with the hitters.

For hitters, I found how far their stats changed, in standard deviations, from the league average in these five categories:

• Strikeouts (K%)
• Walks (BB%)
• Groundball Rate (GB%)
• Pull Percentage (Pull%)
• Isolated Power (ISO)

Then I binned the change as good or bad. I determined “pulling the ball” (can be shifted) and groundballs (fewer line drives and home runs) to be bad. If a person disagrees, they can change the values found in this spreadsheet and create their rankings.

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It’s been a unique fantasy season in which I’ve never experienced. Pitchers should be dominating the landscape with strikeouts at an all-time high. They’re not because home runs are also at an all-time high. With this unique environment, the fantasy norms which owners have been familiar with no longer exist. No one has played fantasy baseball in this high strikeout and home run environment because it has never existed before.

Here are some new guidelines for navigating this season and thinking towards next season.

Home runs have pushed scoring is up, but not to any historical levels

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Today, I’ve got Quick Looks on Newcomb, Gonzales, and Gossett. Let’s start with the young lefty in Atlanta, one of the top pitching prospects in the game.

Sean Newcomb

For Newcomb, I watched his June 21st start against the Giants.

• He’s on the extreme first side of the pitching rubber and throws from a low 3/4 arm slot. This combination will make it tough for left-handed hitters to square him up but right-handed hitters should have a good view of the ball. This idea has not been born out yet, with lefties putting up a .400 BABIP against him.

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