Today’s edition features another injury beneficiary and a man we had all but forgotten about attempting to make a comeback.

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Episode 124

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is now live! Eno Sarris and Nicholas Minnix discuss Wil Myers, Jon Singleton, Marcus Semien, Nick Franklin and Brad Miller, Kendrys Morales, Jesse Hahn, Cody Allen, Dellin Betances, the Marlins’ bullpen, Mark Teixeira, Yordano Ventura, Andrew Cashner, Taijuan Walker and Johan Santana.

As usual, don’t hesitate to tweet us any fantasy questions you have so that we may answer them on our next episode.

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Good timing. The RotoGraphs consensus rankings for catchers went up yesterday. The more information the merrier. I’ve made some adjustments – a few significant – since the backstop tiers I developed for May. Between the two, you should have a good idea of how fantasy owners in your league might view certain crouchers for the rest of the season.

I’m single, so I’ve been known to purchase a frozen pizza or four. I haven’t tried them all, so in a few cases, I’ve taken the word of a reviewer and combined it with my feelings about the picture on the box and other information that I can interpret with uninhibited bias. What do you know?! Just like my tiers.

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Disclaimer: After watching Randy Wolf throw six good innings on Monday night, I’m no longer sure I know anything about baseball, so what follows may just be gibberish.

And, of course, there’s no turning back from my early-May proclamation that Troy Tulowitzki is now in a tier of his own at the shortstop position. Four weeks later, the Rockies slugger has cooled some – he “only” had a wRC+ of 172 in May, compared to 211 in April, and he’s off to a horrid 1-for-4 in June – but he’s still producing far beyond what any player at the position could even dream of.

Having said that, the resurgence of Hanley Ramirez, the continued success of Alexei Ramirez and the staying power of some early-season surprises, the position remains an interesting one.
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Okay, maybe I was wrong about the catchers (You can follow along using the rankings links on the right hand navigation bar). The top group definitely wasn’t performing well. I just never shop there, so maybe it was a blind spot.

But I do shop among the top first basemen. No shares of Miguel Cabrera — no number one picks, and no willingness to spend that much — and just a couple shares of Paul Goldschmidt, Edwin Encarnacion, Jose Abreu and the like. Hey! Those guys are doing fine!

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Yesterday, I identified and discussed the five players most added in CBS Sports leagues. So today of course, I’ll check in on those players being dropped. Often I find the dropped players are better than the added players as fantasy owners love to weight the last two weeks of performance infinitely more than the player’s entire body of work. So let’s see if owners are making the right moves when dropping these guys.

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• MUST READ: The American Sports Medicine Institute released a position statement on Tommy John injuries. Read the whole thing. Orders.

• Angels pitching coach Mike Butcher has two theories on the increase in Tommy John surgeries. The first:

He’s one of many who believes it’s bad for kids to play only baseball year-round, which often results in them putting too much stress on arms that have not yet matured.

The second one theory I have not heard before:

And just as importantly, Butcher says too many professional pitchers are throwing from the opposite side of the rubber (meaning, a right-hander throwing from the first-base side and a left-hander throwing from the third-base side).

Butcher has found that more than 30 of the pitchers who have undergone Tommy John surgery this year fit that description.

“Some guys do it because they feel like they’ll be in the strike zone more, they’ll have better command that way — there’s all sorts of different philosophies about it,” Butcher said. “But for me, if you’re on the opposite side of your throwing arm on the rubber, you are constantly pronating [Definition] your arm at a higher rate than if you are on the other side. There’s no leverage behind the baseball.

Looks like another stat to track and it will nice little research project for me to do later on this year.

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The conventional wisdom says that your starting pitcher needs three pitches. Fastball, breaking ball, change-up is best, but three pitches by hook or crook. If they don’t, they’ll have platoon splits and a tough time getting through the lineup. That’s largely true, of course, but there are always exceptions.

Let’s see what we can learn from the exceptions.

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This is my first month on the second-base beat, and I can’t wait to hear who I’ve ranked too high or too low, preferably in caps lock in the comments section below or on Twitter. Either way, caps lock is crucial here. Don’t let me down. Jokes aside, I’ve got over 40 players in these seven tiers, and I hope you find them useful.

TIER ONE

Robinson Cano

Even after two solid months of sub-.100 isolated power, I am still placing Cano in his own tier. The first part of my reasoning here is that, despite the fact that he hit just one home run in each of the season’s first two months, he did everything else so exceptionally well in May that he was still the No. 4 2B for the month. His batting line was a robust .355/.393/.458, he struck out just ten times while drawing eight walks, he swiped a couple bases, drove in 19 runs, etc.

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Of course it’s made sense to make trades all season, particularly for value. But now with a third of the season in the books, it makes a little more sense to trade for needs. And so positional rankings become important, particularly when paired with the tiered rankings that our writers will put out in the coming weeks. If you can dramatically improve at a problem position, do it. Especially if your drop at the other position, the one you’re selling, is not so drastic.

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