We’re about 20 games into the season and certain players are beginning to standout — some for good reasons, and some for bad. Today I also attempt to coin (you’ll get that joke at the end) a new nickname for a player.
Let’s face it…nearly every guy who is sitting on your waiver wire is flawed in some way or another and the thought of using someone from the scrap heap on a full-time basis makes your fantasy skin crawl. But when Jason Heyward goes in for an appendectomy and you’ve already lost Yoenis Cespedes, Michael Bourn and Ryan Ludwick, desperate times call for desperate measures. Now obviously you’re not going to find one guy out there who is going to do it all for you, so your best bet is a platoon. And based on ownership percentages, it looks like you can solve some of your issues just by looking north of the border and using the DH spot from the Blue Jays. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s time for our weekly look at the best of the worst. That’s right, it’s the deep league waiver wire where I attempt to find value in mediocre players! Today happens to be Astros day. The good thing about being a weak team is that most of your players are unowned in fantasy leagues. So that gives me multiple options for this very column.
Over the last three or four years, it’s become pretty clear the Yankees have one of the better pro scouting departments in the game. Everyone offseason they acquire some retreads and somehow turn them into useful players, like Bartolo Colon or Eric Chavez or Marcus Thames. They seem to revive guys from the baseball graveyard, and this year they might have done their greatest work, turning Vernon Wells back into a legitimate big league player.
Wells, 34, was hilariously bad with the Angels the last two years. You know that. He hit .222/.258/.409 (82 wRC+) in 791 plate appearances from 2011-2012, his only saving grace the 33 homers he swatted from the right side. Wells was effectively done as a MLB caliber hitter, someone who kept his job only because of the tens of millions of dollars still owed to him. Fantasy owners didn’t even have to think twice about dropping him from their roster or consider him on draft day.
As of Friday morning, Matt Kemp is hitting .182/.217/.255 with zero home runs and zero stolen bases. His .207 wOBA ranks third-worst amongst qualified outfielders in all of baseball — ahead of only Aaron Hicks and David Murphy — and he currently owns a 28 wRC+ and a -0.6 WAR.
In short, he’s been dreadful, and many fantasy owners who drafted him in the first round have been limping through the month of April, waiting for Kemp to rebound and become the .362 wOBA hitter he’s been throughout his career.
Lots of speculation exists that this slump is either related to his offseason shoulder surgery or the result of a mechanical compensation from his injury last season. While Kemp has repeatedly told reporters he’s physically fine this week, the numbers indicate something has negatively changed at the plate.
Wednesday is known hump day, so to help get you over the hump is a weekly update on the goings on of the American League outfield. Every Wednesday some attention will be brought to players with rising or falling stock in the American League outfield, with the exception of the first Wednesday of each month where a full tiered rankings update will take place.
Bullish:
Chris Davis
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As usual, the primary waiver focus leans towards pitching with calamitous bullpens and hot young arms taking center stage. But what if your pitching isn’t the problem? Let’s say you’re flush with quality starters and secure closers and you don’t want to spend the bulk of your FAAB budget on Tony Cingrani or Edward Mujica. What about adding a little offense to secure your future? Leagues with short benches make it tough to stock a few good bats as most people tend to use their bench for starting streamers, but deeper leagues with more abundant bench spots allow you to do both. So here are a couple of guys who might be helpful adds as part-time injury fill-ins who could blossom into full-time fantasy stars. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s true, it’s true. Wednesdays aren’t usually filled with excitement. But wait! It’s deep league waiver wire day and I am positive you have been waiting for this week’s edition since the second you finished reading last week’s. Today I look at two National Leaguers who may be able to help you in a deep mixed or NL-Only league, though they are both likely already owned in your standard NL-Only.
After the Twins traded incumbent center fielder Denard Span to the Nationals in the offseason, it was assumed before spring training began that Darin Mastroianni would take over the job. Instead, the team couldn’t ignore the spring training performance of Aaron Hicks, as the 23-year-old hit .370/.407/.644 with three steals. Haven’t we established that spring training stats are 99% noise? How come teams still make decisions based on them? That was enough to push Hicks ahead of Mastroianni on the depth chart and open the season as the starting center fielder.
After going one for five with a home run Sunday against his old team, Nate Schierholtz has his seasonal line up to .343/.410/.629. That qualifies as ‘on fire,’ especially for a dude with a .272/.321/.413 career line going into the day. Of course his .400 batting average on balls in play makes much of what he’s doing unsustainable, but maybe there *are* sustainable parts to his start?
