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?
The Rockies came to town, and with them they brought their enigmatic center fielder. Dexter Fowler is dripping with tools, but has averaged about seven homers and 16 steals per season to go along with his .272 career batting average to date. Ostensibly, I was asking Fowler about baseball. But I couldn’t help it. I ended up asking him about fantasy baseball, and his prospects of breaking out this year.
It’s another week of recommending mediocre players who might just be less crappy than the rest of the fish in your free agent pool. Or, you could just stream any hitter facing Roy Halladay.
A week into the season is a good time to check in on the states of platoons around the league. A strict platoon makes for easy lineup setting and under-rated value in deep leagues with deep benches, but for the mixed leaguers among us, we’re probably looking for a player to transcend their platoon splits and play every day. With that in mind, let’s check in on some situations that might be in flux.
I asked. You answered. Who knew the most commented on post with my byline would be a poll about OBP leagues? Over 1,000 of you play in leagues that count OBP in some way or another. So that means I will be publishing articles specifically focusing on players in this scoring format. Today I will identify a couple of hitters who may be available in your league and gain value when OBP, rather than AVG, is a category.
After getting off to a red hot start last week with four home runs, a .370 average and a stolen base to boot, Dexter Fowler is a player getting and deserving of a lot of fantasy love. The question is whether the slender center fielder can keep the offense up after hitting only 29 home runs in four seasons before his hot first week.
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