I’ve got two early-season waiver wire adds for you, one to help your outfield and one to help your bullpen…

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With 3 home runs and a .371 average, J.D. Martinez is one of the big pickups in roto over the past week. The question around Martinez is sustainability. Obviously he won’t hit .371 all season, but can he sustain a solid average in combination with respectable power numbers throughout the year?

I think so. I do not quite think we are going to witness a Jose Bautista coming out party in regards to Martinez, but I do think he can surprise and be a valuable player throughout the year. His walk rate throughout the minors was never too great, but he did post high averages and solid home run totals at most levels.

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As you are likely well aware by now, Jacoby Ellsbury suffered a subluxation (partial dislocation) of his right shoulder when Reid Brignac landed on top of him at second base during yesterday’s game. There has been no timetable set yet for his return, but he will likely be out for at least six weeks. This is obviously a huge blow for his fantasy owners and the Red Sox, especially with Carl Crawford still on the shelf, who could have replaced Ellsbury in the leadoff slot. Instead, Mike Aviles and his .317 career OBP has now moved on up. So what’s an Ellsbury owner to do?

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What did you know about Alejandro De Aza in the middle of July last year? My guess is, “not a whole lot”, if you’d even ever heard of him at all. For my part, I have a vague recollection of him jumping right from Double-A to claim the Opening Day center fielder job with Florida in 2007, which lasted for all of about a week before he broke his right ankle. He returned late in the year, failed to hit, and then missed all of 2008 after needing surgery on his left ankle during the spring. For most of the last three seasons, he’s been bouncing between Triple-A & the bigs for the Marlins & White Sox, putting up superficially nice minor-league stats (.309/.372/.479), but never getting much of a chance to play at the major-league level and largely settling into a career as a barely-thought-of Quad-A player. (Which is still nice work if you can get it, I suppose.)

That all changed last July 27 when the White Sox got involved in the Colby Rasmus/Edwin Jackson three-team deal, opening up a spot on the Chicago offensive roster with the departure of Mark Teahen to Toronto. At the time, GM Kenny Williams claimed that De Aza was getting called up to do more than just fill out the bench, noting that the ineffective incumbent in center, Alex Rios, was going to have to “take a backseat”. De Aza provided the margin of victory with a homer in a 2-1 win over Detroit in his first game and never looked back, hitting .329/.400/.520 with 12 steals over 171 plate appearances, good for a .401 wOBA and 2.8 WAR in barely a third of a seasons’ worth of play. It was a stunning performance from a guy who had entered his age-27 season with a career .242/.286/.325 line in parts of three big league seasons, though no doubt fueled in part by an absurd .404 BABIP.

For all that, no one was quite sure what to make of De Aza heading into 2012. Was he a flash in the pan, taking advantage of small sample sizes and September pitching, completely unsustainable over time? Or could be he the next Mike Morse, a late bloomer slowed in part by injuries who showed his skill at the end of one season before completely breaking out the following year? The White Sox made room to find out by moving Rios to right field, trading Carlos Quentin to San Diego, and mercifully dumping Juan Pierre.

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When you write a fantasy baseball column that recommends players, your number one priority is accuracy.  You can make all the suggestions you want, but if you’re making bad calls, no one is going to listen to your advice.  And even if you do happen to get one right eventually, there’s always someone out there to tell you that even a blind squirrel eventually finds a nut.  You need to know what you’re talking about.

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Whenever we go out, the people always shout: “Is it time to pick up Jon Jay for my lineup quick?” And I say: “Probably not if he’s available in your league,” which doesn’t quite make for a good song. But it might make for a good RotoGraphs post.

Yahoo tells us that Jay is available in 91% of leagues, which means that he’s off the board in NL-only leagues and probably not available in eighteen- or twenty-team leagues. And if your 14-team league has five outfielders, should Jay be one of them? For example, my Blog Wars team has Cody Ross and Michael Brantley sharing my final outfield slot. Jon Jay is gone even in that league.

Which probably means he’s not a great pickup if he’s available in your league. He just looks more attractive until you poke around under the hood.

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The American League outfield has a wide mix of both talent and age. On one hand there is Mike Trout, and then on the other there is Vernon Wells. And that diverse situation is just on one team in the AL.

This is the first week of AL OF Tiered Rankings, and they’ll be coming out on the first Monday of every month. On the later Mondays of each month we’ll be looking at individual AL outfielders and examining them much more closely.

Tier One
Jose Bautista
Jacoby Ellsbury

Putting Joey Bats first here was a pretty easy call. His transformation has been well documented, but it never ceases to amaze me that a man can reinvent himself on a random September day and then become one of the best hitters in baseball for the foreseeable future. Pairing Bautista with Ellsbury was something that I really wrestled with. I don’t expect 30 home runs again, but his combination of power and steals (I’m thinking 20 HR and 55 SB) and his .300 career average tilted me in favor of putting him here. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve finally made it through the offseason.

We survived the 3 am games in Japan, the Marlins’ home run statue didn’t come to life and vengefully destroy the new stadium last night, and the reward for our patience is back-to-back days of real, meaningful baseball from morning to evening.

While most owners probably aren’t looking to revamp their rosters just yet, injuries and spring swoons may have some looking for an early season ringer. So, with the pageantry of Opening Day as a backdrop, here’s the season’s first Waiver Wire.

Jose Tabata (ESPN: 9 percent owned, Yahoo!: 47 percent owned)

Tabata fits in a category of player I’ve mentioned before, namely the guys who feel like they’ve been around forever, even though they aren’t that old. Tabata is just 23, he has fewer than 200 major league games to his credit, but because of personal issues, his name has been around since he was in the low minors. He lacks the power to be a 20/20 threat, but he easily has the speed, as he swiped 16 bases last year despite playing in just 90 games.

Health is key for Tabata this season. He’s part of the Pirates long-term plans, so playing time won’t be a concern as long as he’s physically able to take the field. He missed 50 games with a right hand contusion last summer, and then broke his left hand in September, which ended his season. Neither injury should linger into this season, so he’s a clean slate.

He’s certainly not going to replace someone like Michael Bourn, but the choice between Tabata and, say, Austin Jackson (53 percent owned on ESPN and 59 percent owned on Yahoo!) is pretty close. Jackson is almost certainly going to be driven in more often, but Tabata is going to provide a better average.

Lorenzo Cain (ESPN: 44 percent owned, Yahoo!: 45 percent owned)

Spring training produces two major batches of sleepers. The first group is the guys who start out red-hot, produce a ton of hype, and then have their draft stock rise to the point that they’re really no longer a bargain: Delmon Young is probably this year’s best example. The second group is the guys who just have a strong spring from tip to tail or who really start hitting at the end of camp. There tends to be less time for the hype machine to inflate their value, which means they can be had for a value price. Cain belongs to the second group.

His spring numbers were fantastic: .371/.450/.743 with 5 HR and 11 2B, but since he didn’t go on a huge HR binge or do anything except play consistently well, he didn’t get the overwhelming push of coverage, which means he went undrafted in about 50 percent of leagues across both ESPN and Yahoo. Like Tabata, Cain is part of the Royals future and he shouldn’t’ have trouble getting playing time as the team’s best center fielder. ZiPS has him set for a .259/.314/.370 season with 17 SB, which strikes me as overly conservative. I don’t quite buy Cain as a guy who will carry that .700+ slugging percentage into the season, but he’s a career .295 hitter in the minors, so I think he’ll provide a better average than a .260 to go with the steals he’ll provide. He is an inexperienced player, so there may be some growing pains, but he should be a great option in leagues with 4-5 OF slots or as a potential bench option in shallower leagues.

In past years, I have posted 20 bold predictions for the upcoming season. Just because our little RotoGraphs contest among authors only required 10 doesn’t mean I was going to stop there! So here are another 10 bold predictions to ridicule me for, or cause your eyes to open in wonder as to how I could be such a brilliant prognosticator. And before you read on, take another gander at my first set of boldies to refresh your memory.

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Juan Francisco is in Atlanta. Paul Janish is headed to Louisville. That means Todd Frazier has made the Cincinnati Reds. He probably deserves more attention than your typical final roster guy.

For example, take a look at how his last two years at Triple-A stack up against popular middle infield sleeper (and 27-year-old) Zack Cozart:
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