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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Josh Rutledge is back up with the Colorado Rockies, and with the injury to third baseman Nolan Arenado, this will be more than the “occasional pinch hitter” stint he had in the early parts of the season when he totaled just 15 plate appearances over 11 games in a 19-day span.

No, Rutledge looks likely to start at second while Arenado heals, moving D.J. LeMahieu from the keystone to the hot corner. Despite his flaws, this four-to-six week path to playing time (and perhaps longer if Arenado eventually opts for surgery to place a pin in his broken finger, something that won’t be determined until later this month), this makes Rutledge an interesting add for those in need of shortstop or second base help.
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The MLB transactions list is usually a good place to start when a fantasy owner is looking for a surprise addition. Suppositions about those transactions can work even better, but I’m too late.

I’m a bit out of the loop on things, but I don’t think I’m off base here. I figured that both of these players were kind of obvious as recommendations when I saw their names, but their needles haven’t moved much since the announcements of their impending returns to 25-man rosters, each in a different circumstance.

If an owner has any reservations, then I’d say to them that I wouldn’t hesitate. I’d be aggressive, if there were any wonder about how one of the two would play in my league – in other words, if it’s because of league depth or something similar.

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Once a hitter displays a skill, he owns it.

That can be one of the hardest axioms to remember in fantasy baseball, as down seasons or exceptionally cold stretches make us turn our backs on a player for good. Never is that harder than when the matter of skill ownership gets clouded even further by the process of aging – a skill is owned, sure, but it can also erode over time.

Given those factors, I understand the trepidation in buying into 35-year-old Jimmy Rollins coming off of perhaps the worst season of his career, one in which his home run total dropped to just six in 666 plate appearances, his strikeout rate continued inching higher and his isolated slugging all but fell off the face of the earth. But Rollins’ early-2014 resurgence is worth examining for several reasons.
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As we’ve spent the past few weeks picking the bones of injury replacements here in the waiver wire dumpster, let’s turn to our other pastime in this business: placing bets on penny stock prospects in the hopes they’ll yield some value. In the cases of the Diamondbacks and the Mets, however, we’re talking about two sub-.500 teams, which presents the possibility that these young guns could stick around in the majors with some regular playing time — presuming, of course, that they produce.
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Here are my updated shortstop tier rankings:

Tier One: Troy Tulowitzki
Tier Two: Everyone else

Tulowitzki has been that damn good, and while Paul Swydan did a great job covering Tulowitzki’s early breakout last week, it’s worth putting the hot start – 236 wRC+ and 3.1 WAR and all – in context for fantasy baseball.
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You’ll hear us talk about statistical stabilization here, and link to pieces like Russell Carleton’s or Derek Carty’s. The basic idea is that there are thresholds at which a stat moves into a decent sample and becomes more meaningful.

Maybe you’ll come away thinking that we’ve said that ‘x stat is stable so that’s what you’ll get the rest of the way,’ and if so, that’s on us. That’s not what stabilization means in this context.

What it means is that the r-squared number that correlates a player’s past stats with his future stats in that category has passed .50. That’s a mouthful, here’s another try: if you were to try and predict future work in a category, you’d regress their current work against the league average. At the stabilization point, you can use half their own number plus half the league average in your calculations.

One more try, in the most colloquial language possible: Stabilization is the point at which a number in a category tells us more about their future work than the league average.

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Today’s edition of the deep league waiver wire is for those with a truly barren free agent pool scrambling for an injury replacement. Even better, both have dual position eligibility, which is extremely helpful when you’re faced with so few pickup options.

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Brad Miller is no longer taking walks or getting hits. That’s obviously a problem, because it means he’s killing your team in average, failing to drive in runs and not getting on base to score runs or steal bases. Entering the seasons as the Fangraphs consensus number nine at shortstop and not ranked by a single person as outside of the top-10, Miller has instead repaid owners with the 24th-best performance at the position, providing net positive value only in home runs (he has three).

The .187-7R-7RBI-3HR-0SB line is obviously troubling. The realities underneath it – specifically, his suddenly-anemic walk rate and sky-high strikeout rate – are even more troubling, though hopefully they represent a short-term issue.
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In an industry league I joined this off-season, I inherited a team with Jean Segura as my starting SS and biggest trade chip. Having never been a Segura fan, I started shopping the Brewer speedster, and found myself relatively flush with offers. In a 20 team league, I think at least eight owners inquired, and deals were pretty solid.

This week, I finally traded Segura, and the return was not what it would have been three or four months ago. So what happened?

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