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.
Any long term discussion about Anthony Rendon is full of caveats:
Yes, but He can’t stay healthy — he hasn’t put up more than 160 plate appearances at any level or in any calendar year. Yes, but he’s probably a third baseman and the incumbent is pretty good — no matter how bad Ryan Zimmerman’s throws look, there’s still a first baseman signed to a fairly decent contract staring at Zimmerman accross the diamond. Yes, but we don’t know how good the power will actually be — power takes the longest to stabilize, and Rendon has not yet put up a one-year, one-level sample that’s big enough to really be predictive.
Yeah those caveats are all fine and good, but Anthony Rendon is healthy and in the big leagues. Right now.
Pedro Alvarez and Kyle Seager entered the season ranked 19th and 13th, respectively, in the Rotographs consensus rankings back in March. Although neither were likely to be your first choice to occupy third base on most fantasy teams, injuries to Chase Headley, Hanley Ramirez, Aramis Ramirez, Brett Lawrie, David Freese, among others, likely thrust Alvarez or Seager into lineups with fingers crossed.
So far, Seager hasn’t been useful at all, and Alvarez has been an unmitigated disaster. But I think there are signs that the former might yet prove to be useful, although the vultures are starting to circle on the latter.
Being that we’ve only completed about two weeks of the regular season, I like to preach patience above everything else when it comes to your fantasy team. Obviously there are some cases where waiver moves are a necessity, but when it comes to your struggling stars, patience is the key. Small sample sizes, law of averages, however you want to put it; so little time has passed with so much more to go and sometimes you just have to endure a couple of bad weeks to reap the quality benefits down the road. But not everyone subscribes to that theory and there are owners out there who are pained at the sight of their team near the bottom of the standings right now and have very itchy trigger fingers. If you are in need of help at the hot corner and you have one of those panicky owners sitting on Royals third baseman Mike Moustakas, now might be the time to pounce.
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.
Kevin Youkilis has had himself quite a start to the 2013 season. After flirting with the abyss and then teasing us with a return to relevance in Chicago, Youkilis has been hitting the snot out of the ball for the New York Yankees, and it couldn’t be at a better time for the club. With injuries up and down the lineup, the Yankees are 3-4 and without Youkilis in the middle of that order, it could look a lot uglier.
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.
Entering his second full season of major league play, most projection systems have Kyle Seager taking at least a minor step back in terms of his overall fantasy production. ZiPS and Steamer have him dropping to 15 and 14 home runs respectively, while Bill James is the only system held on FanGraphs that has him matching his total stolen base output from last season.
Yeah, I just used a Pat Benetar song for a post title. If that song was playing, I feel like I should be at the Skate Deck, tube socks pulled high, just praying Tracy Piercy would come over and say hi to me. I’ve hit rock bottom. And third basemen are entirely to blame for my condition.
I have third base as kind of my “beat” here at RotoGraphs. I’ve written a lot about third basemen for the last two seasons. I’ve grown quite fond of many of them. And this year, they’re breaking my heart.
When we do this thing where we categorize players into tidy little compartments it tends to bring out the monsters in many of you. Had I given more attention to some of my cultural anthropology or experimental psychology courses, perhaps I’d have an explanation as to why. But nonetheless intrepid reader, I’ll attempt to put forth my best tiered assessment of the available third basemen to you on draft day.
As you no doubt know, the tiers shift. They move like like an Omar Vizquel with Arthur Rhodes on the mound. But I know that many of you like to aim for top three tier material at as many positions as possible, so perhaps this will help you assuming you haven’t already put together your squads. If you already have and your guy is in tier five, well, condolences.
