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No high school anecdotes today people, just the good ol Roto Riteup.

• Keeping in line with catcher news, the Kansas City Royals activated Salvador Perez yesterday just before their game against the St. Louis Cardinals. Perez had been on the 60-day disabled list after having knee surgery back in March. Perez immediately proved his worth by smacking a two run home run in the fourth inning and going 2-4 overall on the day. He profiles as more of a higher average, lower power type catcher, but he is worth a look in dynasty formats. His on-base percentage won’t win him any awards due to his poor walk rate, but he very rarely strikes out either. Preseason ZiPS had him at a .274 AVG with 10 home runs. I might take the over on the average though, based on his upper minors BABIP profiles. If he hits .285 for 300 or so PA, he is a more than useful fantasy catcher. His Yahoo! ownership rate is just 9% and his ESPN is a mere 2%. In comparison to the catchers I examined yesterday, I would order them Perez > Rosario > JPA. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time for me to wave the white flag on this year in Scoresheet. At 27-42, I’m only nine games out of first in my division, but I’m in last. As in dead last in King Kaufman’s AL-Skeeter 12-team AL-only Scoresheet league in the inaugral year. A couple of injuries lasted longer than I thought they would, and I’m not sure I understood how much depth is needed going into the season. In any case, I’m willing to jettison non-keepers to improve my position for next year. Inauspicious beginnings, but there are some things to like about this team still.

Perhaps you can help me identify the best non-keepers. It’s my firm belief that a fire sale should come with a white flag waive — I did that by trading Derek Lowe for a 21st-rounder next year — and then a quick strike with the best tradeable chips leaving first. We keep 13 veterans and as many prospects and/or rookies as we like (rookie is defined as anyone under the rookie eligibility 130/50 PA/IP cap).

So who should I be pushing next? Where are my biggest decisions? I’ve put asterisks next to the veteran keepers I’m looking at — I need three of the guys with (*) next to their name. I shopped Napoli some, but the offers were not exciting, so I’m more likely to work around the edges.

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Summer is (almost) officially upon us and if your teams are anything like mine, you are starting to feel the injuries more than the heat this June (maybe that is because the heat hasn’t come to Seattle yet, but still). Every year, at least one of my teams gets hit by an injury bug and I am left scrambling for replacement players and trying to figure out how to make room for a stop-gap at multiple positions when I really don’t have anyone I want to cut loose.

When that happens, I look for the Multiple Position Temps. These are not the guys you expect to carry you to a title, but players you can pick up, fill in as needed, maybe get some decent stats, and weather the storm until you starting infield makes its way back to full healthy. Most importantly, you can grab one of these guys, use him at 3-4 positions, and not have to scramble every time a spot in your lineup opens up.

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As you get older, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on your belt. A danish or three and you might need to reevaluate that notch you’ve worn into your favorite leather strap. As your fantasy team progresses, you might want to keep an eye on your Brandon Belt, too. A home run or three, and you might want to reevaluate that notch he’s worn into your team’s bench.

Certainly, the news is better today than it was even just a week ago. He’s now got three home runs and looks to have a handle on at least three-quarters of the playing time at first base in San Francisco. Especially now that Aubrey Huff Kendrys Morales‘d that Matt Cain celebration, the position is mostly Belt’s to own. He’s always had patience, too, so in OBP leagues — especially those with five outfielder slots — he’s already a boon. But the question still remains: what is his true-talent power level?

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They say that, in life, timing is everything. Yes, success is often something you achieve when you put in the proper amount of work, but for many, it can simply be a matter of being in the right place at the right time.  Sometimes, it can be an amazing occurrence in life, at least when it happens to you, and other times you just sit there and watch in complete disbelief, wondering how some people can catch such a break. It can be as big as randomly meeting someone who, in the end, offers you your dream job, or as small as simply flipping on the TV and catching a ballgame in the fourth inning that ends up being Matt Cain’s perfect game. 

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In the original ottoneu league, the weeks following the amateur draft tend to be among the most active. As contracts are signed, draftees become roster-eligible and teams – particularly those that are out of the running for this year – begin the process of stocking their farm system with newly minted millionaires.

This year, Carlos Correa was already auctioned in that league, going for an impressive $6. Not only that, but half the league bid on him and four of the bids were for $5 or $6. All for a 17-year-old. The kid has a ton of potential, and may very well be the second coming of Alex Rodriguez. But I didn’t enter a bid.

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Right along the fringe of most leagues, there’s a class of mostly-replaceable, mostly-interchangeable, mostly-lefty, definitely-still-useful platoon outfielders. If you only play them when they have the handedness advantage, and act cutthroat about them when you face a roster crunch, you can get the most out of them while reducing your risk. It’s a tried-and-true strategy in most head-to-head leagues on the pitching side, where streaming is ubiquitous. Maybe it makes sense to have a semi-streaming spot on your offense in your tighter, more active leagues — and if that’s the case, it probably makes sense for that player to be a first basemen or outfielder.

Here are some guys in the National League that fit the description of a fantasy-platoon outfielder. Either their complete offensive upside is only above replacement when they have the platoon advantage, or they legitimately seem to have a platoon situation going on. If there are so many of this type in one half of the league, maybe they truly are replaceable in your standard mixed league.

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It’s saves mini-series week here at RotoGraphs! We tried one look into whether or not bad teams provide save opportunities, and then we tried another. We looked at lefty closers. The results seem to indicate that bad teams are almost as good as good teams at providing save opportunities, and managers don’t seem to prefer lefty closers.

But ‘bad teams’ and ‘good teams’ are not all alike. Commenters rightly pointed out that there might certain types of teams that create more save opportunities. How about teams with small run differentials? They seemingly play in more close games which could end in saves. How about teams with good pitching staffs? They might keep the score down and create more save situations. Or even teams with good bullpens. They might be able to keep the score close and hand the ball to the closer more often.

These are all testable questions. So it’s time to run the correlations — this time with teams since 1990, in order to reflect current bullpen usage more accurately. There are still over 600 team-seasons in our sample. SVO stands for Save Opportunities.

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We all know there’s the absurdly tall Chris Young, the talented pitcher who refuses to stay healthy and then there’s also the absurdly athletic Chris Young who patrols center field in Arizona and has a penchant for the swing-and-miss.

But this post isn’t some kind of wacky odd-couple attempt at finding commonalities between the respective ballplayers, it’s about the outfielder Chris Young and the unexpected and rather peculiar trends in looking at his results so far in 2012.

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Wasting time with the proverbial series of tubes one day, I stumbled upon one of the dumbest questions I’d seen in a Yahoo! forum. Some sad human being actually asked “how many dimes are in a dollar” on Yahoo, the top response was “How many do you want there to be?” No fooling.

Now, as dreadfully Homer Simpson as that might sound, I actually found sort of a terrifying similarity when looking at one of my fantasy squads. I’ve had such a run of terrible luck at third base that I rather feel like I’m getting about five dimes on the dollar in return for my investment, and well, I’d like there to be more. While I’d prefer to have a neat-and-tidy lineup where I’ve got a stalwart at each position, I’ve had to scramble in a way that has forced me to think well outside the box. Like taking the blue pill kind of outside the box.

Enter the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad home/road split for Chase Headley.

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