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Preston Tucker was a 7^th round pick for the Astro’s in 2012 out of fabled Plant High School in Tampa Florida which produced a number of Major Leaguers including Hall of Famer Wade Boggs. Normally a High School prospect with plus power from the left side, a reportedly high Baseball IQ,  and good plate discipline would be drafted fairly high but not in this case.

It’s not that Tucker wasn’t noticed by scouts who liked his powerful yet unorthodox swing and developed arms, but what was mentioned more often than not was that he had a “bad body”—scout parlance that encompasses a number of physical shortcomings and in this case it was his lack of height at just under 6 feet tall. Considered the 14^th best prospect in the talent rich Houston Farm system in 2014, Tucker isn’t even considered the best prospect in his family, as his brother Kyle Tucker who is 6’-4” was recently drafted by the Astro’s as their # 2 pick.

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We don’t, and won’t, play in Fantasy Baseball keeper leagues that permit trades. Too much time-suck, too much rancor when the team in last place trades, say, Carlos Gomez to your main rival for, say, Wilmer Flores and Zack Wheeler, and neutralizes your impeccable draft planning and brilliant in-season maneuvering. But Reality Baseball itself is, of course, a keeper league that permits trades, and the run-up to the trade deadline is always pure entertainment.

But now the trading tsunami is over, the seas are once again calm, and here come the Birchwood Brothers in their trawler, dragging the bottom as usual for submerged exotica, and hoping the net brings up more than toxic oysters, dead toadfish, and sea lettuce. Mike Leake? Alex Guerrero? Shane Peterson? Even Mike Foltynewicz? Go to! All of those catches are too easy, and let’s toss them back and leave them for the weekend anglers to hook (although we admit it’s possible that the Braves, and hence Foltynewicz, won’t win another game this season).

No, we are interested only in the phosphorescent sea slugs that are too far below the surface to attract anyone’s attention but ours. And we think we’ve caught some. Here they are, in no particular order:

Tyler Holt, Indians OF. The promotions of Holt and Tyler Collins (who came very close to making the cut here) are significant, because they mark the first time that the population of MLB players named after the third-to-last slaveholding President of the United States has exceeded 1% of the total. But Holt makes it on the merits, too. Holt’s two-season (592 total PA) stats in Triple-A: .296/.378/.371, 40 SB, 9 CS. He’s very fast—his SB/CS numbers are very close to Jose Ramirez’s, and if you think that’s a criticism, check Jose’s MLB SB/CS numbers—and is a plus fielder in center field, too. The only thing blocking him there is the superannuated Michael Bourn, over whom Holt will be an improvement in every aspect of the game. Bourn, however, isn’t going anywhere, in either sense of the phrase, since he parlayed his superb 2012 season into a four-year, $48M contract that no one, including the Indians, now wants. So with the departure of Brandon Moss and David Murphy, Holt should really have become the Indians’ everyday right fielder. But their current bright idea is apparently to put Lonnie Chisenhall there, on the long side of a platoon with Holt, and we can almost understand, since it’s hard to give up on those first-round draft choices with power. Moreover, when Holt does start, he bats ninth, which isn’t the best way to use his speed. Even so: Bourn is just a sunk cost, and Chisenhall is Chisenhall, which means he’s capable of long slumps and his fielding may undo him. So it’s not impossible to see Holt winding up as the Indians’ full-time CF or RF, stealing some bases, scoring some runs, and producing a high OBP.

Bruce Rondon, Detroit RP. With Joakim Soria gone, the candidates for Tigers closer are Alex Wilson and Rondon. Wilson’s been great this year, but is a softish thrower and doesn’t strike people out. Rondon, conversely, has a triple-digit, but somehow very hittable, fastball. Yet Rondon’s got too much going for him to be passed up: 13.15 K/9 (a top-10 figure), a 2.54 FIP (right next to Chris Archer and Corey Kluber), and, most significantly, a bottom-10, .429 BABIP, which has no place to go but down. We think he’ll take over from Wilson as the Tigers’ closer at some point soon–and why not? Why wouldn’t the Tigers take a look at what they’ve got?—and do fine.

Aaron Sanchez, Toronto SP/RP. Sanchez began the season in the Blue Jays’ rotation and pitched well, contracted “upper body soreness” in early June, spent about 7 weeks on the sidelines, and has been near-perfect in four appearances as a set-up guy since his return. The prevailing wisdom is that he’s just a setup guy unless and until Roberto Osuna, the anointed closer, begins to struggle. Maybe so. But we think the Blue Jays are cannier. Their pickups of Mark Lowe and (we’re serious) LaTroy Hawkins suggest that they’re contemplating a bullpen with a Sanchezless future. Conversely, take a look at the Toronto rotation, even as supplemented by David Price. Can the Blue Jays really afford to have Drew Hutchison (1 QS in his last 9 starts) in their rotation? Not, we think, if they’re planning to make the playoffs, and Lowe and Hawkins free Sanchez to take over from Hutchison (or Buehrle/Garza/Dickey if anyone gets hurt). Make him a starting pitcher again on that team and he will have serious value.

David Holmberg, Cincinnati SP. Here is yet another starting pitcher—he was preceded by Michael Lorenzen, Jon Moscot, and Josh Smith—summoned from Louisville to fill a hole in the Cincinnati starting rotation, which at this point has more holes than filling. We can’t figure Holmberg out, but we like him. He’s a lefty, and is, of course, described by scouts as a back-of-the-rotation type, but we suspect they didn’t mean the back of the rotation on a Triple A team, which is where he’s been for two successive subpar seasons. He doesn’t have overwhelming stuff, he doesn’t miss bats, and he doesn’t give up many fewer walks than the norm. And yet: Called up by the Reds last September, he had four consecutive excellent starts against contending teams; called up again last week, he just had another one against Pittsburgh. Over those five starts, he’s got a 2.12 ERA, which is roughly half of what he had at Louisville. Why is this happening—why is he a different pitcher in the majors than he is in the minors? Our answer lacks analytical rigor, and doesn’t satisfy us, but it’s the best we can do after reviewing his numbers: he rises to the occasion. In all of his starts, he’s put some men on base, but then, in those high-leverage situations, he doesn’t let them score. Maybe, when you’re a second-round draft choice pitching poorly in Louisville and wondering where your career’s gone, there aren’t enough occasions to rise to. Or maybe Holmberg’s run of good starts is a blip, and he turns into a pumpkin tomorrow. But we touted him on Twitter last week, and we’re staying with him.

The non-waiver trade deadline came and went and left the closer grid looking a little bit different. Rumored trades involving Aroldis Chapman, Craig Kimbrel, and Carter Capps, among others, didn’t come to fruition. As always, if you notice any mistakes on the updated grid, please comment so they can be corrected.

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One trend that is unavoidable in baseball is that Home Run power is dissipating. Since the peak year of HR production in 2000, the number of HR’s hit has dropped by almost 27%. A full 10% of that drop happened between 2013 and 2014. A HR was hit every 29.4 AB’s in 2000 and that number was 39.6 in 2014. Some numbers for your viewing pleasure….

Statistics Courtesy of the Seattle Times

For once we don’t need to dwell on the reasons for this decline—they are well known.  As with any obstacle we are presented with an opportunity. It is fairly easy to identify the players who are proven HR hitters and capable of providing power within the more restrictive confines of the new normal. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to find an emerging power hitter who provides a measurable advantage in the HR category at a position generally not associated with HR prowess? Enter Mr. Jonathan Schoop, second baseman for the Baltimore Orioles.

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Ken Giles owners, rejoice!!!! Drew Storen owners, I’m so sorry. Who saw that coming? As you all know by now, Jonathan Papelbon has agreed to be traded to the Nationals, but one of his conditions was that he was guaranteed to be the closer, bumping Drew Storen to a setup role. Don’t hastily drop Storen as he’ll still help your ratios, grab you holds and still grab the odd save. Giles earned his first save of the season for the Phillies with a scoreless ninth in Toronto. Jeanmar Gomez moves into the back end of the Phillies grid.

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The short answer for why we missed on Jacob deGrom on the way up was that he improved each of his pitches as he ascended through the minor leagues, often by changing the grip. He’s back to his old tricks, as only Anthony DeSclafani’s slider has gotten harder this year, and the other guys throwing the Dan Warthen-branded Mets slider are all doing pretty well with that pitch.

So let’s look at movement and velocity changes on pitches and see if we can spot the next deGrom, hopefully in time to have him on our roster before the true breakout.

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As this year’s MLB draft picks have signed their contracts and entered the ottoneu player universe, owners have been auctioning them off like crazy. Dansby Swanson, Alex Bregman, and Brendan Rodgers in particular, have been flying off the shelves, and often at rather high prices.

Those three are all owned in more than a quarter of leagues with prices ranging as high as $15. So far, I have placed only one bid across all my leagues – $5 on Swanson in the original ottoneu league – mostly because I am not sure these players are worth the risk. But everyone else seems to think they are. So am I missing something? Or are you?

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After writing about the biggest value gainers last week, I started pondering Charlie Blackmon and A.J. Pollock. Both are power/speed guys, both are on the way to their best season, and both were kind of obvious in hindsight. That last part is what interests me. If their better-than-expected performances this season were fairly easy to see coming, then why didn’t most fantasy owners notice?

I touted Blackmon in passing, but didn’t blow a trumpet about it because I wasn’t completely confident in him. I had an inkling about Pollock, yet he didn’t make any of my teams and I didn’t write about him. I think so many missed them because they slipped into a sort of value vortex. They aren’t young, they didn’t have much buzz coming up and we’d seen enough games from them to assume we knew what they were.

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“I had rather be right than President,” famously stated Henry Clay, even as he was (1) going out of his way to be wrong, in order (2) to become President, a ploy that (3) still didn’t work. We ourselves had rather be trapped in Tartarus with only George Steinbrenner and Bill O’Reilly for company than President, but we’d rather be right than pretty much anything else. And there’s an extra frisson of pleasure for us if we happen to be right when most other people aren’t. So it pains us not only when we are outright mistaken, but also when we are less than certifiably correct, and the consensus comes closer to the mark than we do.

We are nonetheless committed to giving you a precise assessment of the accuracy of our in-season opinions. The opinions in question are those with respect to what we call Pick Hits (if they’re players we suspect you don’t own but might want to) and Muscular Boys (if we suspect you might own them and won’t miss them, should you need to clear a roster spot). To keep ourselves contrarian, our Pick Hits aren’t owned in more than 25% of Yahoo leagues, and our Musts to Avoid aren’t owned in fewer than 50%.

Our opinions probably can’t be described as comically erroneous, though go ahead if you insist. But we are forced to admit that only one of them demonstrates the preternatural shrewdness to which we aspire. Otherwise, once we mentioned them, the guys we mentioned did pretty much what the common run of pre-season predictions envisioned they’d do, however well or badly they’d done theretofore.

We are undaunted, though, and at the very end of this installment, we roll out our latest Pick Hit, Tomas Telis, whose promotion by the Rangers we hoped for last week. Our wish was granted. First, though, the bookkeeping. The dates in parentheses are the dates on which we identified these guys; the stats are this season’s, starting with those dates.

Pick Hits

Jake Marisnick (April 22nd). 181 AB, 18 R, 15 RBI, 4 HR, 8 SB, 3 CS, .221 BA, .266 OBP. Buoyed by his past minor league success, his hard-contact improvement in the second half of 2014, and his superb spring, we thought Marisnick would be a mainstay in the Astros’ lineup and hit about .270, with perhaps 10 home runs and 20-plus stolen bases. Instead, he lost his center field job to Preston Tucker, went on the DL, and hasn’t hit well since his return. He’s doing about what everyone besides us thought he’d do—a little worse, actually—with about the same strikeout and hard-contact rates as in past seasons.

Brett Oberholtzer (May 12th). 38 1/3 IP, 2 W, 2 L, 2 QS, 44 H, 17 W, 19 ER, 27 K, 1.59 WHIP, 4.46 ERA. Only one of his eight starts was really bad, but only one of them was really good, and now he’s in the minors. We haven’t given up hope on him, and can imagine flagging him again if he returns to the bigs. The difference between what we thought he’d do and what he did is largely attributable to his ballooning walk rate. This sudden spike has happened to him a couple of times before, in the minors, and he’s always managed to correct whatever was wrong. His starts at Fresno since his demotion suggest that he’s doing so again.

Jose Urena (May 19th). 39 1/3 IP, 1 W, 4 L, 4 QS, 39 H, 17 W, 16 ER, 19 K, 1.42 WHIP, 3.66 ERA. We expected a bit better, because, like the rest of his rooting section, we keep thinking he’ll convert his 97 MPH fastball into strikeouts. As you see, it didn’t happen. But he didn’t pitch badly at all, and may attract our interest again, if he finds himself with a team that can get him more than 14 runs in 7 starts, which probably isn’t the 2015 Marlins.

Welington Castillo (May 26th). 1118 AB, 15 R, 15 RBI, 5 HR, .261 BA, .328 OBP. This one worked out even better than we’d hoped. When last we discussed Castillo, he’d just been traded from the Cubs, where he was the third-string catcher, to the Mariners, where he was the second-string catcher, but figured (we thought) eventually to work his way into some sort of job-sharing with Mike Zunino. Our expectations were modest, and our reasoning wasn’t abstruse: Zunino is overused, and Castillo’s a good catcher and at least as good a hitter as Zunino. We failed, however, to reckon with the fabled acumen of the Mariners’ brain trust. Castillo played one game for Seattle, then got shipped to the Diamondbacks in the Mark Trumbo trade. He won the Arizona job by virtue of having a pulse, and then started channeling Yasmany Grandal. Meanwhile, if you don’t own any of the three Seattle players and want a sadistic chuckle, check out the June/July stats for Trumbo, Zunino, and Castillo’s replacement Jesus Sucre.

Jefry Marte (July 15th). 15 AB, 2 R, 3 H, 1 HR, 4 RBI, .200 BA, .250 OBP. So far, so not too bad. Brad Ausmus seems to like the idea of having Marte in the lineup against lefthanders, in which role we think Marte will thrive. Hope you followed our exhortation and had him last week against J.A. Happ, whom he destroyed. Hope you didn’t have him this week again against J.A. Happ, whom he didn’t destroy.

Musts to Avoid

Mat Latos (April 22nd). 4 W, 3L, 7 QS, 72 2/3 IP, 62 H, 19 W, 30 ER, 64 K, 1.12 WHIP, 3.72 ERA. Latos’s first three starts of the season were so awful that we figured the guys who noted his declining pitch velocity were on to something. The pitch velocity is still down, and it’s not like his post-April stats have healed the sick, raised the dead, and made the little girls talk out of their heads, but he’s performed roughly to consensus preseason expectation, which means he’s had some value.

Anthony Gose (April 29th). 216 AB, 30 R, 10 RBI, 1 HR, 10 SB, 6 CS, .273 BA, .318 OBP. We weren’t exactly wrong about what this guy would do, but we were wrong about what its effect would be—so far. Gose had a very fast start this season—an artifact, we felt, of his otherworldy April BABIP of .500. Invoking his career OBP of .302 and 30% strikeout rate, we surmised that he’d hit a slump and lose his job. He had an epochally horrible June–.169/.213/.183, with no RBIs in 71 at bats—but kept his job, and now he’s hot again. We defiantly insist this can’t continue. Gose’s BABIP, even excluding his hot April, is .364, which figures to go down, and his batting average and OBP figure to go down with it. His SB rate is nothing special, and his fielding stats suggest that he’s not doing what got him the center field job in the first place. We expect another slump, and don’t think the underperforming Cabreraless Tigers will be able to carry his bat the way the underperforming Cabreraful Tigers could. And as before, Rajai Davis is ready to take Gose’s job whenever he’s done with it, or it’s done with him. Will that happen soon enough to make him worth jettisoning now? Who knows?

Ian Kennedy (June 4th). 2 W, 4 L, 5 QS, 45 1/3 IP, 42 H, 11 W, 15 ER, 37 K 1.17 WHIP, 2.98 ERA. Kennedy’s had a pretty soft schedule since June 4th, and some of the 9 unearned runs he’s given up since then are due to his decompensation once his fielders got things rolling. So perhaps he hasn’t pitched as well as his numbers suggest. But still: could we have been more wrong about him? We concluded that the Ian Kennedy of 2014 (a pitcher who could get left-handed hitters out) had vanished, and the Ian Kennedy of 2012-2103 (a pitcher who couldn’t) had returned. As of June 4th, lefties’ slash line against him was .297/.366/.637, which over the course of an entire season would make Lefties Against Kennedy the MLB MVP. Now, the slash line is .245/.311/.511—but for the occasional home run, he’s been unhittable against them. We were lucky: we had enough dead spots on our roster that we didn’t have to unload Kennedy when we went shopping, so we’ve still got him. If you listened to us, we apologize.

Melky Cabrera (June 10th). 131 AB, 12 R, 15 RBI, 3 HR, 1 SB, 0 CS, .313 BA, .366 OBP. It looks like we got this one wrong. We concluded that Cabrera could no longer hit (1) fastballs, and (2) left-handed pitching. He’s still having trouble with fastballs, but he’s started to hit left-handers again, just like he used to (Melky’s OBP against them since we slagged him is .450 in 40 plate appearances, which elevates him roughly to his norm for the season). Is the old Melky back? His power seems to be gone, probably for good, but he can apparently still hit.

So in light of the foregoing, why would you listen to us about Pick Hits or Muscular Boys? Beats us. But just for yuks, bear with us as we add Tomas Telis to the Pick Hit list. Telis is a 24-year-old switch-hitting catcher, just promoted by Texas to replace the injured Carlos Corporan on the roster. We first mentioned him during the pre-season. He’s being labeled a back-up catcher, just like Corporan. We see him the way we saw Welington Castillo: as a guy who could easily find his way into a job-sharing arrangement with supposed first-stringer Robinson Chirinos, and maybe even become the undisputed starter. Chirinos is 31 years old, and essentially a career minor-leaguer. He’s a right-handed hitter with a slash line of .214/.304/.429, which means he’s got some power but that’s about it. He’s nothing special at throwing runners out (30% caught-stealing rate), and ranks near the bottom of the league in pitch-framing. Telis doesn’t have much power, but he can hit: .291/.327/.404 at Round Rock this year, .345/.377/.489 last year. (In 2013 at Round Rock, Chirinos was .257/.356/.400.) The knock on Telis has always been his catching skills. But he’s been throwing out 48% of would-be base-stealers this season, as opposed to 18% last season, so he seems to have figured something out. Has he also learned to frame pitches? We don’t know; but how bad would he have to be at it to neutralize his other advantages over Chirinos? Can the Rangers possibly see themselves not only as contenders, but also as contenders whose contention depends on having Chirinos in the lineup? We propose not, and we’d make Chirinos an official Muscular Boy if he had enough Fantasy owners to qualify.

Next week, we’ll forbear posting on our customary Wednesday, preferring to wait until Saturday or Sunday, August 1st or 2nd, on the theory that we might have something to say in the wake of the July 31st trading deadline that everyone else isn’t saying. If you can’t stand the unaccustomed wait, please stop by @birchwoodbroth2 on Twitter.

After crediting myself with 4, 5 and 5 correct bold predictions over the last three years, this years predictions are proving a bit too bold. We’re only half way through the year, and I can pretty easily write off almost all of my bold predictions. It’s not a good place to be.

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