Bryan LaHair (ESPN: 32 percent owned; Yahoo!: 41 percent owned)

In many ways, LaHair’s start is what I expected from him. He’s not leading the league in home runs — hat tip to you, Matt Kemp, and your home run every 8 PAs — but he’s in the pack tied for sixth in the NL after jacks in back-to-back games against St. Louis. He’s also striking out a fair amount, which should come as no surprise for a young player whose ability to stay in the majors is directly related to his power. His 33 percent strikeout rate ranks him fifth in the NL, which isn’t great, but in most leagues it’s really neither here nor there, since outs are outs when strikeouts aren’t a hitting category. Read the rest of this entry »

As we wrap up the month of April it’s time to go back to your waiver wire and sift through some of the names of players that have been dropped over the last few weeks.  Usually they are players who were taken in the later rounds of your draft and, with an early season slow start, have been discarded by their owners and forgotten on the free agent scrap heap.  However, a number of those players are now starting to turn things around and could be timely adds to your roster, whether it’s for a starting position or even just quality depth.  Here are a pair of just such examples and, even better, at thin positions.

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Welcome to an all Padres, all the time edition of the deep league waiver wire. As you all know, Padres pitchers are the ones you want. And given how starters are dropping like flies recently, it is likely some of you are hunting for someone with a pulse, with the hope that this someone may not actually kill your ratios.

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Jarrod Parker

Even though the A’s didn’t take Parker with them on their trip to Japan, no one expected him to languish in Triple-A for very long. After 20 innings in Sacramento, Parker finally rejoined the A’s, just in time to make a start against the White Sox, winners of their last four heading into Tuesday night’s game. Welcome to majors, kid, don’t hang a breaking ball to Adam Dunn! It isn’t the worst assignment Parker could have gotten, the Rangers are a division rival after all, but it will be a nice test. One game, good or bad, isn’t going to yield a ton of useful information, but at least Parker will face a team that approximates an average or slightly above major league offense. If he were facing either the aforementioned Rangers or the Pirates in an interleague game, interested observers would have even less useful data with which to work. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve got a pair of AL Central outfielders on the docket today; two players who are coming off down and/or injury-hampered seasons and are poised for strong rebounds…

Alex Rios | White Sox | Owned: 46% Yahoo!

Whenever you think of Rios, you can’t help but think of his mammoth contract — owed $38 million through 2014. Thankfully his real life contract situation means nothing in fantasy. The 31-year-old had the worst season of his career in 2011, posting an unfathomably bad 59 wRC+ in 570 plate appearances. His walk rate (4.7%) was a career worst but not completely out of line with prior years (6.1% from ’08-’10), though his strike out rate (11.9%) was by the far the best of his career (16.1% from ’08-’10). The most interesting thing about Rios’ 2011 season was his batted ball profile…

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Up until last night, Tom Wilhelmsen was my highest scorer in ottoneu, a league in which I own Ryan Braun, Troy Tulowitzki, Robinson Cano, and Dan Haren, to name a few. Mike Minor’s great outing launched him past the Mariner set-up man, but Wilhelmsen’s value through the first two weeks of the season should be noted.

In any holds league, Wilhelmsen is looking like a quality add, if he is even still available. In ottoneu he is especially valuable due to his SP/RP eligibility — he started 12 games in triple-A last year. Since moving to a relief role last year, Wilhelmsen is an entirely different pitcher than he was as a stater. His strikeout rate in the majors of 24% easily trumps that of his triple-A mark last year of 14.7%. This is relatively common with relievers, and it is one reason why you often see set-up men like Wilhelmsen come out of nowhere to become extremely reliable.

Wilhelmsen packs a 95mph four-seam fastball which sets the tone for his curveball, which has been rather effective so far this year. His two-pitch repertoire, along with the occasional change up, fits well in a back end role.

ZiPS does not like Wilhelmsen for the rest of the season, giving him a 1.34 K/BB for the remainder of the year. I don’t think this does him justice, as his sample size as a reliever is too small to judge him accurately in a projection system — ZiPS also has him starting nine games which will not happen.

With three holds already, he looks like he is entrenched in the set-up role and could be next in line for saves if something happened to Brandon League. As mentioned, the sample size for Wilhelmsen is rather small, so picking him up will require at least a bit of speculation that his performance to date is not luck filled. From my vantage point, it looks reliable, and in acquiring him in the FanGraphs ottoneu league I am showing my faith in him. I picked him up for just $1, and he should be owned in all ottoneu leagues. In other holds leagues, he is one of the top guys that should be targeted on the waiver wire, and he could provide value in his rate stats for deeper leagues or in AL-only formats.

Injury and ineffectiveness have a way of creating opportunity for players many of us have never even heard of. Or at least if we’ve heard of them, we never thought we’d actually consider putting them on our fantasy baseball squad. Enter Matt Carpenter, A.J. Pollock, and Kirk Nieuwenhuis.

All three are either short-term or speculative grabs at the moment, but it wouldn’t take a whole lot for each of them to fall into regular playing time – and given than none of them have ownership rates north of 5% (alright, Matt Carpenter broke 5% overnight), they’re at the right price. Call it “extreme” deep league waiver wire if you like.

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Francisco Liriano (ESPN: 13 percent owned, Yahoo!: 37 percent owned)

I get the sense that if I were to go on a 2500 word rant about Liriano’s inconsistency and how frustrating it is to own a pitcher who can either make or break a rotation I’d probably find a fair amount of support in the comments. For sanity’s sake, I’ll save that for another time, but that doesn’t change the fact that Liriano’s last 8 weeks are the kind of puzzle that makes me want to swear off fantasy sports. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, I am going to look at some 2B options in deep leagues and, as it worked out, NL-only leagues. These 3 hitters are owned in less than 6% of all leagues, so they should be widely available.

Owned percentages are ESPN and then Yahoo.

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Between all of the injuries and slow starts, it’s expected that everyone in your league is scouring the waiver wire and looking for players to fill in the gaps.  The trick though, is to do it on the cheap this early in the season.  There are far too many people blowing their FAAB budget too soon or wasting a decent waiver priority on a quick-fix band-aid that won’t be playing in a month’s time, so while you need to stay active, you need to be smarter than the next guy in the way you do it. Read the rest of this entry »