Matsui & Peavy: Waiver Wire

by
August 8, 2011

Let’s look at a pair of one-time fantasy stalwarts that have fallen by the wayside in recent years…

Hideki Matsui | OF | Athletics | Ownership: 34% Yahoo!

The one they call Godzilla has been seemingly revitalized by the All-Star break, hitting a cool .451/.495/.720 with more doubles (seven), homers (five), and walks (nine) than strikeouts (four) since the midsummer classic. He’s been helped by a favorable change in his batted ball profile, slugging more line drives while cutting down on the fly balls…

Fifteen of the 21 games Matsui has played since the break have been played in parks that will punish hitters for hitting balls in the air (Comerica, Safeco, the Trop, and his home park in Oakland), so he’s been hitting more balls on a nose at a good time. His BABIP has shot through the roof as expected, but it remains at a reasonable .286 for the season. ZiPS projects a .264/.340/.434 batting line with five homers the rest of the way, solid output for a waiver wire fantasy outfielder.

Jake Peavy | SP | White Sox | Ownership: 39% Yahoo!

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

Injuries and the shift into a tougher park in the tougher league have caused Peavy’s career to stall over the last two years or so, but he’s shown signs of getting back on track over his last four starts. He dominated the weak-hitting Twins yesterday (8 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 6 K) and more than held his own against the Yankees earlier in the week (7 IP, 8 H, 3 R, 1 BB, 4 K), and the good news that he’s consistently throwing 100+ pitches without showing signs of falling off in the later innings. He had a problem once his pitch count got past 75-80 earlier in the year and last season as well.

Peavy’s season ERA-FIP split is huge (4.63 ERA, 2.80 FIP) is the largest in baseball (min. 80 IP), though ZiPS expects that to even out a bit down the stretch: 3.65 ERA and a 3.06 FIP. His next two starts will come at home against the Royals and Rangers, but after that he’ll run into a three-start stretch in which he faces the Mariners, the Twins, and then the Twins again. That’s a three-start stretch worth taking advantage of in fantasy crunch time.





 

Mike writes about the Yankees at River Ave. Blues and baseball in general at CBS Sports.

3 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Peav
14 years ago

Pick me up if anyone was dumb enough to drop me. I will put any of your shitty Fantasy teams on my back and carry you to Playoff glory.

0