Roto Riteup: July 28, 2013

Today is the last weekend Roto Riteup before the non-waiver trade deadline. To go with the theme of last weekend things, here is Bill Hader’s final appearance as Stefon on Weekend Update and as a cast member on Saturday Night Live.

On today’s agenda:
1. An update on Omar Infante
2. Just 10 more starts for Matt Harvey
3. Ivan Nova continues to roll

An update on Omar Infante
Following up on Friday’s Roto Riteup, Omar Infante’s return will now be pushed back until mid-August. He won’t be partaking in any baseball activities for at least one and perhaps as many two weeks. Given that two weeks represents almost one quarter of the remaining games, Infante is expendable in 12-team mixed leagues now, though deeper leagues or AL-only formats should continue to wait on him.

Just 10 more starts for Matt Harvey
In addition to the New York Mets going to a six man rotation, manager Terry Collins announced that he thinks Matt Harvey will make about 10 starts for the rest of the season. Harvey is up to 145 innings this year after pitching 169.1 innings last season and thus a steady and closely monitored increase in his workload shouldn’t surprise. Collins did concede that if the Mets go on a winning streak and “are five or six out, we’ll have to redetermine what our next move is.”

For those Harvey owners — particularly those of you in head-to-head leagues — this news is exactly what you didn’t want to hear. Losing out on starts due to the six man rotation as well as a limit on Harvey will be very difficult to replace during the H2H playoffs. The dilemma is keeping Harvery on your playoff roster and have him eat a roster spot for the last two weeks, or keep him off your playoff roster entirely and lost out on two of his starts.

During the final weeks of the H2H playoffs, the Mets will play at Atlanta, at Cleveland, host Washington, and then host Miami. Both Atlanta and Cleveland are above average offensive clubs whereas Marlins are a team to pad stats against. The Nationals are the swing vote here. For the season they rank in the bottom three in baseball for runs scored, however over the the past 30 days the Nats have scored in the top half of baseball. Previous generations might have said “discretion is the better part of valor,” this generation would say “YOLO!” What our generation may lack in refinement and tact, it certainly attempts to make up for in gusto. Start Harvey and trust him to be successful against quality teams. What he can do in two starts is as valuable as what some pitchers could accomplish in the four full starts that Harvey would normally be pitching in.

Ivan Nova continues to roll
After yesterday’s dominating performance against the Tampa Bay Rays, Ivan Nova now has five quality starts in his six starts since being promoted. Over those six starts Nova has 40 strikeouts against 12 walks — though he has struck four batters as well. Nova’s 10.3% swinging strike rate and 23.5% K% are both career bests and he is still getting his always excellent ground ball rate. As noted by our very own Mike Petriello, Nova has been using a new pitch since being called up this year. Nova is available in over 70% of Yahoo! and ESPN leagues as well as 40% of CBS formats.