Archive for Cody Ross

The Arizona Diamondbacks shocked much of the baseball community when they parted with a pair of promising young players — Tyler Skaggs and Adam Eaton — to acquire a legitimate home run threat in Mark Trumbo. Thus, the remaining trio of Gerardo Parra, A.J. Pollock and Cody Ross will now jockey for regular playing time in center and right fields instead of splitting major time in all three positions.

Home run power doesn’t solely define an outfielder’s overall value. On-base skills, contact skills, speed and defense are vitally important, but when it comes to the Trumbo addition, it’s not difficult to understand why Kevin Towers and the Diamondbacks felt they needed to upgrade their power at the outfield position. Last season, their collective outfield finished dead last in home runs and ISO.
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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 »

Boston’s right field just may have become a little more fantasy friendly as the club signed Cody Ross to a one year, $3M contract the other day.  Initial plans are likely to platoon Ross and Ryan Sweeney, but if both perform as they have done so in the past, Ross should end up with the lion’s share of starts while Sweeney is relegated to a late-inning defensive replacement-type role.  That would certainly put Ross on the map for both AL-only and deeper mixed leagues.

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Happy 4th of July weekend to you all…

So some of the boys and I decided to test out our waiver wire skills and ran a quick little Deep League Waiver Wire draft.  We had to pick those that we thought would be the most productive for fantasy teams THIS season but had less than a 10% ownership mark using ESPN Fantasy as a guideline.  Since the pick’ns were pretty slim, we left the positions as follows:  C, CI, MI, OF, SP, RP.  I had the first pick of the four of us, so here’s what I did… Read the rest of this entry »

Join us this week on Bottom of the Barrel Scrapers as we look at a stopgap infielder with multi-position eligibility and a former playoff hero who just might have found his stroke in 2011.  They may not be the tastiest treats on the fantasy dessert buffet, but hey…they’ve each got a World Series ring.  That’s something, right? Read the rest of this entry »

The night before Opening Day makes me feel like an 8 year old kid on Christmas Eve, staring at a mountain of presents sitting under the tree waiting to be torn into the next morning.  That one’s definitely an Xbox, those are the video games, and somewhere in that pile is definitely a new baseball glove.  Then morning comes and with unbridled excitement I rush to the pile and start ripping paper with a fury like no other.    Socks and underwear?  A sweater?  These aren’t video games, they’re books.  And who the hell gives an 8 year old a stationery set and thank you cards?  I got rolled on Christmas morning!!

Well, that’s what’s going on now for many of us as we look over our rosters that we were absolutely gushing over as recently as last week.  Suddenly you see a bunch of red crosses next to the names, platoon situations are being discussed, and statuses are being changed from “active” to “minors”.  I know that Opening Day is supposed to be a day filled with excitement and fresh starts, but now it just feels like the fantasy gods have come down and kicked me in the groin….twice.  Here’s what I’m bitching about: Read the rest of this entry »