The State of the Waiver Wire
Have you scoured the waiver wire for a hitter in your standard leagues lately? If you have, you’ll completely understand the point of this article.
In one of my standard leagues, I have been looking for an extra hitter for the past week and a half, and decided to forgo a trade in favor of plucking someone off the waiver wire. Over this past week and a half, I have yet to pick up a hitter for one very good reason: there isn’t a whole lot of hitting talent on the waiver wire at the moment.
If you actually take a look at who’s available on the market at the moment, you’ll notice most of them have a fatal flaw of some kind. For example, take a look at Freddie Freeman, who’s available in two-thirds of Yahoo! leagues. Over the past month, Freeman has hit over .300 with four dingers and a good number of runs and RBIs. He’s really young and has great upside, so why shouldn’t you be racing to pick him up? His June BABIP sits around .375 and his strikeout rate is above 30%. Freeman never had large K rates in the minors, so two straight months with strikeout problems are concerning.
Scrolling through the list of players who have been ranking highly on Yahoo!’s board this past month, you’ll see most of them are doing it with batting average, with not a whole lot of power available at this point and time. I don’t know about you, but the best power threat available to me is Jorge Posada. When a 39-year old catcher is the best you can find on the waiver wire, you’re probably better off leaving your team be for the time being.
If you’re looking for hitting on the waiver wire, you’re going to be left empty handed. At this point, you may be better off adding an extra pitcher and flipping one of your current starters for a bat. If you play in a league that makes trading difficult, you going to be S.O.L. if you’re looking for that one bat to put you over the top, so try and find a one-category stud on the wire to boost your numbers as best you can.
Zach is the creator and co-author of RotoGraphs' Roto Riteup series, and RotoGraphs' second-longest tenured writer. You can follow him on twitter.
I don’t think there is such a thing as a “standard” fantasy baseball league. I don’t know what you mean by that term.
In general, because so many leagues (including the one I play in) still use 14 batters and 9 pitchers, a greater percentage of available batters tends to be rostered than available pitchers, leaving less batting talent in the pool.
I read Standard League to mean 5×5, MLB, 12 teams. Is that wrong? (note, it doesn’t matter if 50% or 20% or 80% of leagues conform to that description, it could be a term of art with its own definition, like Quality Start).
Standard League is 5×5, 12 teams, yes.
Jorge has been hitting just fine of late. the dude’s bat has seldom been a question. and since he’s not actually a catcher this year, his injury risk factor is somewhat mitigated.
I need to get into a shallower league. Every player who’s ever mentioned in waiver wire columns around here is always long gone in my league (with the possible exception of prospects). 16 teams, 14 position players, 9 pitchers, 5 bench spots and 2 DL spots — it’s brutal out there.
Sean Rodriguez is the poster boy for this league’s waiver wire; he’s been on and off the wire all season and it seems like at least half the teams have had him. So that’s our replacement level right there. After him, the top non-DL free agent (ranked by % ownership) is Ian Stewart. Among pitchers, it’s Travis Wood. Slim pickings, indeed.
Thank you for that insightful post.
Thank you for that very useful and non-sarcastic reply.
jpc, this is rotographs, it’s okay to talk about fantasy here…
If it’s any consolation, my primary league is a keeper, A.L. with 12 team, 23-man active rosters (14/9) and 17-man reserves. That’s 480 players from a pool that includes 350 major league players. Most top-100 prospects are already spoken for. The most-owned non-DL players on CBS not in our league rosters are Gary Sanchez, Scott Kazmir and Jurickson Profar, the latter a strong prospect but a 2013 ETA at-best and blocked by Andrus.
That reserve roster is nucking ifsane.
My deepest league was a 20 teamer, but we only had 2 man benches and 2 man DLs.
14 team league, start 9 hitters, 7 pitchers, 4 man bench, so maybe 150-160 position players are rostered at any given time. I called out the same the same thing to another manager yesterday. Best hitters on the FA pile right now might be Trumbo, Damon, Willingham. Freeman was just picked up.
After a DL move opened up a spot on my roster, the best I could do in my standard league while looking for decent power production was Garrett Jones.
I wish that more authors who write about fantasy ball categorized league size by the amount of players rostered than by the amount of teams such as several of the previous commenters have. Does it matter that my three league are 8, 12 and 16 teams? or is it more important to note that 216, 264 and 400 players are rostered when looking at league depth.
I completely agree with Graydog. My friends and I mention this all of the time. My league has just 10 teams but we roster 30 players each making it deeper than a “standard” 12-team league. Rostered players is a much better way of describing league depth.
my waiver list is filled with pitchers ranked in the 100s and 200s… i recently picked up jordan zimmerman, dropping chris coghlan (good riddance) for him. ridiculous he was available this late in the season
I’ve flirted with Freeman multiple times this year (picking him up and alternately dropping him pretty quickly). I just dropped him after he hit a dong for me and I picked up Luebke. I agree there aren’t many quality players on the waiver wire but you can always find some gems.