Waiver Wire Pickups: Pitchers

A few days ago I looked at which position players should be considered off the waiver wire. Now I will look at some pitchers that less than or equal to 50%, 40%,30%, 20% and 10% owned in Yahoo leagues:

Chris Perez (46% owned) – This is a no brainer pickup. He will be getting the save opportunities in Cleveland while Kerry Wood is on the DL as the primary closer. He may lose some saves if Kerry comes back. Since Kerry and the DL are such good friends, I bet Chris gets several chances this year to rack up some saves.

Matt Lindstrom (40% owned) – Again, a no brainer pickup, even in small leagues. If the league is only 10 teams, there is only 3 closers to go around for each team. If you have the chance to get 4 or 5 of them, you could get enough saves to complete and once ahead, trade them off to someone later that desperate to move up the save ladder.

Paul Maholm (26% owned) – A nice average pitcher that can sit on the bench as a replacement when one of your starters gets hurt (I already have a walking wounded team) . Also he can make spot starts against offensively challenged teams. His rate stats won’t kill you and the few added wins and strikeouts won’t hurt.

Jeremy Affeldt (17% owned) – He looks much improved being used out of the pen. He doesn’t look to add much for saves, but could get a few vulture wins and nicely lower your rate stats.

Brad Penny (10% owned) – Every pitcher at St. Louis that pitching coach Dave Duncan touches seems to turn to gold (remember what he did to Todd Wellemeyer). Brad looks like a nice pitcher to stash on the bench in deep and NL only leagues, see the first few results and then see if he is worth keeping.