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.
Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.
I would add Jason Hammel to the <10% list. He could really break out this year. At the very least, consider using him away from Colorado.
Good call. I definitely don’t plan on letting him go undrafted in my league!
Yeah, Hammel might be my favorite sleeper. We’re talking about a young guy who threw 176 innings last season with 3.17 K/BB and 3.81 xFIP.
Deeeeep sleeper:
Jake Westbrook 4% owned
+1!
Regarding Penny I would look at the body of work the last two years. He had a chance to rest his arm before the Giants picked him up. He’ll pitch on regular rest for the Cards and by now, Penny should have tried everything. I’d like to see Duncan work his magic, but the odds are against.
Greg
A’ight. I’ll take the other side of that: Penny throws hard and has sequences of awful starts when he has any of his owies. I think Penny’s a terrific risk to take; we’ll see who is right (on one data point; small sample size, of course) at the end of the season.
Mat Latos shouldn’t be sitting on any WWs.
I think so too
I’d take Ryan Madsen, Franklin Morales or Matt Lindstrom over Chris Perez. He is unproven, walks too many and won’t have the save opportunity the others get.
You can add John Rausch to that mix.
Jamie Garcia anyone?
Bud Norris vs Gio Gonzalez: thoughts?
I like Gio a lot, to break out next year, assuming the a’s let him start a bunch this year. This year? Better than last.