Fantasy Baseball 2015: Week 12's Buy-Low, Sell-High Trade Advice

The latest results aren't always the most meaningful ones, yet they're fresh in everyone's mind and thus more heavily weighed than the others. Fantasy owners can utilize this recency bias to their advantage on the trade market.

At the end of May and beginning of June, Chris Sale allowed 13 earned runs through two starts. Anyone who ran away from the ace missed a truly dominant stretch when he surrendered nine runs through eight outings with 13.57 strikeouts per nine innings.

And anyone who sold him after he gave up five runs on Wednesday? Buckle up for a long summer.

When a player catches fire, don't assume that streak represents the new norm. On the flip side, a rough patch isn't the end of the world. Everyone experiences ups and downs, so a savvy manager will capitalize on unsustainable good times and take calculated risks on those in a slump.

Buy Low: Michael Pineda, SP, New York Yankees

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Michael Pineda just got treated like a pinata by the Philadelphia Phillies, baseball's worst offense against right-handed pitchers. Those eight runs through 3.1 innings, the fourth time he has relinquished five or more runs in a single start this season, torpedoed his ERA to 4.25.

Rather than panic, use his latest calamity as a buying opportunity. The 26-year-old righty still sports a 2.89 fielding independent pitching (FIP) with 9.25 strikeouts and 1.28 walks per nine innings. Only five other starters (Max Scherzer, Corey Kluber, Madison Bumgarner, Jason Hammel and Carlos Carrasco) have a K/9 higher than 9.0 and a BB/9 below 2.0.

There's not much beyond an incredibly high .349 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) to explain his inconsistencies. This is someone who struck out 16 batters in a single outing last month and looked like a legitimate American League Cy Young Award candidate.

Having not pitched a full season since 2011, durability comes into play. However, a healthy Pineda has all the makings of a fantasy ace, so see if those worries prompt a frustrated owner into letting him go at a discount. 

Sell High: Brett Gardner, OF, New York Yankees

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Players can't get much hotter than Brett Gardner, who's hitting .326/.390/.607 with five home runs and three stolen bases this month. Once a fairly one-dimensional speedster, the 31-year-old outfielder now boasts an .847 OPS with nine homers.

The next long ball he hits will give Gardner his second season with double-digit homers, the first coming with last year's 17. He has sustained and embellished that power to become a legitimate five-category star so far, but let's not get too caught up in the moment.

Gardner is a career .268 hitter currently batting .292. Even during last year's power surge, he notched a .412 slugging percentage. The rate is currently .482. A hot streak has padded his current portrait well above career norms, but a slump will even things out eventually. That's how baseball typically works.

He still holds plenty of merit as a 15-30 threat, but Gardner's trade value will never get higher. 

Buy Low: Jeff Samardzija, SP, Chicago White Sox

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Jeff Samardzija is finally starting to heat up. After getting decimated for 15 runs in two nightmarish starts, the Chicago White Sox's prized offseason addition has allowed seven runs over his last three outings. He struck out seven batters through seven innings in all three of those games, coughing up a combined two walks.

Yet there's too much damage to immediately erase. He still holds a 4.53 ERA and 1.33 WHIP on the season, and opponents are hitting .288 against him. Samardzija even yielded 24 hits over those three bounce-back starts, which still gives managers time to pounce on "Shark."

He has made his own bed with a career-high 24.5 line-drive percentage, but that's not in line with someone who upped his ground-ball rate in each of the past three years. While he has maintained last year's newly harnessed precision, his K/9 rate has again dipped, this time to 7.46.

Based on his recent starts and 8.42 career clip, there's still hope of him at least repairing his K/9 above 8.0. If that happens, he could remind everyone why he was commonly regarded as a top-25 fantasy starter entering the season.

Sell High: Billy Burns, OF, Oakland Athletics

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Giving Billy Hamilton some competition for the "Best Billy Speedster" title, Billy Burns is hitting nearly .100 points higher (.322) than his Cincinnati Reds counterpart (.225). He has swiped 15 bags since his MLB promotion, with Hamilton (MLB's steal leader) collecting 23 over that same stretch.

Burns is certainly valuable, and he needs to be owned in all leagues. This sell-high recommendation is geared for competitive leagues, where the Oakland Athletics' burner is long gone.

The stolen bases shouldn't surprise anybody; he snagged 57 of them last year. The average, however, is another story. Burns hit .288 through the minors, registering a .237 average between Double-A and Triple-A during the 2014 campaign.

FanGraphs' Eno Sarris gave reason to distrust Burns' .371 BABIP. "By percentage, only Brian Dozier is hitting more pop ups than Billy Burns," Sarris wrote. "Those are automatic outs on balls in play, and if you look at the BABIPs for the top-25 guys on the pop-up leaderboard, you’ll get an average (.279) that should open your eyes."

That incoming regression offsets the infield hits gained by his legs, so don't be surprised when Burns reverts to a .250-.260 hitter going forward. If that happens, he's merely a steals play, which can help managers hurting in that particular category but benefit a Burns owner with a speed surplus.

Buy Low: Adrian Beltre, 3B, Texas Rangers

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Adrian Beltre pleasantly surprised his fantasy owners by returning from the disabled list on Tuesday. The Texas Rangers third baseman missed three weeks with a strained ligament, forgoing a minor league rehab stint to make a sooner-than-expected recovery.

“I don’t pretend to think he’s 100 percent, but whether we wait a week or have him go take a few at-bats on rehab, it was going to be there a while,” general manager Jon Daniels told The Dallas Morning News' Evan Grant. “He’s not going to further hurt himself, we’ve been told. It’s not a surgery. The doctors say he’s not risking anything. Today, he felt like he took another step forward.”

Last year, Beltre spent part of a homerless April on the disabled list. From May 1 onward, he hit .331 with 19 homers, so the 36-year-old can rebound from his injury and sluggish .252/.286/.394 start.

Beltre's short-lived days as a regular 30-homer slugger are over, but he has hit at least .315 in each of the past three years. A healthy Beltre will repair an alarmingly low average and provide good power.

Even if he's not the second-round stalwart gamers signed up for, he's still an underrated star who someone else might pawn off for 75 cents on the dollar. 

Sell High: A.J. Burnett, SP, Pittsburgh Pirates

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There's little smoke and mirrors behind A.J. Burnett's masterful rebound for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Along with a 2.01 ERA, he sports a 2.64 FIP, career-low 2.47 BB/9 rate and 54.1 ground-ball percentage. Yet it's a little too good to believe for a notoriously inconsistent 38-year-old who nearly retired.

Coinciding with his improved control, Burnett has sacrificed velocity and strikeouts, punching out 86 batters through 98.1 innings. He has kept a stellar ERA despite a 1.21 WHIP, and an 81.8 left on-base percentage deserves some credit.

He has also surrendered only three homers this season, one year after gifting 20. Moving away from Citizens Bank Park helped, but his 4.5 home run-fly ball percentage is well below his career 11.0 clip. Even if he were to revert to a 9.1 percentage, which he netted in Pittsburgh two years ago, some more balls are bound to clear the fences.

This isn't to suggest Burnett is due for a downward spiral, but don't bank on such a low ERA through the final three months. Three of his recent starts have come against the New York Mets, Milwaukee Brewers and Philadelphia Phillies, three of baseball's worst offenses. Sooner or later, he's going to regress to the mean against more dangerous lineups.

Note: All advanced statistics courtesy of FanGraphs.