Fantasy Baseball By The Numbers: Week Eight

I’m a very active manager. I routinely rank first or second in waiver moves in my leagues and am constantly in the trade market. I put a lot of importance (as should you) on always trying to improve my teams in whatever way possible. But with the waiver season being just about over and many trades accepted and rejected, I found myself staring at my roster with no idea what to do. I had put together a good every day line up with a mix of established stars and young emerging talent. I had traded away my offensive bench talent to put together a solid top to bottom rotation. I had played the saves wire.

It brings me to the important fantasy element of the day: the waiting game. There are those managers out there who will trade just to make a trade or will pick up the latest name to hit two home runs in a game. These are the managers in standard 12-team leagues who are holding onto Mike Stanton for when he gets called up to the Marlins. Don’t be one of these people. At this point in the season you should have a very good idea of who you like for the long term and who you think will fade out, and you should be taking appropriate actions with those players. Do you know how you want your roster to look? Do you know your team’s strengths and weaknesses?

We will cover these things more in depth at a later date, but make sure you know and are doing things to answer these questions, and most importantly, if you already have the answers to these questions, congratulations, enjoy it. Just keep tabs to make sure everything is going smoothly, because in fantasy, especially fantasy baseball, those questions can become unanswered overnight.

Number of right-handed pitchers in the Cubs’ bullpen after Carlos Zambrano returns to the rotation, meaning the team will have to replace him with a right-hander. Some will go look at the Cubs’ roster and see three, but in this case Carlos Marmol doesn’t count because he only pitches the 9^th; this is about situational pitching. And many will be shocked to hear that the odd man out will probably be Randy Wells.

I love Wells, but looking at the staff it is unfortunately the only move. With Big Z’s arrival, the rotation will have 2 lefties and 4 righties, including Carlos Silva, Wells, and Ryan Dempster. At first glance the instinctual choice is Silva, but how do you demote a guy who is 6 – 0 with a 3/1 K:BB ratio? You move on to Dempster, who despite a bad season in ’09, hasn’t pitched less than six innings in a start all season and is too valuable as a one-two punch with Ted Lilly to be moved back to the bullpen (and besides, we know why ’09 was tough for Dempster). Pray no one else has figured this out and try to deal Wells for whatever you can get.

Number of home runs so far for Albert Pujols in the month of May, including a RBI drought going on nine games. It’s worth knowing not because you should go out and low ball your local resident Pujols owner (in fact, definitely don’t do that, I promise you won’t trade with that person for a while), but because of the novelty of it. He’s never had less than two home runs in a month. Never. He’s also batting only .256 on the month, however it’s important to note he hasn’t struck out in his last eight games, so he’s still getting contact. Don’t even think about moving him.

Conversely, number of home runs for David Ortiz this month. He’s also batting .361 and drove in 19 runs during that time. You should definitely go pick him up if he got dropped by an owner fed up with the 34-year-old’s erratic play the last couple seasons. I’ve never owned him in a league but I’m getting tired of all this Boston drama. If he works out great, but there are plenty of options at 1^st base (perhaps there’s a Kendry Morales owner who still doesn’t believe?), so I’m going to let Terry Francona deal with it.

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