Every year, we all think about, or even make, New Year’s Resolutions.  Sometimes they are goals.  Sometimes they are hopes.  Sometimes they are pipedreams. The one thing New Year’s Resolutions do is help to refocus energy lost as we found our way through the holiday season.  My New Year’s Resolutions are plentiful.  The one that matters most here is twofold.  One is to produce weekly, if not daily content for this site, for the entire year.  It may seem easy, and I am in no way complaining, but life can get in the way from time to time.   The second is to fully prepare for my fantasy baseball drafts this year.

In the past, I must admit that I’ve been a lazy drafter.  I don’t do the best preperation and typically don’t do my tiers until late February.  Not this time around. I will start working on my tiers this week and will star posting what I have thus far as soon as it’s available.

Every year, there is the water cooler discussion of who the best pitcher in baseball is that year.  While there are some pitchers who jump up from year to year, the likes of Wandy Rodriguez and Ubaldo Jiminez come to mind, the list tends to pretty static over the course of time.  You can always throw Roy Halladay out there, Felix Hernandez, Tim Lincecum, and maybe even CC Sabathia as a top five candidate.  One pitcher I always throw out there is Josh Johnson.   Johnson is a beast when he is on the mound.  He has a plus curve ball and slider with a mid 90′s fastball.  There is a lot to like.  He has shown some great poise as well for a youngster.  Continue Reading »

Courtesy of Scout.com

If only things were so easy for the big club.  The Omaha Storm Chasers rolled to a 7-0 win over the Iowa Cubs in a Pacific Coast League game last night.  Why is this important to your fantasy team?  Because some pretty big name prospects were a part of the action.  Danny Duffy picked up his first win of the year, improving to 1-0 in four starts.  On the season, he has a .90 ERA and has struck out 24 in 2o innings pitched.  The southpaw has shown over his minor league career a good to great K/9 ratio.  With the Royals constantly looking for starting pitching, his time may not be too far off. Continue Reading »

In a not so regular feature, a quick look at some highly touted prospects and those without the hype tearing up the minor leagues. Continue Reading »

Carl Crawford was brought into Boston to be a catalyst at the top of their lineup.  Along with Jacoby Ellsbury, he was supposed to set the table for Dustin Pedroia, Kevin Youkilis, and Adrian Gonzalez and add a little pop of his own.  Over the past three year’s Crawford had averaged 14 homeruns, 72 RBI, 44 stolen bases, and 92 runs scored.  Some 2011 projections had him scoring over 110 runs and stealing 50 bases.  As everyone knows, Crawford has been downright awful this year.  He has just 14 hits in 82 at-bats.  He has struck out 14 times and has already been thrown out twice attempting to steal.  It is hard to quantify what is going on with Crawford.  You hear from baseball analysts all the time that it takes a special kind of player to suit up in Boston or New York.  Is the pressure just too much for the outfielder?  Is the number of zeroes in his salary adding to the pressure?  Continue Reading »

So are the days of our lives.  When you draft someone and everyone in the room asks who? Then you drop him… and someone else picks him up the week you try to get him back. Do yourself a favor, pick up Jerry Sands.  He is starting in left field tonight for the Dodgers.  Eric Mack talked about him in his Sports Illustrated prospects watch this week.  I had drafted him in my 16 team mixed league but couldn’t hold onto him because of DL issues.  I dropped him to pick up a starting pitcher and now am really regretting it.  Sands has the potential to straight out mash and now the Dodgers outfield is stacked.

And a note on drafting and dropping.  I highly advise against it.  I had to make some moves because teams didn’t put players on the DL until just before games started and I figured I could drop Sands and get him back before he blew up in the minors.  Well… that didn’t happen.  If you draft someone late and are convinced he’ll be in the show eventually and produce, hold tight and don’t look like me, a fool!

We continue our journey through the majors and discuss the fifth starters in the National League Central.  There are some interesting stops in this division with injuries in Cincinnati and Milwaukee as well as some rotations in flux on what project to be some awful teams in Houston and Pittsburgh.  As always, we are working within the projected fifth starter at the time of this post.  We will mention injuries and spot starts where that information is available.

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In one of the strangest things I’ve seen in the MLB in a long time, Manny Ramirez announced his retirement today.  Rumors are that he had heard from the drug program and was facing a 100 game suspension.  Ramirez leaves an 0-6 Tampa Bay Rays in the lurch with no real replacement for his bat.  Matt Joyce and Desmond Jennings would seem like the first in line for possible playing time.  Will the Rays move up Jennings time frame though or wait to see how this plays out with their current roster?

Manny Ramirez has a secret. SHHH!!! No one knows what it is, but it got him a day off from school this week and it most assuredly is partly to blame for his .050 start. Keep a close eye here. Manny was dazzling this spring, but we all know how fast sweet turns to sour with this apple. Be afraid, but don’t jump ship yet.

Speaking of jumping ship, Chase Utley owners should be throwing out the lifeboats as we speak. He is “not close to jogging yet” according to GM Ruben Amaro Jr. If he can’t even jog what does that tell you about his chances of playing this season. Utley will have surgery eventually and as I professed in the last podcast he should have been a non factor in your draft. If you are stuck with him you need to have a long term plan for 2B the rest of the season ASAP! Continue Reading »

As the season continues its first couple of weeks, we continue our look at the fifth starters around the league and wonder if any of them are even worth your time.  Roster sizes are fixed and those bench spots can become prime sleeper parking spots early on in the year.  Getting in on a fifth starter who is primed for a big year can help you out leaps and bounds as the year goes on.  Again, for the sake of our argument we are going off of CBS Sports depth charts.  Some listed as fifth starters may not get a start in the first couple of weeks while others may be the fourth pitcher to throw.

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