Yo, Adrian! Don’t Sell High

JPops asks: I received an offer of Lyle Overbay and Chien-Ming Wang for Adrian Gonzalez in my 16-team MLB 5x5 roto league. I need pitching help. Should I make the deal? Shoeless Joe would not make this deal (and note that Shoeless Joe’s e-mail back to JPops was sent before Gonzalez’s three-run jack last night). And here’s why: First, in 2/1 or 3/2 trades, Shoeless Joe almost always tend to favor the side that includes the best player in the deal. Wang and Overbay are fine players, but Gonzaleeeezzz (if only Harry Carey was alive today to butcher his name) is the best fantasy player in the bunch. Secondly, remember, when making uneven deal that has your team getting back more players than you are giving up doesn’t mean that this deal is just Overbay and Wang for Gonzalez —it’s Overbay and Wang for Gonzalez and XX player, ie, the player you need to drop to accommodate the trade. More on this in a minute. As for Gonzalez, the former first overall draft pick in 2000, Gonzalez smacked 24 homers to go with a .304 average in his first full season last year. He’s already got 7 dongs and 23 RBIs (a club record in April for the Padres) in the short 2007 season. And while he plays at a deep position and a pitcher’s park, Shoeless Joe wouldn’t sell high for a middling starting pitcher and average starting first basemen. While Wang will get wins, Shoeless Joe doesn’t think he’ll repeat his sub-4.0 ERA and 1.31 WHIP from last season. And because his game is seriously devoid of K’s, that makes him a one category pitcher in Shoeless Joe’s opinion. While pitching depth may be hard to come by in a deep 16-team league, Shoeless Joe just wouldn’t sacrifice a young stud like Gonzalez for Wang. And it’s unclear who JPops would be dropping to accommodate Wang. Shoeless Joe a tough time believing that there’s a large difference between Wang and the guy currently on JPops roster or a guy who could be obtained off waivers. If it looks like your team needs wins, their might be a guy like Tim Wakefield or Livan Hernandez floating around your waiver wire. And don’t forget the young studs like Tim Lincecum, Homer Bailey, or Adam and Andrew Miller, who will probably be called up and be assets THIS fantasy season.

Resisting Sucker Trades

This is the time of year during which the first bad fantasy baseball trades are completed. Inordinately, a good portion of these trades are wildly uneven. A good deal of those responsible for these trades right now are managers prematurely pressing the panic button on quality players. Generally there are two reactions to uneven trades. The most common is for a number of managers to veto the proposed trade. Thereafter, for the rest of the season, it turns into "veto" revenge, where everyone vetos nearly any trade that comes through, thereby essentially making free agency the only way to improve a team. The next most common reaction is for leagues to take the philosophy that vetoes should be reserved only for cases of suspected collusion. This often results in a race to find someone willing to make a terrible trade - the only offers you see are obviously unacceptable to the informed. While Doc Gram prefers this to a veto-happy league, too often in these cases, the winner is determined not by who knows baseball the best, but who is most adept at taking advantage of the least informed managers in the league. Doc Gram calls it "Find the Sucker." Doc Gram acknowledges this is part of the game - being the better negotiator, tricking other managers regarding your intentions, and doing whatever is necessary within the rules to improve your team. But nothing is more frustrating in the first few weeks of the season than having carefully gathered what you think is a great team only to see your efforts put at risk by a competitor acquiring a slow-starting top 20 pick for someone chosen in the 14th round who happened to have a hot April. In these cases, the ignorance of the worst managers in your league - the Suckers - can be the biggest determining factor in who ultimately wins the league. There's no use bitching about it, really. Once one of these trades has occurred in your league, if you weren't smart enough to be the one responsible for the heist, all you can do is use it as motivation to win in spite of the stacked odds against you and the skewed competitive balance in your league. So Doc Gram will focus on prevention, like any good doctor would. Here are five signs you are being offered a Sucker trade. If you know the signs, you could be saving not only your team, but also maintaining the competitive balance of your entire league. 1. The trade involves sending fewer of your players away than the number you get back. Usually this is a "3 for 2" or "2 for 1" trade. While these sometimes can be perfectly fair, in most cases early in the season, the value received by the team getting more players isn't much higher than if that team traded an equal number of players and picked up the next best guy available in the free agent pool. So when evaluating these trades, look at the worst of the players you're being offered and ask yourself if there is someone equal or better in the free agent pool. Even if there isn't, you have to value the worst extra guy in the trade based on the difference between his value and the next best free agent player. Too often, Suckers just add up the stats on each side of the trade and come to the conclusion that they're getting more production than they're giving up. What they should be doing instead is also adding in the stats for the best free agent at the position to the "giving up" side of the equation, not to mention considering what you're losing out of the player you'll have to drop to accommodate the extra guy coming over. If you do this, giving up a star for two slightly above average players starts looking a lot less tempting. Overall, winning in fantasy baseball requires consolidating the most talent possible into each roster spot - it's not like fantasy football where bye-weeks and injuries make depth the more important asset for much of the year. So these type of trades nearly never make sense, in Doc's opinion. 2. The person making the offer keeps stressing this year's stats in his emails. This is probably a good sign that the guys that the manager is offering are currently overachieving and he's trying to sell high. Nearly every major league player will have two or three weeks this year during which he outperforms his peers. Weeks 1, 2 and 3 are no more important to the standings and no more predictive than are Weeks 4, 19 or 22. What's predictive is 3-5 year player track records (go into stats from the minors in the case of youngsters), player age, season-long opportunity, and health. 3. The person making the offer is telling you that you urgently need a stat category or you'll be out of it. As said earlier, we're barely 4 weeks in to the season. Nothing is urgent at this point unless you have major injuries or are coming off of a horrible draft. Your opinions on your players should not have changed yet. 4. The offer made to you has sat open for more than a few days. Smart managers don't leave well-balanced trade offers open too long because they know that you could hit accept at a moment's notice should there be an injury to one of the players that you'd ship over in the trade. If they're willing to leave an offer on the table indefinitely, and they're still making other moves in the league, it probably means they think they'd get the upper hand on the proposed trade by a longshot. 5. Your counteroffers are ignored. If you think you've been offered a trade that will help with some immediate needs but you're not sure you're getting fair value overall, go back with a very fair counteroffer. People looking for sucker trades often won't even respond half the time, and if they come back with something even more uneven, you know you're being tested. Don't fall for the "last chance/final offer" line either - you'll get another chance at the player 99% of the time someone says this.

A-hole, or Merely an Ingrate?

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/unfiltered/?p=335 Doc Gram is starting this post with a link to Christina Kahrl's recent column on Baseball Prospectus' "Unfiltered" blog. He encourages you to read it, especially if you buy the Prospectus each year. Just so you know, the editor listed first on the book cover thinks your love of fantasy baseball is at best, corroding the game. Doc Gram's not sure why Kahrl decided to stir the pot. He doesn't mean the one simmering with the tomato sauce she writes about preparing - he means the pot of steaming, horseshit-laden ungratefulness that she ladled upon the BP website. Like an Altria executive clucking her tongue at the cost to taxpayers resultant from caring for lung cancer patients, Kahrl proceeds in her post to snipe her colleague Will Carroll for caring about his fantasy team while whining about how there are no "points" in real baseball. Guess what? There's no REVENUE FOR YOU in "real" baseball, either. Unless Kahrl believes they're going to make the New York Times' bestsellers list selling 200-500 copies to the insular MLB execs who actually move the game and give a shit about what some lady cooking tomato sauce thinks. Maybe Kahrl figured that by admitting up front that it's not necessarily in her best interests to be posting what she did, she could escape this response from readers like Doc Gram. She also consults a thesaurus to come up with several euphemisms that have a similar effect to saying "no offense, but..." before you call someone an asshole. Or maybe she figured she should be controversial because bloggers wouldn't be able to resist the urge to object in posts like this one. But the fact remains that Kahrl's congealed arrogance did not allow her to resist the urge to hide her disgust for her own audience - and she plainly bit the hand that feeds her. So here's the back of that hand, Christina. No offense, but you're a pompous asshole - not because you think fantasy baseball might be bad for baseball fandom. But because you couldn't just shut up about it and eat the meal that fantasy baseball is putting on your table. Next time, do a crossword puzzle while you wait for your sauce.

Free Jonny Gomes

Several years ago, Baseball Prospectus started a grassroots effort to “Free Erubiel Durazo.” It’s hard to believe now, but in the late '90s, Durazo was a stud prospect for the Arizona Diamondbacks. Late to arrive to the U.S. from Mexico, Durazo absolutely destroyed minor league pitching as a 25-year old and was the prototypical Billy Beane type of player — high OBP guy with tons of power. But he also produced Ty Cobb-like batting averages his first year in the minors. Seriously, check out this dude's minor league stats. Ridonkulous. Arizona quickly promoted him and he didn’t disappoint. In 155 AB’s as a rook, he hit .329 with 11 dongs and an OPS of 1,016. Oh my. Durazo went into 2000 as the full-time starter at first base for the D’Backs and picked up right where he left off during his debut, peaking at .346 and a 1,090 OPS on May 7 of that year. But it was all downhill from there. Durazo went into a deep slump and the D’Backs eventually demoted him. From 2000-2002, Durazo would only average 197 ABs for the big club, while shuttling to and from the minors and spending his age 27 and 28 seasons playing backup to the aging and overrated Mark Grace. The guys at BP were obviously horrified by this. Guys with Durazo’s track record deserve more than one chance and the D’Backs never gave it to him. Sure, they were contenders in those days and even won a ring, but it wouldn’t have killed them to find out what kind of player Durazo really was. Durazo eventually got out of Arizona, shockingly signed with the Oakland A’s, and made a full-time DH for 2003 and 2004. He acquitted himself pretty nicely as born-again full timer, but he was never became the guy that BP hoped for. Durazo is now out of baseball after a last minute cut by Oakland this spring. Which brings me to Jonny Gomes of the Devil Rays. He’s got a very similar profile to Durazo, without the Honus Wagner averages in the minor leagues. He broke through with Tampa Bay in 2005, hitting 21 homers in 348 ABs. Last year, he started like gangbusters, hitting 11 homers in April, before a shoulder injury caused him to go into a horrid free-fall, before they finally ended his season with surgery in August. You would think that given his 2005 and early 2006, an organization like the Devil Rays would be more than happy to pencil Gomes back into their lineup for 2007. Think again. Gomes barely even made the major league roster this spring, with the Devil Rays going all in with their young pups – Elijah Dukes, Delmon Young, and BJ Upton. With Ty Wiggington apparently a fixture at first base, it looks like Gomes is in for a lost season barring a couple injuries or bad slumps by the young'ins. He’s 26 years old. His time is now. Either the Devil Rays should play him or trade him to a team that needs a power hitter —the Nationals perhaps? It wouldn’t surprise anyone if he was playing across the Bay by July. Somebody needs to give 500 ABs to Gomes and it needs to happen now before he gets Durazo’ed. Free Jonny Gomes!

Baseball HQ vs. PECOTA

Posting has been a bit fluffy lately, so here's one for the stat geeks. Before the season, Doc Gram did an analysis of the projections provided by the creators of two of the most popular annual baseball books for fantasy leaguers- Baseball Forecaster and Baseball Prospectus. The purpose was not only to get two perspectives on each player, but also to determine market opportunities, based on knowing which managers in his league rely on which sources more. In the graph here, the lines are actually made up of points, one for each player, along the x-axis. The red lines refer to projections made by the folks at BaseballHQ.com. The blue lines refer to the projections Baseball Prospectus provides based on PECOTA. To normalize the two projection sets for comparison, Doc Gram kept it to those players for whom both sources projected stats, and used a third source for estimating 2007 MLB ABs. Then, a secret formula was applied the same way to both sets of projections, to create a meta score that we'll call mgSCORE, which represents the y-axis. The yellow line is a simple average of the two projections for each player. The player all the way to the left is Albert Pujols, as he achieved the highest scores for both sources; the player all the way to the right is some scrub you don't give a shit about. Anyway. When you look at the graph, the places where the blue points and red points are furthest away from the yellow line essentially represent the largest disagreements between the two expert sources. The first big blip from the left is Derrek Lee, who Ron Shandler loves and the Prospectus people only like. Players like these warranted the most attention from Doc Gram during pre-draft preparations. A few more where BP and BHQ are pretty far apart include David Dellucci, Gary Sheffield, Hideki Matsui, and Bartholemew Bonds. Doc Gram will provide some more details on some of these types players over the course of the season, using 20-20 hindsight to rip on whoever's conveniently wrong as of that day. But for now, it's interesting to note one trend in the graph. PECOTA projections seem to be more conservative than Shandler for the top 250 players or so, and more aggressive for the rest. This would indicate that PECOTA is predicting that more overall production may come this year from players who go undrafted by the fantasy world. This seems realistic given the fact that the average major leaguer is now nearly 29 - older than the average has been in years. Maybe the folks at Baseball Prospectus are thinking that this is the year some of those younger guys will start to get their chances.

Snap, Crackle, Drop?

Doc Gram is growing very impatient with his favorite player named after a breakfast cereal. Coco Crisp seems to have lost his Pop. With another 0 for 5 last night, Coco looks absolutely soggy in milk. He was touted as a cheap source of 20/20 potential by a couple of the fantasy expert sources, with 15/15 a more likely bet. Not only has he failed to hit the weight of the average 6th grade girl, he's looked nearly clueless at bat and reached base at a pathetic .171 OBP. Waving helplessly at terrible pitches, sending juicy fastballs bouncing to short; it's not pretty. Boston fans are beginning to clamor for Willy Mo Pena. Unless Coco can put together a couple multi-hit games soon, he may be riding the pine and fantasy managers may be searching for other options. His doppelganger seems to be youngster Chris Young of the Diamondbacks, but he's also off to a slow start and has a minor groin strain. Alex Rios is probably held in most leagues, but may be underrated by his owner and acquirable on the cheap. Doc Gram thinks at least two of these three guys will accomplish his 15/15 mission this year. As for Crisp, hold on to him on your bench for at least few more days. Remember that we're barely two weeks in. And that Willy strikes out about twice Mo' often as Coco.

We Do It All For the Love Y'all

Just wanted to give a shout back out to three fantasy baseball bloggers that were generous enough to provide a link to the Moonlight Gram this week. We were lucky enough to be graced by the blessing of Roto Authority, likely the Web's most popular independent blog that exclusively focuses on fantasy baseball, as well as Fake Teams, which provides useful commentary on all areas of fantasy sports, and finally, MLB Fantasy Advice, which is a bit lesser-known but an extremely well-written blog that's great about sticking to providing immediately actionable information. With over 1000 visitors to the Moonlight Gram yesterday, Doc Gram and Shoeless Joe both felt great to see that a certain phrase rang true: "If you build it, they will come."

Confessions of a Fantasy Cooler

There Shoeless Joe was, happily minding his own business on a return trip on the Acela train last night. Without a high-speed Internet connection or TV (would it kill Amtrak to offer Wifi?), he was forced to follow the Dice-K/King Felix matchup via his cell phone's broke Web browser and periodic update phone calls from his league's commish. He finally arrived home just in time for Felix to take the mound in the 8th inning after mowing down the Red Sox lineup— upstaging Dice K's Fenway debut with a no-hitter through seven innings. Shoeless Joe was very excited to make it home to possibly witness history. You can guess what happens next. Literally 20 seconds after settling into the cozy confines of the couch, JD Drew had broken up the no-no with a sharp single into center field on Felix’s first pitch of the 8th inning. Good news is that Felix’s pitching line was still uber-studly for fantasy purposes — the win, a microscopic WHIP, zero earned runs, 6 K’s, and a partridge in a pear tree. But that no-no would have been historic for the just barely legal to drink King Felix. And yea, Shoeless Joe does feel partly responsible. Which got him thinking. How many other times had he played the part of the cooler for his fantasy players or sports teams? It seems that his players and teams do better when he follows them less. Perhaps Shoeless Joe should join the wife for America’s Next Top Model instead of stressing out over Todd Helton’s latest at-bat. And by the way, that Felix guy has some silly stuff. He’s a lot of fun to watch. Reminds you of another slightly portly pitcher by the name of Fernando who also took the league by storm at a very young age. Shoeless Joe grabbed Felix in the 8th round with the 93rd pick in a 12-team 5x5 league. Last year he was the 26th pick. Looks like this is the year he fulfills last year’s hype. Of course, if that last paragraph didn’t just jinx him.

Enrique Polazzo! Enrique Polazzo!

Actually, it's Placido Polanco, but it's fun to say his name like the crowd does after the queen is saved in The Naked Gun. Polanco has been pretty much a one-trick pony the last few years - he's a steady .300 hitter. The Baseball Forecaster's Ron Shandler described him in his first weekly ESPN.com chat as someone who provides only "empty production." But while that's been true for the past couple of years, Doc Gram is not sure that's necessarily true this year. He's been batting second in the Tigers' order, and if he can stay healthy, he may have more value than people are assigning him now. .300 hitters with 500 AB in the two slot nearly always get 90+ runs for the year. That's still only two categories, as Polanco has slugged above .450 only once in his career. But no one would flinch if you picked up say, Brandon Inge, who provides only two categories as well, because they are HR and RBI, seen for some reason as more scarce. Don't forget there aren't that many .300 hitters each year either. Polanco is not by any means going to tear up your league, and he shouldn't be used as a 3B or corner infielder in most formats, but he will provide you a good pickup option in deeper leagues if a second baseman or MI slot-filler goes down. If he stays healthy and in the two-slot in Detroit, he may give you more that that.

Join the Right Guard Protest

As a paid subscriber to MLB.TV Premium, Doc Gram is staging a protest aimed at Right Guard deodorant. It costs $19.95 per month to subscribe to MLB.TV Premium, which provides access to hundreds of MLB games over the Internet through a web browser. It's pretty damn cool to be able to watch the games online, but that's not what this is about.* This is about having to watch the SAME 15 second Right Guard commercial over and over and over and over again. Every time you click on a new game. For fantasy baseball managers, this can mean once every two minutes. And that's why Doc is mad at Right Guard. Hell, come up with ... I don't know... TWO commercials and run them alternately. It's the one you've seen on TV - where the couple is hiking and spots the serene scene of a deer grazing. The guy points it out, and suddenly the deer's eyes go red and he's foaming at the mouth, attacking. It was funny the first time. But not the second. And certainly not the 152nd. At this point, I'll take another round of that horrid Mellencamp Silverado commercial. Doc Gram has thrown out his stick of Right Guard in protest and plans to use in its place a mix of infield grass, persimmon and Wrigley Ivy extract. It may still stink and cause minor irritation, but at least he won't be paying for it. He encourages you to join the protest and invites suggestions on other ways to keep wetness and odor at bay. * if you don't mind paying $5 more than last year, just so you can finally be presented with video that is visible to the naked eye. Or the fact that a good portion of weekend games are blacked out when FOX has a national broadcast. Or the fact that MLB Mosaic has yet to live up to any of its promises of six games on a single screen, still sputtering pixels and malfunctions in its second season. Doc Gram still pays. Doc Gram is a sucker.

Wheelerin' And Dealerin'

Brad Lidge, one of the league's best closers until his mojo was apparently stolen by Albert Pujols in Game 5 of the 2005 NLCS (2.60 ERA in three seasons previous, 5.52 since), has lost his job again, with the Astros giving the nod to Dan Wheeler, who got his first Save of 2007 yesterday. Kudos to Doc Gram and others who drafted Wheeler for peanuts in anticipation of the final stages of Lidge's fall from grace. But more importantly, kudos to all those fantasy managers out there who didn't overpay for closers in a thin year. All three of you. Most people took the lack of depth in this year's closers to be a signal to buy based on scarcity. In two leagues that Doc Gram snake-drafted, the front-line closers were all gone by the 10th round, and nearly any closer with any value gone by round 16. This is just ridiculous. True, there are a handful of closers that always return value at the very top of the ranks, but in any given year, 20-33% of the closing roles change hands during the year - and this year it looks like it will be closer to 33%. If you accept that idea, does it really make sense to spend high draft choices/big auction $ on 2nd tier closers (guys who get Saves but not much else)? Think about it. Are the list of the #4-#10 closers EVER the same year to year? No, because it's just as much based on opportunity as ability. The Save is the only stat in which the manager decides who receives it. Nothing but ability prevents batters from attaining any of their stats (maybe less so for SB). Nothing but talent precludes a a pitcher from a good WHIP and ERA - and even throwaway middle relievers can get Wins. But only the preordained get Saves. And because the decision on who to crown Closer rests with the manager, there's going to be a lot more volatility. Managers more often try to put themselves in the best position to win that day and over the next week or two than they do to try to ascertain who will help them most over the course of a season or a few years. That's the GM's job. Batters are also more likely to be seen as long-term investments compared with pitchers who many people think either have "it" or don't. An organization will give a struggling young batter a full year to prove himself. A manager will give a closer a full week. The manager needs to win NOW, so he is necessarily impatient, and therefore more likely to make changes in those areas like closing role that are seen as his call. What this means is that second-tier closers (those who don't earn outstanding WHIP, ERA, K/9) are only as good as their last start, and a single decision away from losing their sole statistical value. They are therefore at a significantly higher risk to fall short of their projected potentials. So why invest your picks or auction cash so deeply in them? Don't say because of scarcity, because there will be around the same number of saves this year as there always are, even though it might be harder to find them in one neat package along with other desired skills. Scarcity is a good reason to pick a perennial lock on a good team like Mariano Rivera. It is not a good reason to pick Salomon Torres for $15. Instead, do what Doc Gram did, and spend more of your picks/money on batters or starters, and then late in the draft or via waivers, take the best set-up men out there in terms of skills like ERA, WHIP and K/9 - there are several whose underlying skills are better than the closers they set up. They'll still provide minor value in those skill categories while they await their big shot. Plus, it's only a matter of time until some manager gets impatient somewhere and hands the car to someone else - and those with the best pitching skills will ultimately get the keys. Dan Wheeler is revving Doc Gram's engine as we speak. Examples: Matt Capps, Jonathan Broxton, Justin Ducscherer, Mike Gonzales, Scott Linebrink

Dating Barry Bonds

Having Barry Bonds on your fantasy team is like casually dating a sexy but slutty woman. No matter how much you enjoy the sex, you know it's not heading toward a Happily-Ever-After. But you do know what you're dealing with when you consort with a woman like this. So, from the beginning, you temper your expectations for the relationship. You know what you're going to get out of Bonds. Swap out the cheap sex for cheap HRs. You know you're not going to have a long term relationship - he's flawed and he could be gone any day - carrying with him his own baggage - injuries, failed drug tests, even federal grand juries. Slutty girls usually don't have that many friends, at least not many lookers, and neither does Barry, at least in terms of fellow sluggers in his lineup. Barry may spend most of his year walking, as the lack of friends means no one's driving him around. And even though a towering shot to center when you can get it might take you to some nice places, like the girl you'd only casually date, you can't really count on Bonds paying off on a day-to-day basis. He'll take the day off if he has to stay up late playing ball the night before an afternoon game. He'll act like a bitch in front of your friends. Sometimes he'll flake out completely, and miss a week on what sounds like a weak excuse, like a back strain or the flu. And finally, like the slutty girl, you can't really brag about having Bonds on your roster. To those who don't know baseball but read the papers, they assume that EVERYONE wants Barry on their squads. To those who know baseball, but not fantasy baseball, they think you lovingly embrace the steroid era. And to those who know fantasy baseball, they assume that you haven't been paying attention since 2002. But there's nothing wrong with getting that thing you need for as long as you can. So make hay while the sun shines. Enjoy your dirty Bonds love and hope you can make it to 30 dates (HR). But don't be surprised when his body or his past or his attitude make dropping him the best thing you could do for yourself.

Pitcher to Watch: Zach Greinke

Lost in Dice-K mania yesterday was the performance of Zach Greinke in yesterday's Red Sox/Royals matchup. Greinke scattered 8 hits over 7 strong innings, struck out 7 (including Big Papi 3x) to one walk, and gave up 1 earned run. We all know Greinke missed virtually all of last season dealing with anxiety disorder problems, and the Royals deserve props for giving Greinke time and privacy to figure things out. What you may have forgotten is that Greinke is still only 23 years old, and it wasn't too long ago that he was being called a young Greg Maddux. In 2004 as a rookie, Greinke posted 8 wins, 100 K's, and an ERA of under 4.0 in 24 starts as a 20 year old. He digressed severely as a sophomore in 2005, adding almost two full runs to his ERA. He was out of baseball for the first half of 2006, but pitched most of the second half in the minors before a late cup of coffee in September. Greinke had a great spring, and based on yesterday's performance, he should already be on your radar in mixed leagues. His porous team will suppress his win totals, but he could be a great bargain to snatch off the waiver wire and stick at the back of your rotation. 12 wins/135 K's/4.00 ERA/WHIP under 1.25 certainly looks feasible.

Three Sleeper Catchers

If you're in a single catcher roto league, and you don't have a top 5 catcher, it's pretty much anyone's guess as to who among the rest will finish in the top 12 for the year. The recent injury to Baltimore receiver Ramon Hernandez both supports that point and makes the question more relevant for those looking for a replacement. Here are three options that may not yet be tapped in your league. 1. Gerald Laird, TEX UPSIDE: 500AB, .280, 20HR, 65RBI, 85R LIKELY: 450 AB, .270, 15HR, 50RBI, 75R 2. Chris Iannetta, COL UPSIDE: 500AB, .295, 15HR, 65RBI, 80R LIKELY: 420AB, .285, 12HR, 50RBI, 55R 3. Josh Bard, SD UPSIDE: 450AB, .295, 15 HR, 65RBI, 55R LIKELY: 400AB, .290, 12HR, 55RBI, 45R

Dice-10K

Daisuke Matsuzaka lived up to the hype in his first start for the Boston Red Sox, fanning ten and allowing six hits in a 4-1 victory over the Royals. Questions still swirl around him on whether the Japanese leagues' practice of pitching every seventh day means his arm will fall off in the Majors by July. Most people are putting the over/under around 15 wins and 180 Ks for 2007. But the Sawks couldn't have asked for a better debut, and if he does the same at Fenway next week, you'll have to start thinking that the $103 million pricetag will seem like grand larceny by October. Doc Gram guesses his value will end up being similar to Oswalt or Halladay once all is said and done, but would rather have one of the Roys for now.

Exploit Your League's Addictions

Every league has its own addictions. It starts with a few managers with an affinity for a certain stat category and proceeds from there, with the other managers feeling the need to add strength in that category to properly compete. During the draft, HRs, SBs, and Saves are usually the drugs of choice, because they're generally considered the scarcest categories. But does your league go overboard with one of these, more than the other? Are people drafting closers in the eighth round that play for teams that will be lucky to finish with 50 wins? Chad Cordero, anybody? Are managers taking guys who will hit .240 so they can get the chance for 30 HRs? Sammy Sosa, anybody? These are buying opportunities for you. Don't get high on the secondhand crack smoke - draft a closer before you "lose out." During the eighth round when guys like Cordero are going, take another batter in a scarce position, say, a middle infielder, like Edgar Renteria. Draft a David DeJesus or Placido Polanco with that last "throwaway" pick instead of Sosa . .300 hitters aren't exactly a dime a dozen either, yet are often ignored, and they can come with Rs - even RBIs, if they land the right spots in their batting orders. After the draft, people are always looking to vulture new closers and speed sources, but they still tend to ignore guys who don't do anything big in the HR/RBI/SB/W/S categories. So let R/AVG/K/WHIP/ERA be your domain, and take advantage of the crackheads in your league.

Two Reasons Why Johan is Not a First Rounder

We all agree that Johan is likely the best pitcher in the American League by a large margin. But is he worth taking in the first round? Doc Gram says no. Two main reasons: 1. Pitchers are risky Your first round draft choice MUST pay off. It should be a player with low relative risk - and all pitchers carry too much risk compared with batters. First, pitchers get injured more than batters. Second, they don't play everyday - which means when they go on the 15-day DL, they can miss 2-3 starts. Batters are generally going to get 5-10 planned days off the year just to stay fresh, and thus can make up missed time by playing during those previously scheduled days off. Pitchers can never get those missed starts back. 2. Elite batters are categorically more valuable When you choose Johan in the first round, you're likely foregoing your only shot at 5-category players - guys like Carl Crawford, Alex Rodriguez, Alfonso Soriano, etc. Johan, or any other pitcher, can only bring you value in four categories at a time, and one of those - Wins - is really not in his control.