Fantasy Baseball: Places to be careful down the stretch

After the trade deadline of July 31, your fantasy team is going to begin to take a different shape. Many of the players you’ve relied on to carry you to this point will begin to lose effectiveness down the home stretch. This doesn’t apply to all, but players in these categories are ones to be careful with. You don’t need to cut them, but you shouldn’t go forward into the season’s final two months without good backup plans in place.

Veteran stars on bad teams: Poster Child – Troy Tulowitzki

The Rockies aren’t worried about Troy Tulowitzki finding his stroke again. What the Rockies should be worried about is bringing Tulo back only to have him suffer some injury that takes several months to heal from. Let’s face it, 2012 is lost for the Rockies, so the last thing they want to do is damage their chances in 2013 before the 2012 season ends. 

Admittedly, Tulo is a bit of an extreme example, as he’s been out for a good amount of the year with an injury. Still, imagine being a bad team this time of the year. If you’re bad enough, chances are that you know you’ll be bad in 2013 as well. So, it only makes sense that when the rosters expand, you’ll give the young kids more of a chance to play. In that case, if a team has a young kid come in and do a good job, they have some reason to move the older (and probably expensive) veteran player to a team with a short window to win. 

I am not saying that every veteran player on a bad team is going to lose playing time, but if you have a guy over the age of about 25 and his team is more than about five games out of a playoff spot, I would at least start scouting some backup options. If the player in question is like Tulo and has dealt with injuries for a lot of the year, I would look more aggressively. The last thing you want is to be relying on a player who’s going to see the bench a lot when you’re trying to win a fantasy championship.

Young, highly touted pitchers: Poster Child – Stephen Strasburg

Let me put it this way, if the Nationals are serious about putting Stephen Strasburg on a pitch count, this logic applies to others as well (see Matt Moore). Young pitchers tend to be babied quite a bit. They are held to tight pitch counts and innings counts, and we’re reaching the time of the year where that’s going to show up. In the case of the Nationals, we’re talking about a legit World Series contender that’s still talking about shutting down their ace pitcher.

If a pitcher is on a tight count, his win total will decrease, as will strikeouts and any other counted statistic. In a head-to-head league, I would even worry about their ERA and WHIP, as anything bad those pitchers do will be extrapolated against fewer innings, and their good contributions won’t mean as much.

Realize that teams spend a lot of money on these players with hopes that they’ll be dominant arms for the better part of a decade. They are going to have a hard time doing anything that puts future years at risk, even if it hurts a real chance at a World Series, which the Nats have.

Veteran pitchers in career seasons: Poster Child – Chris Capuano

As of right now, Chris Capuano is owned in 100 percent of ESPN leagues. If you’re one of the owners of him or a pitcher like him, be careful. Only twice has he had a sub 4.00 ERA season, and only one of those came in a year where he qualified for the ERA title (more than 162 innings pitched). Even at that, those seasons were 3.99 and 3.95, respectively. Now, he’s got a pretty sub 3.00 ERA. With a 25-year-old, you can just say that he’s hitting his stride. But when we’re talking about a 34-year-old, we’re looking at a guy having a career year, and I wouldn’t look for that to keep going.

The combination of hotter weather and tired arms will make the last two months of the season quite a bit rougher than the first four. Yes, this does apply to all pitchers, but guys like Justin Verlander and Matt Cain have done more than enough through their careers to make me believe that they’ll keep it going through the end. Capuano and others like him, not so much. These are veteran players with fairly average careers up until this point and there’s a reason for it.

If you’re wondering about R.A. Dickey, he has enough of a past for me to believe that he’ll be strong down the stretch. No, I don’t think August and September will be as kind to him as April-July have been, but he’ll still be a guy to bank on.