Making the Right Moves

Bourne (16 steals, 4th in MLB)
Downs ( 7 saves, solid control of closer job)
Street (8 saves)
Sherill (10 saves)
Hanrahan (5 saves, regained closer role)
Bailey (2 saves, appears to have the job)
Jimenez($1 keeper, 53Ks in 59 innings, 6 quality starts)
Young ($1 keeper, 8 quality starts in 62.2 innings)
Porcello ($1 keeper, 5 QS and 6 wins in 51.2 innings)

Winning in fantasy baseball is all about picking up the right players at the right time. Drafting well certainly helps and means you have to make less moves, but you still need to fill out your roster with hot players if you want to win. This yearI have had more of a "win in September" mentality in general and have been more focused on making moves that could have stronger value in the playoffs.

I have been VERY aggressive seeking out prospective closers, to the point of dropping and adding Street, Sherrill, and Bailey more than once as their jobs have been up in the air. This comes as part of the draft strategy of getting several mediocre closers instead of investing way too much for the top closers. I end up being very competitive in saves and relief pitchers don't hurt your ratios quite as much if you carry a big starting staff to smooth out the innings. Not to mention sometimes the "mediocre" closers turn into elite or very solid ones. Soria comes to mind, and Bailey could be elite this year potentially.

Adding Ubaldo, Porcello, and Young looks to be very strong at the moment as they are all potential keepers and are pitching well right now. Picking up players that are keepable, need to have been drafted, is pretty important if some of them work out in this keeper league. At some point I might be able to trade them for extra value if a team needs keepers. This format also discourages steaming a bit as in a normal league I might be tempted to drop one of these guys if they have a bad start and there is a decent option available, but being a keeper league if I drop one of them someone might snatch them up and stash them. The league kind of forces patience, which obviously some owners didn't have as I ended up with these three solid starters that are also keepers. The only drops I regret are the closers that I ended up picking back up later, so thus far no regrets. I am kind of upset that Baker has turned out so well at catcher, but Wieters should outperform him the rest of the way.

Bourn is the type of player I hate but is needed on my team. I don't have quite enough steals with Roberts(10), Hanley(8), Pujols(7!), Jones (4), and Holliday (3) to be very competitive week to week, so having Bourn as a bench option when steals are close is pretty valuable. He is hitting a LOT better than last year getting on base nearly 80 points better and he had 41 steals last year. He could easily hit 50-60 with a .350 on base and score a lot of runs. He is essentially Jose Reyes-lite, and actually has better numbers across the board than Reyes at this point(granted Reyes has 11 games fewer played due to injury). My situation would be better if Ortiz was hitting so that Bourn wasn't an automatic start as I auto-bench Papi. In general I prefer my speedsters to do better across more categories, like Hanley, Roberts and I guess Pujols! Not many people have 16 home runs and 7 steals at this point...and a .460 on base. Pujols is a god!!!!