If we’re being completely honest, the best rookie in the American League this season has been Brett Lawrie, followed closely by Desmond Jennings and Dustin Ackley. The Rookie of the Year race should be between these three future franchise cornerstones, but it seems grossly unlikely that voters will give the nod to players who played partial seasons only, even if their sabermetric stats like Wins Above Replacement (WAR) may dictate they were, in fact, the most valuable (and outstanding) AL rookies.
This is, of course, a shame, and an indictment on current CBA rules that more or less force budget-conscious teams to keep their top prospects in the minors to start the year, thus avoiding “Super Two” early-arbitration eligibility. By keeping Lawrie, Jennings, Ackley, and others in the minors until June, July, or later, teams can push their service time clocks far enough back to control the player for an additional year later on. While you can agree or disagree with this from a team management standpoint (after all, the Jays will likely lock up Lawrie to a long-term deal buying out his arbitration years anyway, and ditto for the other two), you can’t help but find the error from a moral standpoint - this is a system that hurts players, teams, and owners by keeping major league caliber talent off of rosters for a suboptimal amount of time. But I digress…
My point is that with these three (we’ll call them your MVRs or MORs for Most Valuable/Most Outstanding Rookies) will not be given the Rookie of the Year nod unless voters have a serious change in their standard views of the award. That makes the actual Rookie of the Year race relatively wide-open, and with that in mind I turn your attention to the candidacy of another Toronto Blue Jay, rookie catcher J.P. Arencibia.
More after the jump!
For the first time, I’m going to try and post a weekly picks column on Friday or Saturday of each week. The lines will generally come from Bet365, my online sports book of choice, and will be pulled the day I write the column (I will make note if I jumped on an exceptionally juicy line earlier in the week and saw it move). For Week 1 in a post-lockout year, we’re all pretty clueless, but a decent track record the past two seasons and a plethora of pre-bet reading has me fairly confident in my first set of published picks. Take a look after the jump to see my picks against the spread (“ATS”) for each game, a brief explanation of my logic, and any other bets (over/under, money line, teasers, etc) I found to be particularly enticing this week.
There are dozens of different draft strategies a fantasy player could choose to employ on draft day. This is obvious - the old fashioned Triple-RB strategy, the QB-TE “elite options” strategy, a PPR-focused WR-RB-WR strategy, and many, many more. I’ve touched on some end-game WR and RB strategies in the past week, but today I wanted to look at the roster strategy that varies in the most significant way - Quarterbacks.
8-team, 10-team, 12-team, tiny league, gigantic league, I’m of the opinion at least 24 Running Backs should be owned in all leagues. I’ve never been in a league where less than two RBs are started, and most allow two plus a flex play. Add in bench options (at least one of which you’ll be keeping for bye week fill-ins, handcuffs, etc), and many more than 24 should be owned, but the top-24 must be owned. That’s three RBs per squad in an 8-team, two in a 12-team, and so on. Beyond those 24, I’d highly recommend stocking your bench with RBs over Quarterbacks or Tight Ends, and maybe even Wide Receivers depending on your scoring and roster format.
