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Grey’s in transit to Texas Wine Country for a friend’s wedding so Drunk Uncle Rudy’s has control of the ol’ roundup post. Yup, Texas has a wine country. If you guessed the wine is mediocre and they only sell it in magnum bottles because everything’s bigger in Texas, you’re half-right (you can buy it in barrels too). But mediocre wine ain’t so bad. My mother-in-law brought us Arkansas wine the other day that she and her husband picked up on a recent roadtrip. Oofa! I had a sip and thought, “Are they trying to make this taste like Manischewitz?” Did they run out of grapes and substitute with purple gobstoppers? I bet when Arkansas winery sales reps stop by Wal*Mart HQ, the wine buyer has to euphemize, “We appreciate you make wine in our state but we don’t think it meets the standards of our indiscriminate clientele.”

Since there is no big news today, I thought I’d revel in the awesomeness of Arquimedes Caminero – the Marlins middle reliever who pitched 2 scoreless innings last night in a mop-up role. It isn’t his talent or potential that is awesome – it’s the name. The first name adds some Greeky Latin to the Italiany Latin Giancarlo and Placido and explains the spiraling fortunes of the Marlins. The last name sounds like a Chevy car designed especially for Staten Island with a Camaro front and an El Camino pickup truck back. Haul trash to the local landfill by day – charm the guidettes by night. The Caminero! (BTW, Chevrolet’s social media agency, if you’re reading this, totally recommend the Caminero to GM and stop with that Chevy Silverado ‘Strong’ commercial on Pandora. “Everybody knows he ain’t just tough…he’s strong.” More like everyone knows that song doesn’t just suck….it blows!

Anyway, here are some Grey bragging about his RCL team-free notes from a short schedule Thursday…

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It was about a half year ago that Grey threw all his chips into the pot on Marco Estrada. Man-crushed him onto just about every team we co-manage (along with the deviated septumet) as well as his Razzball Commenter League team. Well, this looked like a lost season for ol’ Marco when he went on the Disgraceful List in early June while sporting a 5.32/1.36 in 69 IP. Combined with Ryan Braun’s suspension and the inevitable 2nd half regressions for Gomez/Segura, Milwaukee has been as relevant to fantasy baseball fans as the city is for travelers intolerant of lactose, cheap domestic beer, and drag queens masquerading as a young Penny Marshall. Under this shroud of yawnonymity, Marco Estrada’s season is beginning to rise from the ashes like Bud Selig’s toupee at that fateful windy hometown barbecue that’s now annually celebrated as Furrywurst Day. Estrada went 7 IP in a tough matchup (@CIN) and gave up 3 baserunners (1 H, 2 BB) and K’d 9 Reds. That’s his 3rd solid start in his last 4 and that includes an @TEX + home vs. STL. He’s definitely worth a pickup for the homestretch if only to see if he can pitch well enough to convince Grey to double down on Estrada in 2014.

In other news…

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Albert Pujols and his owners are not not not gonna have a good time the rest of 2013 thanks to a partially torn plantar fascia ligament in his foot. It must be hard to stamp out fasciasm when it affects one’s foot – especially when the leader of the movement is so menacing. Pujols has clearly been a shadow of his former self but he still has been the 6th most valuable 1B (not counting guys with other position eligibility) according to our Season-to-Date Player Rater. For those of you without a built-in replacement at 1B like the Angels (Mark Trumbo), I recommmend just playing matchups via the Hitter-tron and hope you luck into a few hot streaks. Or, if you’ve got surplus at a position, trade for a dependable 1B to save yourself the joy of deciding between the Yonder Alonsos on the waiver wire.

Anyway, here are some other notes from the weekend. (And a shout-out to Grey ‘Iron Man’ Albright who is taking a night off with the Cougar’s family whom, I assume, live in a pink house somewhere in Indiana)…

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Happy All Star Break!

I’ve crawled out of my lamely above-ground bunker in Austin (my house, similar to the Alamo, has no basement) to note some enhancements we’ve made over the All-Star break.

Our partners at Steamer Projections have incorporated 1H 2013 minor league hitting and pitching stats into the Rest of Season projections. This improves the results (generally for the better) for rookies such as Yasiel Puig (now projected as a $25 player). This improvement also helps the Stream-o-Nator and Hitter-tron projections since these ROS projections serve as their foundation.

As I’ve opined before, our focus this year was developing tools and player pages that will help you make quicker, smarter fantasy baseball decisions. With Stream-o-Nator and Hitter-tron, we feel we provide great gameday resources for those of you who play in daily formats. To complement these projections, we have now added links to the following resources on those pages (under Gameday Resources in the top menu):

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One challenge to streaming hitters vs. streaming pitchers – or playing daily fantasy games – is that teams do not publish ‘Probable Hitters’ a few days in advance. The closest thing is Jim Leyland who publishes the positions a couple days in advance and then fills in the name the day of the game (Miguel Cabrera is getting an off day, Don Kelly you’re hitting 3rd).

So you might find the perfect hitter to stream only to find out on game day that he isn’t in the lineup (aka the dreaded ‘!’ in ESPN or ‘x’ in Yahoo. )

BTW, isn’t it odd that the site with the exclamation point in its name uses an ‘x’ and the site that promotes the X-Games uses an exclamation point? And what’s the deal with…..nope, I got nothing else here.

There is a related challenge with weekly leagues – particularly deeper leagues – when you have to choose between hitters on your team and need to account for their projected playing time in the coming week.

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Fantasy baseball rest of season rankings are the herbal tea to the double espressos that are Hittertron and Stream-o-Nator.  Most of the post-draft fantasy baseball decisions we make – particularly in non-FAAB leagues – are of the short-term variety.  Looking for the hot schmotato to fill in while your 3rd baseman is injured.  Finding a waiver wire […]

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We like baseball. We might even love baseball. But we love fantasy baseball more.

If you read this site at all, this should not be news to you. We do not pretend to be a general baseball site. We do not pretend to write like general baseball writers or general baseball fans. Our focus and point of view has been irrevocably bastardized through the tainted prism of fantasy baseball fanaticism (and the fact that we are smart asses).

Much like you, the vast majority of our baseball-related surfing is focused on day-to-day management of our fantasy baseball teams. Over the years, I shutter to think how much time that Grey and I pored through player news, game logs, player stats, etc. trying to find information that could help our teams.

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Adeiny Hechavarria had a heckavagamia against the Phillies on Sunday with a 3-run triple and a grand slam – both against Halladay. These types of games will be few and far between with this guy’s bat – he’s a glove first SS (though that’s what they said about Brandon Crawford and he’s flashing early power) – but tell that to the old Jews in Miami that think of God when they hear his name. I just wish Adeiny didn’t take off for the Sabbath as I had him Friday night in the DraftKings “Can you take down Rudy Gamble?” challenge. I had my worst finish – 15th out of 23 – so I guess the answer to the challenge was “Yes.” We are doing it every Friday so pay attention to Twitter and the comment boards on Friday for the contest link. Anyway, here are some other observations from this weekend’s games:

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This morning’s rant is for all the owners who took it up the ace on Sunday. It’s one thing when your ace is pitching @TEX or @COL but home against Cleveland where David Price gave up 8 ER and 13 baserunners in 5 IP? Ouch. Home against an Ortiz-less Boston offense (RA Dickey – 4.2 IP, 7 ER, 12 baserunners – the first 5 runs coming before an out was recorded)? Damn. Home against the Kansas City Royals (Cole Hamels – 5.2 IP, 8 ER 13 baserunners)? Oof! Home against a Holliday-less Cardinal team at one of the pitching-friendliest parks in baseball (Matt Cain – 3.2IP, 9 ER, 9 baserunners)? C’mon, that’s just cruel! For those of you in H2H leagues, consider yourselves lucky. At least these starts are expunged from the record. As for Roto players who own these guys, not much you could do now except turn down the perfunctory ‘buy low’ trade offers. Price, Hamels and Cain all have great track records so you have to assume these games were anomalies. Dickey….who the hell knows? Knuckleballs are like snowflakes – I don’t really understand either of them. Why wouldn’t snow fall in balls or, at the very least, in a uniform shape? (Rhetorical – please don’t explain this phenomenon). On to the other events of the weekend….

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 1, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Bleacher Report has acquired Razzball.com, one of the fastest growing independent fantasy sports blogs, as announced today by Dave Nemetz, Founder and VP of Strategy. Razzball and its fantasy baseball, football, basketball, and hockey offerings will now operate as part of Bleacher Report’s new ‘Fantasy Sports’ channel.

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