Listen, I’m no clairvoyant. Actually, I don’t even believe in them. Look into a ball, read a card, trace a palm and tell the future? GTFO. Well, unless you’re Professor Trelawney and your medium of choice for prophesy is tea leaves. Anyone? Anyone? Did I just nerd out alone?!? Thanks for judging me at this very moment. I could have said meteorologist instead of clairvoyant above, I suppose.

While I joke about it, one of the most important elements to competing in fantasy baseball, especially in long-term leagues, is knowing how to look at the minor league spectrum and predict the future of prospects that can help you in the immediate. It’s not necessarily telling the future, but there’s a way to extract some wisdom from the process. Now, let me go all teacher on you as to why the word wisdom was just used: Wisdom is looking to the past to know what’s going to happen in the future before it happens.

Applied to fantasy baseball, experience and wisdom can give you a leg up on the competition if you know what to look for. The elements of a call-up? A team that believes they should be in competition, a struggling hitter at the major league level, and a red hot hitter that can maysh (redneck pronunciation intended). Oh, it also doesn’t hurt to have FanGraphs highlight said player. I’ve yet to do this, and am surely shooting myself in the foot by doing so, but it’s time to make this week’s Creeper of the Week someone who has yet to take a major league at bat. Read those tea leaves and get out ahead of the crowd, because he won’t be available in many leagues once he’s called up. And I predict that will be soon.

• A.J. Reed, 1B (7.8%) – Let’s examine what’s happening in Houston. They’ve started the season 11-20 after making the playoffs last season (although that has more to do with their dreadful pitching). Tyler White and Luis Valbuena aren’t hitting. At all. They just sent Evan Gattis back to AA to work behind the plate, freeing up DH at bats. Aaaand A.J. Reed is sitting in AAA with 6 HR in 25 games. Yes, his AVG is currently .234, but that’s with an unlucky .246 BABIP (it was .383 last year). Reed profiles as a big-time hitter with loads of pure power. He hit 34 HR in 2015 in A+ and AA ball, with an AVG north of .340. Will he do that in the majors? Most likely not. But he will hit. He’s the Astros top prospect, and a better option at 1B than Tyler White. In my opinion, the Astros will promote Reed within the next two weeks, send White down to work on his mechanics, and within another month bring White back up to take over 3B from Valbuena. Similar sentiments could be said about Trae Turner in Washington with dead-weight Danny Espinosa, but I see Reed having more immediate value this season than Turner. Either way, they’re creeping on the majors, and now’s the time to target them…

Enough creepin’…Here are your Top 100 Hitters for Week 6!

The Top 100 Hitters

Dropped from Rankings: Colby Rasmus (92), Melvin Upton Jr. (94), Curtis Granderson (99)

• Not too much turnover at the bottom, but a lot of shakeup through the middle and near the top. Six weeks in we have a good gauge of what hitters will do, and who is hot. If players are still cooler than a polar bears toenails at this point, something’s probably wrong with their swing. Guys like Jason Heyward, Carlos Gomez, Prince Fielder, Adam Jones, and Yasiel Puig all took a rough and tumble this week. They won’t drop out of the Top 100, but they’re quite undesirable in your lineups at this point. I almost dropped Jones in one of my RCL’s this past week, but thought better. The track record is too strong to drop quite yet, but something’s clearly unhealthy or off mechanically.
• Some big risers this week include Daniel Murphy and Chris Carter, who enters the rankings for the first time at 64. I know in the comments last week I was still hesitant with Carter, but I think we’ve seen enough to believe that he can maintain this pace, while approaching 40 HR on the season. Not bad for largely undrafted, right? As for Murphy, he’s basically turned himself into Buster Posey at the plate. It’s time to buy.
• Some prospects are looming in the minors, such as the highlighted Reed to start the article. Ralph Lifshitz does a great job highlighting the prospects each week, and you should definitely click that little hyperlink to the left, to the left, but some names of note to watch out for besides Reed: Trea Turner, WAS (2B); Orlando Arcia, MIL (SS); Andrew Benintendi, BOS (OF).

Good luck in Week 6! Check back next weekend for the new names in Week 7!