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Please see our player page for AJ Smith-Shawver to see projections for today, the next 7 days and rest of season as well as stats and gamelogs designed with the fantasy baseball player in mind.

1. LHP Cam Caminiti | 18 | A | 2028 

At 6’2” 195 lbs with 98 mile-an-hour heat from an athletic delivery, Caminiti declared a year early for the draft and landed at 24th overall. As a two-way player, he patrolled center field and was good enough there that a decision had to be made about his role. He’s shown three solid pitches (curve, slider, change) along with the fastball, making him an alarming and unique matchup for hitters at the lower levels. Atlanta didn’t even bother breaking him in during complex league play, sending him instead to Low-A late in the season. He threw just three innings there, allowing one run on three hits with four strikeouts and zero walks.

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Rangers RHP Kumar Rocker is all set to make his debut Thursday against the Mariners. Arms don’t always come back from reconstructive elbow surgeries, but Rocker has returned looking like the best version of what we dreamed he could be, wiping hitters away with superb command of an 80-grade slider that mixes well with his fastball and changeup. It’s a tip-of-the-iceberg type feeling at the moment as it stands to reason that there’s more in the tank for Rocker both this year and in the near future considering he’s just 26.2 innings into this healthy phase of career. In two Triple-A starts, he struck out 51.4 percent of the hitters he faced, walking 2.9 percent. That’s pretty good over any sample size.  

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Welcome to the cookout, step right up! Grab a plate! You’re gonna love these hamburguesas! I call ’em hamburguesas because that’s how you get USA into burgers! Let me just check the grill temp so the hamburguesas don’t get charred on the outside and raw on the inside. I hate those hamburguesas! Whoa, the grill temp is 900 degrees?! Damn, I used these new Burn-Super-Hot Coles, and now it appears Coles is cooked!

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Happy Monday, Razzball faithful! For this week’s installment of Top 100 Starting Pitchers, I decided to give us all a peek into the darkness that is “The Next 100”. The shadowy realm of the next 100 starting pitchers isn’t nearly as deep of an abyss as the one that houses the pitchers that follow these […]

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Please clap for Busch’s slash line of .323/.431/.618 with 27 home runs across 98 Triple-A games in 2023. Now that he’s out of Los Angeles and being all but handed the first base gig in Chicago, he can finally stop faking second base and fully flower as a hitter. Or so goes the thinking that led the Cubs to acquire him, anyway. 

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Howdy, Razzpeeps! It’s Saturday, and you know what that means? It is time for Razzball Ambulance Chasers, your fantasy baseball injury analysis. Every Thursday or Friday, I email Matt Truss to help me make sure I don’t do things like spell “roles” as “rolls”. Except one time that really did happen and neither Truss nor […]

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installment of the 2024 Dynasty Rankings, with players No. 300 to 201 being unveiled.

When it comes to putting your dynasty team together, you want to build and then maintain a squad that can contend for years. The formula to do this, however, varies from person to person.

For me, when evaluating players for dynasty leagues, the formula for success is a dash of gut instinct mixed in with past experience and a whole lot of what the eye sees. You know a good player when you see him. But a good 34-year-old player is not the same as a good 24-year-old player. Thus, for my dynasty teams I try to follow these simple guidelines:

Youth over Age
You will need veteran players, but you don’t want a whole team of veteran players. If there is a “tie” between a young player and the player four or five years older, I’ll take the younger player.

Hitters over Pitchers
As a whole, young hitters perform better than young pitchers, and veteran hitters are more consistent than veteran pitchers. Basically, I trust my gut when it comes to hitters versus pitchers. Unless a starting pitcher is superior to a solid hitter in the round I am drafting, I will wait on the starting pitcher and go with the hitter.

Starting Pitchers over Relievers
This is pretty easy to understand why. As a group, relievers are so up-and-down it is maddening. Without fail, there will be five or six closers you can pick up in the middle of the season. DO NOT DRAFT A CLOSER EARLY. I will fill out 90 percent of my starting staff before I add my closers/relievers. In my rankings, you won’t see a reliever ranked in the top 150.

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Format = Position Player | Age on 4/1/2024 | Highest Level Played | Estimated Time of Arrival 

1. RHP Hurston Waldrep | 22 | AAA | 2024

With the name of a 19th century oil barren and the arsenal of a high-end big league pitcher, Hurston Waldrep represented a nice windfall for Atlanta with the 24th overall pick in this summer’s draft. His delivery borders on relievery, but a double-plus fastball/split-change combo helped him carve his way to Triple-A in half a minor league season. Atlanta has been rushing its young arms for a while as they try to supplement their world-beating offense, so Waldrep should be on the shortlist for an early promotion. Might even have a shot to make the team in spring training. He signed for a few hundred thousand under his draft slot value, and you know this team loves that.

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