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Please see our player page for Junior Caminero 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.

Emerging from your mother’s basement after six months, “I did it! I won my fantasy baseball league!” It begins to dawn on you that the world no longer looks as you remember it. Where there were once blossoming trees, there’s now decaying branches. Where flowers once sprouted, shriveled vines remained. A tumbleweed blows past. Minutes later, back in your mother’s basement, you’ve painted a face on the tumbleweed and you say to it, “Can you believe I won my league by two points?” After a brief pause, you say, “Do you think I should keep Christian Encarnacion-Strand in an 11-team keeper league with no restrictions? Mr. Tumbleweed, I’m asking you a question.” On a serious note, as many of you know, I started Razzball during the WGA strike of 2007-08, because I was laid off from a job and didn’t have shizz to do. (Since it is invariably asked, I was working with a Zucker brother of Airplane/Naked Gun fame.) This summer with the WGA strike happening again, I was reminded how lucky I am to have this gig, talking about fantasy baseball and just generally goofing off with all of you. Thank you for another great year! (Crazy that those trees were decaying and I still got some freakin’ sap!) Anyway, here’s what else I saw this weekend in fantasy baseball:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

I was surprised to see the Rays promote top prospect 3B Junior Caminero. Could be they’ve got a loophole through which they can add him to the playoff roster. Could be they plan to have him break camp with the club next season and want him to get acclimated for a week or so and then feel like a big leaguer all winter long. That’s the takeaway that matters most to our game. After the news of Wander’s lust(s) echoed across the internet, people speculated the fallout could speed up Caminero’s timeline. I didn’t think so because Tampa’s always loaded with functional major league options across the infield, but today I think that’s more or less what happened. Not that we’re likely to ever find out. 

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Junior Caminero is being called up by the Rays. Junior Caminero is also a little tiny car that Spanish boys drive when they’re five years old and first starting growing out their mustaches. The Junior Caminero goes vroom vroom but it only does it when a nearby father makes the noise. Junior Caminero also is a top five prospect for all of baseball what on earth are the Rays doing calling him up right now on…*starts singing* Do you remembah? The 21st of Septembah? Do you remembah? It’s not the 1st of Septembah? Do you remembah? Rays? Hello? We’re seriously asking. So, here’s what Itch’s said, “He’ll finish up 2023 at 20 years old with 31 home runs across two levels, 20 of those coming in 80 Double-A games during which he slashed .314/.379/.557 with a 17.1 percent strikeout rate. And Grey will be hunted this winter.” What? He ranked Caminero 6th overall in the top 25 prospects. I’d grab him in all leagues, and now I’m particularly excited about 2024, if Junior Caminero can break camp. Vroom vroom! Anyway, here’s what else I saw yesterday in fantasy baseball:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Baseball TwitterX was peppered with Prospect Crush lineups last week, and while I’m not sure I could articulate the definition of “crush” in this context, I thought the idea was interesting enough to build an article around as we near the tail end of the minor league season. I mean I almost dropped my own squad into Elon Musk’s private hype site before I realized I was pouring a lot of time into generating content for everyone’s favorite space invader. 

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Dynasty baseball is always complicated. The winners tend to allocate their roster spots most effectively, and this time of year especially, each spot is gold. With short-season leagues underway in Florida and Arizona, new names are popping into the newsfeed all the time. These two remaining short-season “leagues” have inherited the levels left behind by the recent minor league purge, so one could argue they matter more than they ever have. On the other hand, the pitching and defense is perhaps too haphazard to help us sort the hitters. Same goes double for the Dominican Summer Leagues. Also, it’s only been a week, and everyone is telling everyone else to hold their horses while filling their own FAAB runs with DSL hitters like Atlanta OF Luis Guanipa and Guardians SS Welbyn Francisca. And that’s where we’ll close this post: circling some names making waves in the dynasty-verse. 

Let’s take it from the top first though. Big news of the night has to be Giants OF Luis Matos, who homered in his first at bat and got pulled from the game after his second. He’s hitting .398 with seven home runs and six steals in 24 games at Triple-A Sacramento. This might be a drill but does not feel like a drill. San Francisco is 35-and-32: good enough to make the playoffs if they started today. Hard to make a strong case against promoting Matos. I added him in two leagues yesterday: a ten-teamer and a twelve. Both redraft leagues. Chasing that lightning.

Please, blog, may I have some more?

The guidelines that built this team are pretty fluid, but in a general sense, a player must have significantly enhanced his dynasty profile to qualify. 

Catcher

Orioles C Samuel Basallo has slowed down some since a steamy start but is still slashing .299/.340/.489 with four home runs and two steals as an 18-year-old in Low-A. He looks solid behind the plate, too, especially for a 6’3” teenager. 

Honorable Mentions: Dodgers C Thayron Liranzo. One way to identify a player like this is the ratio of relevance to league-size is changing in a hurry on the fly. Though I’ve added him elsewhere, I’ve mostly ignored Liranzo in my 15-teamer with 20 milb spots per team. This week, I saw his name in some tweets. On May 21, he hit his 10th and 11th home runs on the season. He’s slashing .310/.444/.690 in the month of May with 14 walks and 18 strikeouts in 16 games. Still just a catching prospect in Low-A, but he’ll be off the board in most leagues before long. 

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Royals SS Maikel Garcia leads off for us today and could eventually claim the same role in Kansas City. He’ll probably start at the bottom if he starts at all, of course, but he’s an ideal fit at the top given his high-contact, solid-OBP profile. The team’s build lacks anyone else who fits the table-setting profile. He wasn’t clicking in Triple-A like he was this winter or spring, but I’ve long thought he’s the kind of player who answers whenever opportunity knocks. 

Please, blog, may I have some more?

The devil is in the details. Since dropping the hellish adjective, the Tampa Bay Rays have etched their way into the baseball zeitgeist by being better than anyone else at squeezing every last drop of value out of every single roster spot throughout the entire organization. They’ve made their fair share of mistakes skating at the edges of 40-man roster management, particularly off-loading Nate Lowe and Joe Ryan for little return, but it’s a difficult balance to strike, and I’d rather a team remain aggressive than disappear into their own silo. Tampa initiates a lot of transactions, and most of them work out to their benefit. 

On the other hand, they’ve been so good throughout the system that you could make a case for the club to stop trading for a season or two just to see how it looks for them to field a whole team of their own prospects. It’s not an option, of course. When you’re developing as many prospects as this team, you stand to lose them in 40-man waves every winter, so you reshuffle the deck, moving some ready-now players running out of minor league time for some far-away prototypes who’ll comprise another roster-crunch wave a few years down the road. 

Please, blog, may I have some more?