Roto-Rx

If your question was not answered this time, you can go directly to the source @ https://www.roto-rx.com/ where Dr. Roto will answer all your Fantasy Baseball and Football questions.

The Doctor is in...

Question #1: When I’m comparing Ben Zobrist to other players, what position do I compare him at to get a gauge for his relative worth? – East Hampton, NY

Hampton: Zobrist should be considered a 2B if you have to give him a position, considering he played the most there last year. Remember, his true value lies in his versatility.

Question #2: Now that the regular season is over, who are your MVP and CY award winners? Does Dr. Roto get an actual vote? – Jose, Ramapo, NJ

Jose: No, Dr. Roto does not get an actual vote...hopefully, he will soon. My MVP's are: Albert Pujols in the NL and Mark Teixeira in the AL. Cy Young will go to Zack Greinke in the AL and Chris Carpenter in the NL.

Question #3: Do you think that Hideki Matsui will have a full time gig in MLB next year of will he go back to Japan? – Roy, Bowling Green, MO

Roy: The only place you'll be seeing Matusi next year will be in Yankee Stadium (so long as they want him). If he is not a Yankee, he will go back to Japan.

Question #4: Did the post season problems of Joe Nathan this year affect your outlook for him for next year’s fantasy season? – Felix, Bethel, CT

Felix: Joe Nathan's struggles in the post-season have not deterred Dr. Roto from him at all. In fact, I would use it to my advantage. When his name comes up at your auction next year, you should clear your throat and say, "Nice job in the playoffs". This should drop his value 3-5 dollars in the room and you get a steal.

Question #5: Would you protect Michael Cuddyer for $12 next year? He qualifies at two spots in my league. – Salvatore, San Mateo, CA

Salvatore: I think I would. He had over 30 HR and looked sharp for most of the year. He is always undervalued to boot. Keep him.

The Doctor is out...

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Joe Nathan makes Armando Benitez look clutch!

Ok, the better team won. No one will dispute that. How can you not call a team that has 4X the payroll of the team it’s playing not the better team. But that’s not the point.

Yes, you can say that the Carlos Gomez base running mistake cost the Twins the game. Yes, you can say that the Joe Mauer fair ball that was called foul cost the Twins the game (How does that happen? It wasn’t even close and the umpire was 6 feet away slooking right at it!  Seriously, look at the picture below and see for yourself!)

You can come up with any number of reasons that the Twins lost the game but it all comes down to one thing. Joe Nathan. Joe Nathan costs the Twins the game. And the shame of it all is that Joe Nathan is a huge MLB star making lots of money (the kind that play for the Yankees).

It’s not like the Yankees beat up on a low payroll guy. The guy made $11,250,000.00 this year (yes you have the number of digits to the left of the decimal point correct), and that doesn’t count whatever he received for making the All-Star team or any other performance bonuses he may have.

Joe Nathan is the 2nd highest paid player on the Minnesota Twins and was the higest paid player in uniform last night! His salary is just about 20% of the entire teams payroll! The Twins have a payroll of 60 million. Michael Cuddyer makes 7.66 million, Joe Mauer makes 10.5 million, Justin Morneau makes 11.6 million, Joe Nathan makes 11.25 million and the rest of the team makes a combined approx. 20 million!

Let’s call it as it is, Joe Nathan makes Armando Benitez look clutch. SERIOUSLY! He puts up huge stats in the regular season. The guy is unhittable! Look at the stats, the guy matches or surpasses Mariano Rivera across the board!

Consider this, in the past 5 years Joe Nathan has an ERA well under 2.00 and a WHIP well less than 1.00!

But then there’s the post season. Did you see him hyperventilating out there on the mound? And he was eating his shirt! Don't believe me? Look at the picture! And that was before the HR to A-Rod!

Nathan has now pitched in 7 post season games. In these 7 post season games he’s pitched 7.1 innings, given up 10 Hits, 7 walks and 7 runs. He only gave up 16 runs this entire year! And that was over 70 games! And last year he only gave up 10 runs the entire year! He’s given up 7 runs in 7 games!

I know the best team won and I know it’s inevitable that they will win the series. But Nathan gets paid what he does on the Twins for one reason and one reason only; for games like that one.

What a shame for the other guys on the team playing their hearts out. He’s should give them all a portion of his salary. - Peter Costa

Pete is a serious Rotisserie participant playing the same league with the same guys for 18 years. Not only has Peter never finished in the money; he’s now finished last 14 times and no higher than 10th (in a league with 14 guys). Join us in following Peter’s trials, tribulations and frustrations, as he attempts to navigate his way out of the basement again in 2010.

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Have a Fantasy Football or Rotisserie baseball question? Want to know who to pick up, who to activate and who the hot prospects are? Ask Dr. Roto. Let Dr. Roto guide your team to a league championship.

A Delmon Young Sighting!

On September 18th we posted it here “For the Twinkies the 2009 MLB season starts tonight.” We spoke about the fact that without Justin Morneau that Michael Cuddyer would have to pick up the slack. He certainly has. Over the last 16 games starting with that crucial series against the Detroit Tigers, Cuddyer has hit .327 with 6 HR’s, 19RBI and 15 RS.

But how about the resurgence of Delmon Young? With the season on the line, “For all the marbles” in these last 16 games Young has hit .400 with 4 HR’s, 17 RBI and 12 RS.

As Lee Corso likes to say, “not so fast my friend” for all of you who have written off Young as a bust.
When you nominate Young for $1 in next year’s draft and someone bids $2 you will then hear silence…… When that happens, remember his late season surge and make certain to yell $3 because you’ll get him for that and what a steal that will prove to be. It certainly seems like Young is a veteran, bordering on journeyman, but Delmon just turned 24 years old last month. Delmon Young is finally living up to the hype forecasted for him what seems like so long ago. - Paul Leume

Paul Leume is a MLB columnist from Montreal, Canada. Paul, a one-time beat writer covering the Montreal Expos for the Montreal Gazette is a proud grandfather of 3 girls and now spends his time offering his thoughts and prospective on Major League Baseball on a variety of blogs and websites throughout Al Gore’s internet.

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Have a Fantasy Football or Rotisserie Baseball question? Want to know who to pick up, who to activate and who the hot prospects are? Ask Dr. Roto. Let Dr. Roto guide your team to a league championship!

For the Twinkies the 2009 MLB season starts tonight

Alright, this is it. For the Twinkies the 2009 MLB starts tonight. They have 16 games remaining left on their regular season schedule and 7 of them are against the division leading Detroit Tigers. The Twins are 4 games back so at a minimum, if they are going to catch the Tigers you have to figure that they have to go 5-2 against them putting them only one game behind.

The Tigers have led start to finish and if they do not win at this point, would be considered the "New York Mets of the American League."

Minnesota does have their destiny in their own hands because if they win at least 6 of the remaining 7 games against Detroit, they just have to have a better record than Detroit in the 9 remaining games each team has.

The Twins do have 9 other games to play on their schedule and have to play 6 games against Zack Greinke, Billy Butler and the Kansas City Royals.

You might think that getting to play the Royals is a good thing but the Royals are streaking to the finish going 8-2 in their last 10 games and the Twins are scheduled to face Greinke 2 out of those 6 games.

Trying to score against Greinke has become somewhat of a comedy as teams are trying just about anything to get a run against him attempting to sacrifice runners, bunt for hits, take pitches, even trying to intentionally get hit by pitches as the guy has pitched to a miniscule 2.14 ERA striking out 244 batters, more than a batter per inning (210 innings) and giving up only 44 walks and 180 hits all season pleasing fantasy owners with 1.06 WHIP.

The Twins remaining 3 games are against the White Sox who while not mathematically eliminated at 6 ½ back and having 6 games remaining against the Tigers themselves, would probably have to have to sweep the Tigers all 6 games and also jump over the Twins which would mean that the Tigers would have to lose practically all 12 of their 16 remaining games against the Twins and White Sox for the White Sox to have a shot.

The Twins will be without one of their studs in All-Star Justin Morneau the rest of the way as he is shut down for the season with a stress fracture in his lower back. Morneau was having another stellar season with 30 HR’s and 100 RBI and three weeks left to go in the season. Michael Cuddyer having a decent year himself with 26 HR’s and 78 RBI has moved in from the outfield will get the starts at 1st base the rest of the way.

The way I see it is that since Cuddyer has moved to 1st base, Delmon Young and Carlos Gomez are both going to be getting regular at bats down the stretch in the outfield along with Denard Span. Neither one has done bupkus all year, but they were both top prospects and have both the ability and chance to redeem themselves by getting hot and carrying this team to the playoffs. - Paul Leume

Paul Leume is a MLB columnist from Montreal, Canada. Paul, a one-time beat writer covering the Montreal Expos for the Montreal Gazette is a proud grandfather of 3 girls and now spends his time offering his thoughts and prospective on Major League Baseball on a variety of blogs and websites throughout Al Gore’s internet.

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Have a Fantasy Football or Rotisserie Baseball question? Want to know who to pick up, who to activate and who the hot prospects are? Ask Dr. Roto. Let Dr. Roto guide your team to a league championship!

Instant Replay in Baseball

I’m sure you’ve heard by now about Sunday’s a crazy game between the Twins and A’s. The Twins gave up a 10 run lead only to apparently come back themselves as Michael Cuddyer attempted to score the tying run from second base on a passed ball with two outs in the ninth. Cuddyer sprinted the whole way, but was called out at the plate. However, immediately afterwards, replays showed that he had quite clearly made it safely. Incensed, Cuddyer instantly started arguing with the umpire, shocked at the decision.

These things happen in baseball, umpires make wrong decisions, and in some cases it might be a very black-and-white win-or-lose situation at the end of a game. So, naturally, ESPN has decided that because of this call that ended a game, it’s time to start peddling the instant replay controversy. Even though no actual sports authority has broached the subject, every show is weighing in on the various opinions regarding the expansion of instant replay. According to Sports Nation, 46 percent of fans prefer the way things are going and 44% want to have instant replay expanded in baseball. I find that hard to believe, but we’ll go with it anyway.

The argument for instant replay is either:

1. The most important thing is to get it right, no matter the cost in time.

2. The game is slow anyway, and instead of spending so much time arguing, might as well just use replay.

So, even though this whole “controversy” was entirely made up by the leader in sports, I thought I’d add my two cents anyway. I am definitely against the expansion of replay in baseball. Firstly, most people suggest that the next step for replay will be fair/foul calls. To me, I just don’t see how this works. If a ball is ruled foul, but then overturned, what base do you award the base runner? What I like about baseball is that there are very few assumptions made, as opposed to football (which I might add is so amazingly inexact at some times that when it uses replay for the smallest of margins it almost seems silly) where there are often more.

More importantly however, I like that in baseball there are judgment calls, and those are made by people. Yes, I’m fine with the home run replay, because a ball has either left the yard, or it hasn’t. If any part of it hits the yellow line, it’s gone. There are specific rules. But determining whether someone is out or safe, or whether it was a ball or a strike, is a little more vague. It should be left up to the people who make these sorts of judgments for a living, umpires. All I know is that I don’t want to see any managers throwing red flags past the first base line so that we can hit the replay for baseball, there’s something just so pure about baseball, and I hope it remains that way. – Gregory Shapiro

Greg is an orthopedic surgeon that has a number of professional athletes including MLB players as patients. He’s an avid MLB fan and rotisserie player with some unique insight into the world of professional athletes.

MLB Uniforms

When I first started visiting the Around The Horn sites I was told that I could find or get to information on just about anything baseball related from right here on the Around The Horn. That was not an exaggeration.

As I was going through the beat writer coverage I came across a Minnesota reporter that wrote an article on who gets to pick the Twins uniform for the day. That's something different. Not an injury report, not a steroid scandal, not a controversial play review, just a simple interesting tidbit on who picks what MLB players where.

Anyone ever wonder who chooses the uniforms that MLB teams wear on game day? For the Yankees, Dodgers, Cardinals and Tigers (only ones I think?) they have just a 1 home and 1 away uniform, so the answer is no one. The ones you saw as kid or on highlights or pictures from before you were born are the same ones they are using now. They exhibits class and tradition.

At some point in the 80’s teams occasionally wore their batting practice jerseys as uniform tops (they used to wear one type of jersey in pre-game activities and another for the game). They still do that quite a bit in spring training games (it must be cooler).

Then we had expansion and the Arizona Diamondbacks with their endless combinations and permutations of uniform accessory changes, hats, socks, belts, undershirt (showing), long sleeve, short sleeve, pin-stripe, etc; and that started off a marketing frenzy among the majority of MLB teams. Look at the Mets 10 different combinations in the picture ……. After a while it gets silly.

Nowadays, most teams have a few different uniform versions when they take the field. It’s a marketing thing. Now even if you have your favorite player’s jersey, there are two or three other “authentic” ones that they can sell you as well.

So who chooses which one to wear on any given day? We’ll for the Minnesota Twins; apparently it’s the starting pitcher that day. As Michael Cuddyer put it, "The chances are that the starting pitcher is not going to play all nine innings, yet, he gets to pick what wear for all nine innings. It doesn't make sense to me."

I guess that’s a kind of corny tradition that the Twins have, but it’s cute and it’s their own. That said, I still like the traditional uniforms that exhibit class and tradition……….

Here’s the article I was referring to. “Fashion police: Who decides what Twins uniform to wear?”

The above article was submitted by Richard Swenson of Baltimore, MD.