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Friday, March 29, 2024

Well, at least so far. While American League fantasy players were in FAAB wars for Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel two weeks ago and Huston Street either last or next weekend (depending on which stat service your league uses), there just haven’t been comparable players for National League owners to add to their teams.

And that won’t change much this coming weekend following the Chase Headley trade because Yangervis Solarte, while a great story in April for the Yankees, doesn’t rate to help the Padres as much. Yes, if they let him play third base right away, he might have some appeal in deeper NL-only leagues, but it is more likely that he will have the same limited appeal as Jordany Valdespin did this week after he was called up by the Marlins.

Valdespin was an interesting case for many leagues this week. While he will be playing second base for the Marlins, he was primarily an outfielder for the Mets last year and thus only qualifies there this year for leagues with 20+ games played eligibility rules. Thus Monday, I had to field a question from an NL Tout player about his eligibility, which would normally give a player called up from the Minors only the eligibility for the position played the most times in the Minors this year, but goes by games played last year if the player was in the big leagues for more than five games.

However, old school leagues that still play “book rules” (as defined by the original Rotisserie League Baseball written by Peter Golenbock in 1984) get to switch a player after just his first game played and thus have Valdespin at 2B/OF if they added him in FAAB this weekend.

By the way, there is a distinction that younger rotisserie players need to be aware of because while FAAB is used by most fantasy leagues to award free agents each week, including LABR and Tout as illustrated in our weekly reports in Mastersblog, the old school leagues have weekly “call ups” to fill holes and don’t use FAAB until there are players traded from the other league. Then, after the All-Star break, open FAAB allows bidding on both crossover players and players called up in that league, which is followed by free callups if there are players left who didn’t get bids.

If your AL league was allowed to bid on Street last weekend, you know what he went for – and you aren’t using CBS where his bids weren’t processed but pushed to the following week just as Samardzija and Hammel were previously. Apparently, one day to get a player’s new team listed doesn’t also register with their FAAB mechanism. If you haven’t bid on Street yet, you noted that in our LABR AL report, he went for $57 while in Tout AL, the winning bid was $36 reduced by Vickrey from the $74 bid he got.

It will be interesting to see if there are believers in a Headley turnaround in pinstripes or whether there are teams that desperate at 3B/CI to bid more than he will likely be worth.

But those NL players will likely still be waiting.

Well, unless Solarte plays every day for the Padres this week…and is as hot as he was in April. {jcomments on}