Its been feast or famine for Jack Cust since joining the A's earlier in the month. After being the hottest and trendiest fantasy name in the game, Cust has fallen back to earth and has gone hitless in the last 5 games and has been dropped in the A's batting order from clean-up to 7th. There's a reason why he's been bouncing around triple-A for the last 6 years, right? After going on his torrid homerun streak, he now only has 1 HR in his last 30 AB. And, he's not only not hitting, he's not hitting the ball into play, averaging a K for every 3.0 plate appearances. During his 0-for-17 stretch in these last 5 games, Cust has struck out 6 times. If you get separation anxiety, you can bench him for now, but trying to time his ups and downs throughout the fantasy season may be too frustrating to manage.
Did you know that Joe Borowski leads the AL in saves with 17? I guarantee if I took a poll of the readers, less than 10% would have guessed that he is the saves leader (I know I would've gotten it wrong - my guess would be K-Rod, but he is one off the lead with 16). Anyway, Borowski has been anything but "great"this season with a 6.75 ERA, 1.45 WHIP and a .275 BAA. But, with that said, he only has one blown save and 10 of his 15 ER have come in two games (6 ER against the Yankees in April and 4 ER against the A's a couple of weeks ago). He's better than some of his numbers indicate, but there will definitely be some bumps in the road down the stretch.
Fausto Carmona gave fantasy owners another quality start to earn his 6th win of the season. He now has 8 quality starts in a row which has helped establish a 2.89 ERA and 1.24 WHIP. Let's not underestimate Carmona's ability to quiet the Tigers on Sunday night. Detroit entered the game leading the league in runs scored, but Carmona limited them to just 3 ER in 7.0 IP. Of course, the impressive line for Indians' pitcher was his GB/FB of 17/4 in last night's game and a season-rate of 2.8.
5 games, 5 HR. Nick Swisher's power has shown up in a BIG way over the past week. He raises his OPS to .959 with this power surge and he's hovering at .299 in batting average. We had Swisher projected to hit 37 HR at a rate of one every 15.3 AB. With these 5 dingers, he is now back on pace with a 17.1 HR/AB rate and should continue to produce like we expected.
Does it get any hotter than Kevin Youkilis is right now? He extended his hitting streak to 19 on Sunday with two more hits and has a .440 average during that time span. So now, you have a fantasy players with three-position eligibility (1B, 3B, OF) who is hitting .353 with 6 HR, 27 RBI, 37 runs, and an FPI of 0.84. An interesting split for Youkilis is his ability to hit righties. Typically, a righty hitter like Youk would tend to have better numbers against the opposite handedness. But his average against righties is .371 with an OPS of .997 compared to his lefty split of .295 and .858. Another interesting point is his batting eye is 0.91. To be considered "the Greek God of walks"in Moneyball, you would think his eye would be greater than 1.0. I think he'll earn more walks down the stretch and should continue to swing a bat.
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