Fantasy Football Pickups And Drops Week Four 2011

Another week in the books means it's time for new pickups for your fantasy team.  While the studs on your team are important (so important that I have a whole weekly column talking about them) it's also very important to optimize your bench every week, and keep yourself in good shape in the case of an injury to a starter.  That's the purpose of this column, to give you the information on the best guys to add to give your fantasy team the depth of a championship team.  Be sure to check out the prior columns in this series, as some guys aren't covered here that might still be available in your league.

This week we have a few speculative plays due to starting running back issues, and a few receivers that could also step up going forward....

Fantasy Football Pickups And Drops Week Three 2011

Doing things in a bit of a different order this week, this fantasy pickup column is coming before my week two game reviews because last weeks page views showed this column was most popular.  Have to give the people what they want, and what you all want seems to be my amazing fantasy advice.

Last week in this column, the recommendations included Ryan Fitzpatrick, Ben Tate, and Devery Henderson, who all turned in strong games in week two and are now owned in too many leagues to be recommended in this column.  Hopefully we can hit on a few solid names again this week to keep your rosters in tip top shape moving forwards.

As always, the cut off for available players for the purposes of this column is the 50% owned mark.  While other guys around 70 or 80% owned might be better options, they should be owned in all active leagues already, so I offer only players below the 50% mark...

Fantasy Baseball Spot Starter Pickups For Saturday 5/14/11

Friday's Recommended Starter One's Stats - Fausto Carmona - 7.2 Innings Pitched - 2 Strikeouts - No Decision - 4.69 ERA - 1.04 WHIP
Friday's Recommended Starter Two's Stats - Philip Humber 6.0 Innings Pitched - 1 Strikeout - Win - 4.50 ERA - 1.00 WHIP
Week 5 Starters' Stats - 35 Innings Pitched - 20 Strikeouts - 5.14 K/9 - 2 Wins in 6 Starts - 5.40 ERA - 1.54 WHIP
Cumulative Starters' Stats - 323.1 Innings Pitched - 247 Strikeouts - 6.88 K/9 - 19 Wins in 52 Starts - 3.90 ERA - 1.22 WHIP
Starters' Stats Spreadsheet Viewable Online Here

First a quick note for those looking... The regular pickup column is just going to run Monday to Friday.  The Spot Starter column would be on the same schedule, but they are actually most important for those players chasing stats on the weekends.  Also, Blogger going down messed up the 5/12/11 entries' posting and their tagging so I've deleted them.  The spot starter information is available on the spreadsheet and the pickup column said to drop Jorge Posada and had Chris Iannetta as a pickup

It was a decent double start day today. Carmona didn't help your ERA, but you can see by his WHIP that he didn't pitch poorly. He just gave up a pair of bad home runs. Humber delivered six innings of no run ball, but then was left in to start the seventh inning and taking credit for three earned runs and taking four extra hits to spoil a .33 WHIP. For those in the deep leagues, Gee gave you the strikeouts and should have had one earned over five innings, but they also got greedy and left him in to start the sixth inning. A pair of better starters coming up here for Saturday to help those chasing in head to head leagues...