Rotowire Houston-Smith – Fantasy Baseball Insiders League- ESPN

Rotowire Houston-Smith – Free Fantasy Baseball – ESPN.

Getting down to the autumnal home stretch in the Fantasy Sports Writers Association’s Fantasy Baseball Industry Insiders League.  My club is currently sitting in 2nd place in the Scott White League.  It’s going to be a classic close finish.

My goal remains the same.  Win the league or at least finish in the Top 4 (the top 4 of each FSWA league make the big board at the end of the season).   Realistically, it looks like I will not be able to catch ESPN’s Pierre Becquey, who built a

real statistical juggernaut, so I’m trying to nail down one of the other coveted Top 4 spots.

The end of the season is no time to play it safe so I took a risk recently and traded for Alex Rodriguez for my end of the season run.  A-Rod came at a steep price.  I knew about the calf injury of course (so I anticipated on a little DL time) but still went hard after him regardless.  The team that had him was low in the standings and badly needed help at Catcher and First-base so I packaged All-Star Adrian Gonzalez and catcher Matt Wieters for Rodriguez.

I have led the league all year in OBP and Runs but started to struggle in RBI and SLG once two-fourths of my core; Chase Utley and Kevin Youkillis went down. (Lucky for me I still had Josh Hamilton and Adrian Gonzalez healthy).   I made a few wire pickups Casey McGehee, Jim Thome, Pat Burrell, David Murphy and Chris Denorfia to address these areas of weakness but I was still lacking another major offensive catalyst. So that’s when I targeted Alex Rodriguez.

Which leads me to this bit of fantasy advice; you can’t win at fantasy sports if your not willing to make significant adjustments and take risks.  No one drafts the perfect team and a timely trade along with a few waiver wire pickups can make all the difference in the end.