Fantasy Baseball: The relevance of the Toronto Blue Jays

     While the football season has come to an end, another one is just starting: Fantasy Baseball. Fantasy baseball provides an alternative to fans of the game who can't watch the entire game but still want to enjoy it. It satisfies those who live and breath fantasy sports. For those who have played fantasy sports, they know about the importance of value and upside. Drafting a player too early can kill a player's season. I would like to minimize this risk by discussing the relevance of the Toronto Blue Jay's starting pitching staff in fantasy baseball.
     Toronto's starting rotation (for now) consists of pitchers R.A. Dickey, Mark Buehrle, Brandon Morrow, J.A. Happ, and Esmil Rogers. Many may ask, what is so important about these players and who they play for? Well, for one, these pitchers provide an interesting situation in fantasy baseball. Happ and Morrow are coming off of injuries, while Dickey and Buehrle are coming off of less than spectacular seasons, but respectable ones none the less. The perplexity in their value is interesting.
     Having one or more of these pitchers will not bring your team to automatic victory. They will probably not even go in the first couple of rounds of your draft. What these pitchers do bring to a team is value at their projected draft positions. In a league where pitchers score points based on wins, strikeouts, and innings, Dickey and Buehrle can help. They have consistently pitched without injury and produced decent statistics. Happ and Morrow have major upside when it comes to production, especially since many project them to be taken off the board towards the end of the draft, if at all. This is where the best fantasy players succeed: grabbing players late in the draft that have potential to produce.
     However, production does involve the talent around them. In a league consisting of the Yankees, Red Sox and Rays, where all three teams project to win 85+ games this year, one out of five teams is bound to have a losing record. This team could be the Toronto Blue Jays and unfortunately, this can reflect in their pitching staff.
     These pitchers take on the burden of playing great teams. The starting staff might not be up to the task either. Unfortunately, this staff has a good chance of producing losing records and high earned run averages, potentially hurting your fantasy team if you picked up one or more of these players. It is a slippery slope when welcoming a Blue Jay pitcher to your team. Nobody really knows what will happen during the year either. Picking up one of the Blue Jay's starting pitchers can help your team immensely due to their ability to produce consistently. But because of their competition, this might not happen. My advice? Stay away for now. I would rather feel angry for not picking one of their pitchers and having them succeed than picking up one and it being a flop.