Player of the Fortnight

As a professional scout told me years ago, to check which players are playing at the top of their game, all one needs to look at are stats from the past two weeks.

While Major League Baseball announces winners of Player of the Week and Player of the Month for each league, here's our take of who have been the best players over the past 14 days.

20 under 20%

Faithful readers will know this is the fourth time we've looked at ballplayers with favorable prospects and are under-owned in most fantasy leagues. The first time we did this, in April 2010, we unearthed Jose Bautista and Gio Gonzalez. Last April, we singled out a few solid starting pitchers like Ivan Nova, Derek Holland, and Alexi Ogando. In August, we suggested picking up Brandon McCarthy, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Lucas Duda, and a guy who's killing it this year: Chris Capuano.

Forget about the guys who we missed on; let's accentuate the positives, as we look towards the rest of 2012...

As was the case over a year ago, together, we set sail, in search of rare finds that may help any fantasy baseball squad.

Trade Targets for Contenders

The new playoff format gives more teams hopes of making the postseason, which decreases the number of sellers at the trading deadline. If there is a silver lining for truly terrible teams, like the Cubs and Twins, it's that the laws of supply and demand are in their favor now more than in years past.

The supply of available trade targets goes down a lot, demand increases a bit, and voilà - this year's sellers will fetch more when trading veterans to contenders.

ICYMI, Last Night was Draft Night!

The grammar police are taking the night off. There's not much form here, just free flowing notes I took down during the first night of the 2012 Rule 4 Draft.

Great moment for Houston

The rumors of Carlos Correa potentially dropping to the Cubs at #6 were greatly exaggerated.

Mark Appel getting abused by his college coach, Mark Marquess, didn't help.

This feels like a great moment for the Twins. They wanted Buxton.

How far will Appel drop? The Mariners need hitting. I'd expect the Orioles to take him, as they always need more pitching.

Byron Buxton: "I'm glad I'm a Twins now."

Mike Zunino, catcher from U of Florida to Seattle. Makes sense. Leader behind the plate and very good hitter.

The O's are up, then KC, then my Cubbies... Starting to get nervous.

MLB Pitchers with Best Stuff

The quantitative bounties found in Fangraphs linear weights help us understand most of the who, what, how, or why certain things happen on the field. It is important to remember that pitch values are not a predictive stat. They value what occurred on the field, as a result of specific pitches thrown but should not be used to attempt to predict the future. In the game of trying to guess what will happen, from a pitching standpoint, we suggest looking at players' SIERA or xFIP, as ERA predictors, or their K/BB ratio in a simpler sense.

Without further ado, as of the morning of June 3rd, here are the pitchers with the best "stuff" of the season, by Fangraphs pitch type linear weights.

June Swoons and Stars or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love BABiP and K/BB Rates

It's June 1st, and that can mean many things. for one: regression. Below are a couple of arrangements of players, as squads, whose April/May performances stand out from the norm.