At the start of the MLB season we introduced a new weekly fantasy baseball rankings feature. The intent was to add a blog post each week highlighting the release of the rankings. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been in the cards every week (background: week 1, week 3) given other changes and improvements to the feature itself. Required family time on the weekend hasn’t helped either!

However, here we go for the current week, fantasy baseball rankings week 6.

Fantasy Baseball Rankings Process

Our process is to turn over the rankings from the prior week on Thursday or Friday, update the probable pitchers, and start adjusting the rankings for each position.

This continues through the weekend including adding player comments where appropriate, and each of Chris and I run through the rankings as a combined effort and quality check. A final check Monday morning to update for any injuries or other news from Sunday’s action.

My hope is the rankings feature provides some benefit beyond simply the day you set your lineup, be it for the week or daily. The feature updates every day as probable pitchers change. Plus, each hitter’s spot in the lineup and stats are added as that info becomes available. It gives a nice snapshot of the player’s week. We may continue to do some adjustments early in the new week for significant breaking news.

Player Injuries

There a number of players that left their game yesterday! We moved Robinson Cano, DJ LeMahieu and Fernando Tatis Jr. down. The comment on Tatis Jr. says he hurt his hamstring and check the video. Here it is:

We aren’t sure what to do with Anthony Rendon, who injured his elbow last week, returned Friday, missed Saturday and Sunday, and still isn’t on the injured list. These weekly lineups decisions are tough. Definitely an advantage of daily leagues is you can swap guys in and out every day instead of risking taking a zero for the week if a guy sits longer than expected.

Big news yesterday is Christian Yelich left the Milwaukee Brewers game with back tightness and he is day-to-day. He has a 7-game homestand this week, so we are going to leave him ranked #2 and hope for the best.

J.D. Martinez is another player with back spasms. He missed the Red Sox weekend series but with reports he could come in and pinch hit, it seems a good bet he plays this week.

Missing Players

One of the toughest things is identifying new players to add to the rankings that weren’t there the week before. We are trying different processes for this, including stat queries from our database to find recent top performers not already in the rankings, and reviewing rest of season projections. If you notice any obvious misses then please let us know in the comments.