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First place in the vaunted American League East will be on the line when the Baltimore Orioles and Tampa Bay Rays meet this weekend in a four-game series highlighting franchises at the low end of the spending scale. With numerous big-money franchises struggling to contend and vacillating between buying and selling at the approaching trade deadline, the surprising Orioles and Rays are winning games with young players. Fantasy baseball managers have surely noticed.
A combined 11 Orioles and Rays hitters are rostered in more than 50% of ESPN standard leagues, but fantasy managers may have questions about staying power for some of them. For example, for the Orioles, 1B Ryan Mountcastle recently returned from a bout with vertigo, but he has not hit well. Managers are impatient. Readily available veterans 1B Ryan O’Hearn and OF Aaron Hicks have filled in. 2B/OF Adam Frazier is Baltimore’s third-best points league hitter over the past 30 days, yet he is sparsely rostered. Speedy SS Jorge Mateo is barely playing with SS Jordan Westburg promoted and hitting better. Ultimately, six Orioles hitters show up on ESPN’s most added/dropped list, three on each side. Value is changing!
Meanwhile, Rays 2B Brandon Lowe and OF Josh Lowe — they are not related and, in fact, pronounce their last names differently — are both close to falling below the 50% roster threshold, and this may be an important weekend for them for fantasy evaluation. Brandon Lowe (rhymes with “now”) missed a month with back pain, but he homered on Tuesday. Josh Lowe (rhymes with “know”) also struggles versus left-handed pitching, and he has only two home runs and two steals over the past month. OF Luke Raley appears to be underrated. The Orioles are scheduled to start four right-handed…
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