This week, Scott White and Chris Towers try to figure out what we should do with promising young starters like Sean Manaea and Jose Berrios who have tripped up in their major-league debuts.

Scott: It was fun while it lasted, sure, but between Sean Manaea's eight-run debacle Tuesday and Jose Berrios' fill-in status (Kyle Gibson is eventually coming back, you know), I'm not sure either future stud is worth rostering at this point -- at least not in a standard mixed league.

Sean Manaea
NYM • SP • #59
IP12 2/3
ER16
K10
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And I'm not sure shelf life is even the biggest reason why. They've made a combined six starts in the majors so far, and not a one has been the kind you'd want credit for in Fantasy.

I think I have a pretty good idea how the typical Fantasy owner operates: They want what's trendy, and Maneaa and Berrios are decidedly not. They *were* trendy -- and if they had lived up to our wildest expectations for them, we obviously wouldn't be having this discussion -- but, frankly, they're old news. Unfulfilled hype.

We could argue whether that mindset is the right one to have, but the bottom line is it's the prevailing one. So then, the one owner you have to worry about picking up these two if you drop them is the one with the greatest sentimental attachment to them, the one who invested in them back when we thought they were hot stuff, which is presumably ... you.

Chris: It depends on how you construct your roster, but I'm not so sure I'm ready to jettison these young guys just yet. Like you said, these are future studs, and it's impossible to say when the "future" might begin. It could be in a few months, or even next season; their track records suggests neither Manaea nor Berrios is even close to ready to contribute.

Jose Berrios
TOR • SP • #17
IP14 1/3
ER10
K19
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But the more interesting question than whether you should drop them is who you would drop them for. When I build my team, I'm almost always looking for upside with the end of my roster pitching options, and that is exactly what Manaea and Berriors bring to the table with them. Of course, they also don't have a monopoly on upside either. Guys like Trevor Bauer, Jon Gray, Alex Wood or Rubby De La Rosa bring upside to the table too. If you squint hard enough, in just the right light, you can see any of those pitchers turning into difference makers in Fantasy.

If everything goes right. Which is the same thing you can say about Berrios and Manaea. If you're looking for an upside play at pitcher, I have no problem shuffling through options at the end of the roster, and if Berrios or Manaea get caught in the gears, so be it.

But are you just dropping them to drop them? So you can chase the likes of Colin Rea, Josh Tomlin or Dan Straily? Or worse yet, a proven mediocre commodity like Doug Fister?

No, thanks. Josh Tomlin isn't winning you a Fantasy championship. Neither is Doug Fister or Dan Straily. But Jose Berrios? If he figures it out, he just might. That's still worth waiting on.

Scott: Well, no, Rea, Tomlin, Fister and Straily aren't winning you a Fantasy championship, but that's really scraping the bottom of the barrel. I fully support the uncompromising pursuit of upside, particularly in a mixed-league scenario where those players who are merely OK are forever available on the waiver wire.

If I were to drop Manaea or Berrios, it would be for another pitcher who I thought had genuine upside. You mentioned some already. Rubby De La Rosa throws 98 mph, for crying out loud. You don't have to squint to see the upside there, and his jump in called strikes over his past four starts shows he's attacking the zone in a way he never did before. Alex Wood used to be a Fantasy mainstay and has seen his strikeout rate spike since making a mechanical adjustment three starts ago. Even on the higher end, a pitcher like Kevin Gausman, with his 100-mph fastball, is owned in fewer leagues than Berrios. Ditto Drew Pomeranz, who's second only to Jose Fernandez in strikeouts per nine innings these season.

Drew Pomeranz
LAA • SP • #15
IP40
ER8
K51
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These are the pitchers attracting the most attention right now and the ones you're at risk of losing by clinging to Manaea and Berrios -- who, again, are old news.

Their upside isn't lost on me, and it's possible their breakthroughs come later this year. But I like to remind myself I'm not married to any waiver claim. The way to make the most of limited roster space and maximize your chances of landing a true breakthrough are to corner the players making the most noise. When the noise dies down or the breakthrough is validated, then you can make a more lasting determination. In this case, the former happened. Manaea and Berrios had their turn, but it's on to the next one.

Chris: I didn't just pull Rea, Tomlin, Fister and Straily out of nowhere, though; they are among the most-added players in CBSSports.com leagues. Yeah, it'd be great to go grab Drew Pomeranz or Kevin Gausman, but they're both owned in 82 percent of CBSSports.com leagues, so it isn't doing most of our readers much good to recommend adding them.

And that's really my point, and the one readers should take away from this. Maybe Manaea and Berrios have been exposed; as not-ready-for-prime-time players, or even outright frauds, or however we might want to frame it. They wouldn't be the first big-time prospects to flop once they got a taste of major-league competition, and they certainly won't be the last.

Alex Wood
OAK • SP • #57
IP39 1/3
ER20
K37
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However, we're also talking about three bad starts, which is hardly a definitive sample size. You know who else has had three bad starts very recently? Alex Wood. And Rubby De La Rosa. Wood and De La Rosa have been better of late, but that's hardly proof that they've figured things out; both still tend to get hit extremely hard, and have their own command issue too.

There is a tendency among sports fans to overrate young, unproven players, to be certain. As a community, we tend to overstate how high any given prospects' ceiling is, along with their chances of actually hitting said ceiling in any given season. Skepticism surrounding young players is worthwhile, in other words.

I like to call it the "Boat vs. Mystery Box" paradox, based on the the scene in an episode of Family Guy when Peter, faced with the choice of winning a boat or a mystery box, stupidly proclaims, "A boat is a boat, but a mystery box could be anything. It could even be a boat! You know we've always wanted one of those!"

However, in this instance, you're comparing a mystery box to an older, partially open mystery box. The corners are all dinged up. The mail man may have kicked it at some point. There is a strange, bluish-brown substance of unknown origins leaking from it. And when you peak inside, you find, to your horror, De La Rosa or Wood's 2015 pitching line. Gross.

Give me the mystery box!