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We're getting down to it now.
Depending if your league counts the last week of the season or not -- and some Head-to-Heads don't -- you're going to set your lineup either one more time or two, which means, aside from a keeper scenario, the players you should add off the waiver wire are ones you intend to use right away.
So while starts like Tyler Duffey had Tuesday or Henry Owens had Wednesday are encouraging and perhaps even a sign of things to come, those pitchers would have to be making two starts for you to put your trust in them at this point. And if current rotation alignments hold, they're not.
While playing the hot hand has some merit over the course of the season, most waiver claims are made from a rest-of-season perspective, from the standpoint of "I may not want to start this guy now, but I'll be glad I picked him up in the long run." So you have to shift your thinking this time of year, when only the now matters, and consider moves you may not have considered in June.
For me, that means endorsing a player who I think is destined for steep regression.
Josh Tomlin, SP, Indians (65 percent owned)
You may already have every incentive to pick up Tomlin in spite of what I've said about him in recent weeks. After all, he's coming off a complete-game win in which he allowed two earned runs against the Royals, giving him a 2.70 ERA, 0.68 WHIP and 7.9 strikeouts per nine innings in seven starts. What's not to like?
What's not to like is that he has also allowed 2.0 home runs per nine innings, which would be far and away the highest rate among starting pitchers if he had the innings to qualify. Of the 11 home runs he has allowed in total, 10 have been solo shots, preventing any kind of disaster, but he'll only get away with it for so long. There's a reason he had a 4.25 ERA despite a 1.08 WHIP in 2011, heretofore his best year.
But when exactly it catches up to him no one can say, and clearly, if you rolled the dice on him seven starts ago, he has done you a lot of good. So why couldn't he now? Unlike Duffey and Owens, he has a chance of making two starts next week and at two parks -- Kansas City and Minnesota -- where home runs can be hard to come by. Even if he loses the second start with the return of Corey Kluber, he'd still be a good bet for two starts the final week of the season.
Make no mistake: You're playing with fire by starting Tomlin and I'm sure now that I've endorsed him on some level, it's going to blow up in my face. But desperate times call for desperate measures, right? As desperation plays go, this one could pay off in a big way.
Marcus Stroman, SP, Blue Jays (47 percent owned)
Stroman isn't in line to make two starts next week, and it's not so clear he'll make two starts the week after either. But his upside is such that it may not matter.
Think back to early in draft season, before he tore his ACL and was presumed to be out for the season. Stroman had the look of a top-25 starting pitcher. So now that he has defeated the odds and returned, the lack of interest in him among Fantasy owners is astonishing to me.
You could make the case he won't have enough time to prove himself before you have to determine whether or not to start him, but it's not like he has to prove he's able. He just has to prove he's healthy, and he went a long way to doing that in his first start against the Yankees. The line wasn't especially impressive because of a three-run homer by Brett Gardner, but the velocity, the command, the entire skill set was spot on.
If the results follow in his upcoming start against the Red Sox, somebody in your league is going to seize the opportunity to get another top 25-caliber starting pitcher in his lineup. I'd rather it be you, which is why picking up Stroman before Friday's start is the smart move. If he bombs in that one, nothing lost.
Travis Shaw, 1B/3B, Red Sox (30 percent owned)
Of course, pitchers aren't the only one-offers who could clinch you the title. Maybe you recently lost Ryan Zimmerman to injury, or maybe you still have Victor Martinez as your corner infielder but are completely underwhelmed by his production of late.
Shaw is back to being a hot-hand play, having homered four times in his last nine games, and considering it's his second such run with only about a two-week lull in between, you have to wonder if it really is just a hot streak.
He's an interesting case because he was so bad at Triple-A Pawtucket before the Red Sox called him up in August and then was so good in the majors that he forced his way into the lineup. I don't know what went wrong with him at Pawtucket, but he has had good minor-league seasons, batting .278 with 21 home runs and an .826 OPS between two stops last year and .287 with 19 home runs and a .915 OPS between two stops in 2012. His strikeout rate has risen since his earlier hot streak, so he can't hang his hat on a high contact rate anymore, but he takes good at-bats and seems to have more power than anyone anticipated.
But really, that whole discussion matters only for next year. Shaw is playing every day, he's producing, and he's eligible at both corner infield spots, which should make him one of the more attractive fill-ins over the season's final couple weeks.
