FantasyAssembly.com names his best best buy low and sell high candidates heading into week 8 of the season. Will Darren McFadden take over the Cowboys running game after a strong performance?

When some hotshot rookie gets the call, it’s a mad dash to the waiver wire to secure this unproven talent who has yet to take a swing at the major league level. This week it is Miguel Sano; he is owned in 37% of Yahoo, 38% of ESPN and 67% of CBS leagues and just played his second game of the season yesterday.

Jimmy Nelson, Brewers (@ Phillies) – Yep, it is once again time to point out that the Phillies offense is not so good. I feel like this has been addressed plenty so I don’t need to burden you with the actual numbers the Phillies are putting up. As a baseball and, more importantly a fantasy baseball fan, you should have a pretty good notion of where the Phillies stand offensively. It’s bad

At this stage of the game if you are looking on waivers, you should not be looking at names and you should not be looking for long-term solutions (as nice as those are). No, your main focus should be numbers. And when I say numbers, I don’t mean what a player has done to date; those numbers are meaningless (somewhat).

Sometimes a player can get off to a bad start and their ERA makes them look worse than they probably are. Other times a player can get off to a hot start and while the ERA says they are pitching well, the underlying metrics say something else. This is one of the reasons I love xFIP when evaluating pitchers. xFIP estimates what a pitcher should be doing based upon the raw numbers as opposed to what their surface stats show.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but the waiver wire is thin – almost anorexic, in the leagues I play in. The internet has made it virtually impossible to sneak a sleeper past your league-mates or snag that next potential stud coming up from the minors without a fight. In today’s game, if you snooze – you lose.

We are one-third of the way through the season which is a good time to check in on some of the player on the leaderboard, specifically BABIP (batting average on balls in play). Some players have the skills to maintain a high BABIP while others produce a high BABIP due to other factors like defense and luck.  In…

MONDAY
Marco Estrada, Blue Jays (vs. Marlins) – Don’t look now, but Marco Estrada has thrown back-to-back quality starts! Okay, that is hardly a reason to sound the alarms, but I like the direction he is going. Estrada’s FIP in both of those quality starts was below three, so he seems to be pitching well in his environs.

It gets harder and harder as we go through the season to find useable players on the waiver wire to recommend. The tough part is not repeating yourself and keeping things fresh with new players each week. There are numerous players listed below in the previous recommendations section, and eventually I will have to beat a dead horse with a “best of what’s left on the waiver wire” episode, but that will not be this week.

Let me just tell you, I love waivers. I live on the waiver wire, mostly due to the fact I take a lot of chances when I draft. I take those chances knowing there will be undrafted players available during those first few months that will step up and exceed expectations far beyond players I considered on draft day. Marcus Semien, Devon Travis, Mike Moustakas, Ender Inciarte, Aaron Harang, these are just some of the highlight players I’ve added this season.