To me, September is the month of the year to do two things in regards to fantasy baseball: continue to manage all of my teams to the best of my ability and PAY ATTENTION! Year-end stats are a fabulous tool for the following year's prognostication. But they are much more valuable if you are paying attention to trends within the season.

 

And I believe that the final six weeks of the season are the most important time to pay attention, yet they are often the least valued by fantasy players (including yours truly at times).

 

What do I mean by undervalued? Well, the stats these guys put up in April are built into their numbers all season. They have been a part of both our conscious and subconscious player valuation for months.

 

Yet they are the oldest stats of the season. Are they still relevant? Yes. But in many ways they are the least relevant stats of the season because so much changes within six months. Did a guy suffer a nagging injury, learn how to hit a curveball, develop a splitter, find the strike zone, develop a better eye, get a full-time job, or undergo one of the other myriad of changes a baseball player can go through between Opening Day and now?

 

We all know that just because two players have similar stats in the prior season they shouldn't be valued the same. But it is much easier to remember exactly why these two hitters shouldn't be valued the same while we are still in the season than when we're sitting on a couch stuffed with turkey watching football in three months, or even worse, when we're suffering through the darkest sports month (February) of the year.

 

Did one of the guys have a great month while the other guy was consistent all year? Was one guy improving his skills every month, while the other was sliding? Was there an injury that deflated one player's stats? There are dozens of reasons to value the same stats of two players very differently.

 

These September stats count just as much (if not more) than the ones in April. And yet they are undervalued. Not only because they are the most recent evidence of a player's skills and therefore the least ingrained in our mental fantasy value of that player, but because - as every other fantasy baseball article on earth is reminding you of at this time - we're all playing fantasy football now. This week I'll look at a few players who have had some recent changes in their performance with the slant of looking at next year. If this is interesting/helpful, I'll try to make this a theme for the final set of Musings over the next six weeks or so.

 

To start it off, let's go to Cincinnati, where Jeff Keppinger is very quietly putting up quality numbers for the Reds. He is the type of player who often gets overlooked at this time of year when the mind wanders to dreams of discovering the next Maurice Jones-Drew. But Keppinger knows he is auditioning for a job next year, and is getting the opportunity to do so on a regular basis. While he may not continue to hit for such a high batting average, he should remain a contributor both in that area and the counting stats from here on out. And he's eligible at just about every infield position. Next Spring, when the guy who stopped paying attention to baseball last week is reading his pre-season magazine, he'll look at Keppinger's numbers are wonder how that snuck under his radar.

 

In case you, like the rest of the country, are wondering exactly how the Seattle Mariners have managed this surge into the playoff hunt, you need look no further than two veterans, Adrian Beltre and Raul Ibanez, who were "the suck" for the first half of the season, but have become white-hot of late.

 

Beltre was somewhat disappointing in April and June. A solid May gave his owners some hope and kept his overall first half numbers from looking putrid. But since the All-Star Break, he has been raking on the regular. His July was ridiculous. His 30 RBI that month almost matched his first-half total. He has settled down somewhat in August but is still providing very good numbers for his fantasy owners. If he continues hitting at his August pace over the final month of the season, he'll have put up numbers similar to last year's.

 

So after the early struggles of his career, and the monster 2004 (.334, 48 HR, 121 RBI), we may be now be seeing the real Adrian Beltre. An above average, but not great, third baseman for most fantasy leagues.

 

As for Ibanez, it has truly been a tale of two seasons. Ibanez has more home runs in the last 19 games (9) than he had in his first 94 games this season (6). Read that sentence again. Or to put it another way, over the last 19 games, he is averaging more home runs per at-bat (78 at-bats total) than he averaged home runs per game for the first 94.

 

While there will certainly be whispers about how he has resurrected his season, whatever he's doing is working. And if he continues to rake like this, he'd probably end up around 25 HR and 100 RBI, as hard as that is to believe given where he was a month ago. But next season, I won't be touching him with a ten-foot pole in mixed leagues, unless it is in the deep reserves phase (i.e. Shawn Green territory).

 

David Wells in Chavez Ravine would have been a fantasy owner's dream once upon a time. No longer. Not only is Wells a very large shadow of his former self, but the notion that the Dodgers play in a pitcher-friendly ballpark is no longer accurate. If he puts forth any value, it will be on smoke and mirrors from here on out. He's more likely to be a teammate of Rickey Henderson's than in an MLB uni next season.