As a rough outing against the Phillies hinted, Arizona pitching phenom Max Scherzer may have stuff more conducive to working out of bullpen than as a starter.

AP

By Gary Gramling, SI.com

Every Thursday from now until September, you can come here to find an in-depth look at fantasy baseball's sell-high and buy-low candidates ...

Buy Low

Orlando Cabrera, SS, White Sox: The move from Anaheim to Chicago must have been a shocker for Cabrera. Going from beautiful Angel Stadium to U.S. Cellular Field, the armpit of the major leagues. Taking manager instructions in tantrum form. Bill Plaschke no longer extolling your virtues. A .281 hitter over the past three seasons, Cabrera is currently hitting .209.

Chalk 95 percent of it up to bad luck. Let's visit our old friend batting average on balls in play. Cabrera's BABIP has been .296 over the past three seasons. This year, it has dropped to 228. That's not to say he's been doing the right thing all the time. Cabrera's strikeout rate has risen slightly (once every 11.4 plate appearances from 2005-07, once every 10.3 PAs this year). He's not exactly driving the ball, as (per Hardball Times) his line drive percentage sits at 15.2, below it's usual level in the high teens.

Realistically, Cabrera should be sitting on an average around .250 right now. And once his bat warms up just a bit, that should climb back into the .280s. At the rate Ozzie Guillen runs (Cabrera has attempted a steal approximately once every eight times he reaches), he should finish in the neighborhood of 25 steals. And once the rest of Chicago's offense wakes up, Cabrera's run and RBI numbers will return to normal. Not superstar production. But with OC owners ready to lose it, he's a solid commodity who can be stolen right now.

Sell High

Max Scherzer, SP/RP, Diamondbacks: Tom Verducci started it, but let me be the latest to shout obscenities from the back during the coronation of Scherzer.

You should be feeling a little bit of déjà vu right now, because we've done this before. Except it was the preseason. And it was Joba Chamberlain. And I was a fantasy baseball writer doubling as a secret agent and working on a computer made of solid gold.

As we discussed in the preseason, Joba isn't valuable while pitching out of the ‘pen. He has thrown just 13.1 innings this season, with a 3.38 ERA, 1.13 WHIP, 15 strikeouts, one win, and zero saves. In other words, Joba has had the same approximate fantasy value as Alquilino Lopez, Kyle McClellan and, of course, Ramon Ramirez. Middle relievers have to pitch often and awfully well to have fantasy value. Joba hasn't done either.

Which brings us back to Scherzer. The fact is, he is not long for the rotation in '08. Once Doug Davis is returns, probably by the last week in May, Scherzer heads to the ‘pen (or possibly Tucson) since Arizona has the vets to fill out a rotation, and there's no need to burn Scherzer's arm out. Thus, he'll have to be nearly perfect to make a big fantasy impact once it goes down.

Of course, Scherzer could end up back in the rotation later this season. After all, Davis isn't the picture of health, and ex-mulleteer Randy Johnson turns 153 in September.

But here's the other ugly truth: right now, Scherzer isn't suited to be a starter at the big league level. As a starter in the minors, you can get by firing high-90s heat past the Calvin Pickerings of the world. As a starter in the bigs, you have to be able to change speeds and throw those off-speed pitches for strikes. As Scherzer showed when the Phils knocked him around on Monday, he does neither of those things consistently. (And in the interest of piling on a little bit more: That fastball might come hard, but it doesn't move around much.)

That's not to say Scherzer can't develop the necessary finesse. He's 23 years old and has been in Arizona's system for less than a year. It's just unlikely to happen this season. There's a reason many scouts felt that, coming out of Missouri, he was better suited to short relief than life in the rotation. If you have Scherzer on your roster and you're not in a keeper league, now's the time to cash in on the hype.

Xavier Nady, OF, Pirates: It's a rainy day here in New York, so let's be all Negative Nellie and tack on a second sell-high candidate.

Really, you don't need to do a lot of number crunching to solve the fluke factor on Nady. He's 29 years old. He's never hit higher than .280 or hit 20 homers in a season. His name in Xavier, derived from a Basque place name meaning "the new house." What's with that?

But looking specifically at what Nady has done this season, his '08 start just screams fluke. From '05-07, the right-handed hitting Nady hit .258 against righties. This year, he's hitting them at a .355 clip. From '05-07, he hit .258 with runners on base. This year: .367. From '05-07, his batting average on balls in play was .309, just a tad higher than the MLB average of .303. This year, it's .394, nearly 100 points higher than the MLB average of .295.

So year, plenty of guys improve into their late 20s. But nothing like this should be expected. If Nady is a league average hitter from here on in, his owners should be thankful. But you should already be shopping him to every chump in your league.