Many trendy prospects have been selected in leagues based on hype or name. Every year, without fail there will be stud prospects on the wire mid-season. There are a few things you should do to be the first to know, and act. As my fellow writer noted below, in most leagues the top prospects who have been sent down will have been dropped purely on principle. Here is how to snag them from your league mates in 5 easy steps.

Step 1: Subscribe to the RSS feed for MLB player news on Rotoworld.com. This will keep you up to speed on injuries and such in the majors virtually in real time. It is the fastest updating and most reliable source. The little notes on Y! and CBS are both delayed and most times useless since a season ending injury and a 0-4 day look exactly the same.

Step 2: Find the top prospects and the players in front of them. A handy list of players who are due to get the call and be impact players are FGD’s top 50 list. IT can be found on the top bar. Chart out who is in front of them in the bigs and track (closely) the slumps and injuries.

Step 3: Unless you have no bench spots, be prepared to use one for a swing spot. That means if Corey Paterson is struggling early on, do not be afraid to be a little premature in picking up Jay Bruce. When C-Pat regains his form, you may drop him again and look for the next likely guy to hit the top level. Leaving yourself a spot will allow you to beat everyone who is holding on to try to maximize roster potential 100% of the time. (Really though, who is more valuable: Braun for the second half, or Millar for week 11?)

Step 4: Use your waiver wisely. If there are say 50 FAs who will help you over the course of the season, and you are in a 12 team league, Then you are on pace to get 4 of them (assuming everyone uses their waiver on all 50 players). Assume there are a handful of “crafty” guys who always save their waiver for the guy like Longoria, Bruce, etc. Maybe 6 do that. So you can either have a chance at one of the big guys, or end up with an average of 8-9 of the 50 impact players. If you have the #1 or #2 waiver then you may want to sit on it for a big gun, but if you think a stud is falling to 8, you are sorely mistaken.
There is also the fringe waiver guy, who may not be worth a waiver to everyone, but if there are 5 of these guys all season, and you are willing to use a waiver no one else is, it is worth getting all five guys to have the lowest waiver for awhile.

Step 5: Do not ever let a stud go because you have that position filled. If you are 3 deep at third, and have a shot at Longoria, you had better take it. There are always trade seekers (even more so when the hype for a young guy is so huge). This may sound “duh”, but sitting on a big name trade and blatantly not using it simply because of the chance of a better player later is also a “duh” thing.

If you keep up with that chart and check the players added to the system tab in your respective league, you should be far enough ahead of the game to score some significant mid-season talent.