Welcome to rates and barrels. It's Friday, June 9th. Derek Reimberg here with Al Malk. You're on this episode. We dig into it. It will be a big

weekend of spending in the leagues in which Ellie de la Cruz is still available. It's a lot of

NFBC leagues. Not even all NFBC leagues, though, because in some of those leagues, Ellie was

drafted and dropped and picked up a few weeks ago on the cheap.

So if you did that, congratulations for getting out in front of it.

Congratulations to your Fab account.

It will be much safer this weekend.

But in leagues where Ellie de la Cruz is out there, big, big numbers are coming.

So we'll talk about that.

We actually had a mailbag question about what to do if you are low in free agent budget money at this point in the season. It's very possible that you went in

on multiple big time prospects that were called up, or maybe there were some good players that

were dropped in your league and you spent up a lot. And now you're trying to figure out,

how am I going to get through the next three and a half, four months with perhaps mostly min-bid players. There are some people in that situation,

so we'll offer up a tip or two for how to navigate that. We'll go through a few bats that have

been standing out recently in terms of guys coming back from injury or players getting new

opportunities as a result of roster changes. Plus, we'll take a look at starting pitching. And we've got a little help on the starting pitching front this week. So it's a pretty good week to have a waiver chat, Al. I'm pretty excited about it. Yeah. Well, it feels like almost every week is a good week for that. I mean, I'm weird. Yes, there could be nobody good on the wire, and I'll still spend an hour talking about the players that are there and enjoy it. So I guess that says a lot about just how much, you know, the same way a dog likes to just chase a tennis ball, kind of regardless of the weather. That's kind of how I am with the waiver wire. I'll just go out there and run around for a a little while and enjoy myself. We got a fresh can of tennis balls today.

Lovely. Love the smell. the waiver wire. I'll just go out there and run around for a little while and enjoy myself.

We got a fresh can of tennis balls today. Lovely. Love the smell. Let's talk about Ellie De La Cruz. Ellie Week continues. I've seen some tweets from various corners of fantasy baseball Twitter

suggesting that the Ellie De La Cruz bids were available will be similar to what we saw with Royce Lewis last week. And if you want to go back to previous years, what we saw years ago when Juan Soto came up or when Yorda Elvarez came up. And those are big bids. If you're talking about a $1,000 budget, $400 and $500 bids are possible. Not everyone has that much left, so it doesn't mean that if you

don't have that much, you shouldn't bid. But how aggressively are you pursuing Ellie de la Cruz?

And are you looking at him as someone that you're more aggressive toward in certain instances?

I found a league earlier this week where I really am thin up the middle.

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