King Kaufman has a funny video about fantasy baseball on today's Salon.com page.  Basically he says that fantasy baseball teams are like dreams; fascinating to you but endlessly boring to everybody else.

So with that in mind, I thought I'd post something that might help you snag some brewers in your future fantasy drafts.  I just finished 3 fantasy drafts over the weekend.  I missed out on some brewers I had targeted cuz others beat me to it.  Don't let this happen to you!  Here are the rounds where the brewers got drafted in my leagues:

league number: 1/2/3
round in which player got drafted: # / # / #
# rounds in each league: 22/25/22

Prince  3/3/2
Braun   2/4/4
Hart    8/9/10
Sheets  8/12/12
YoGa    10/10/8
Weeks   10/16/7
Gagne   10/18/16
JJ      14/19/UD
Bush    20/UD/UD
Hall    22/UD/20
Kendall UD/25/UD

In an underpublicized move, the Cincinnati Reds claimed OF Drew Anderson off waivers (subscription-only to BP, I couldn't find a free link).  I guess Moustache must've tried to sneak him off the 40-man and we ended up losing him.  There goes the mystery man.  I guess the most significant question regarding this move is, why keep him on the roster last month instead of Wise?

John Sickels at minorleagueball.com just released his Brewers Top 20 prospects.  No surprises really, and no Grade A's either, but LaPorta and Parra get some love.  Compare this to his previous posts about the Dodgers, Yankees and Red Sox, and we can see how depleted the farm has become.  I'll leave more opinion to the posts below...

The Rule 5 draft is coming up in December.  Now's a good time to take a look at the Brewers' 40-man roster.  According to the rules, anybody with 3 years professional experience that is not on a team's 40-man roster is eligible for the Rule 5 draft.

Just to update everybody with some recent minor transactions: we added side-arming lefty Randy Choate from Arizona's AAA team, purchased the contract of AAAA slugger Brad Nelson, DFA'ed Mike Jones and signed him to a minor-league contract.  I think this still leaves us with 2 or 3 vacancies on the 40-man.

I'm assuming we purchased Nelson's contract to protect him from the draft.  Does anybody seriously think we might have been at risk of losing him?  

We also DFA'ed Mel Stocker after last year's cup-of-coffee.  Stocker was given some love as the best minor league baserunner at the AA-level (BP password required).  He's entering his age-27 year and IS (I believe) eligible for the draft.  

Anybody care to speculate on who else we might lose to the Rule 5 draft?  A quick glance at our rosters shows potentially interesting throwers like Mike Jones, Vince Perkins & Marino Salas (hard throwers, but hardly top prospects at this point in their careers).

Anybody know about players we could target?  After watching Josh Hamilton in Cinci last year, it's hard not to wonder what he might have looked like patrolling our LF next year.  Is there a 3B down on somebody's farm that could keep us from signing Pedro Feliz?

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Nate Silver's recent article at Baseball Prospectus (subscriber only) analyzes his PECOTA rankings for 2nd base prospects (25 yrs old or younger).  It came as a complete surprise to me that our very own Rickie Weeks is ranked 8th on the list, coming in below the likes of Eric Patterson, Josh Barfield, and the immortal Brooks Conrad of the Astros, when ranked for upside.  Brooks Conrad has a brighter upside than Rickie Weeks!?  Nate's one of my favorite BP authors, and PECOTA's my favorite projection system (it helped me to 4th place out of 10 for my fantasy roto league last year..), but that just doesn't make sense to me.  Interestingly, PECOTA takes defense into account, so maybe Rickie's historically bad 1st half of last season biases the rankings.  But he's going to get better, isn't he?

There was an interesting article on the Hardball Times last week about tracking the hardest throwers in MLB (http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/zoooomaya-and-speed-guns/).  What caught my eye is that the Brewers have 2 of the  top 10 for the highest avg fastball speed, Coco and Turnbow.  And also 2 pitchers that have reached 100 mph in games, Turnbow and Sheets.  That would seem to be good news for possible playoff scenarios, where power arms, especially in the pen, are at a premium.  Has anyone seen an extended version of the avg fastball speed list, maybe the top 100 or so?  I'd be interested to see where Capellan fits in.  Weren't we all told that he had one of the best arms in baseball when Melvin stole him for Kolb?