Ryan Theriot brings some speed with his second base/shortstop/outfield position flexibility.

Hey all! For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Jesse Draper, formerly of NL Grumblings, and this is the first of a new article that Sports Grumblings is going to be bringing you on a weekly basis. The column will cover one of the most important – and often overlooked – aspects of the fantasy game: speed.

Grab a Red Bull and stretch out those hammies. Over the next few weeks we’re going to cover everything from sleepers, roster construction and how to gain ground in stolen bases as the season moves along. This is just an introductory piece, but next Monday we’ll kick it off with a look at sleepers.

Today I want to talk about a deal I made in my homer league, and use it as an example of how easy it is to lose sight of where owners get stolen bases from.

After our initial draft, I was sitting pretty with Hanley Ramirez as my starting shortstop, Scott Podsednik as my left fielder, and Bobby Abreu in right. Between the three of them I was looking at a rough projection of about 110 steals. However, I was short on power, and it’s my feeling that power is always harder to get than speed. So I traded Ramirez away for Aramis Ramirez, in a move that essentially netted me an additional 30 – 40 home runs in exchange for about 50 steals. I managed to get Edgar Renteria to play short, not a great source of speed, but definitely useful as a starter. Then Pods went down. So I had no leftfielder, and only Abreu’s 30 or so steals to bank on.

Over some beers at the 30^th birthday party for a buddy of mine in the league, three of us decided to do a big three team deal. I ended up sending Tim Hudson and Renteria away in a great buy low move for Manny Ramirez. I picked up Stephen Drew to play short and now I had my replacement for Pods in left. Then I lost my second baseman and catcher (Howie Kendrick and Joe Mauer respectively) to injury and had to make room for them on the DL so I could get the roster space for their replacements. So I gambled and dropped Pods to the wire, hoping he’d still be out there in June.

Now you’re probably saying to yourself, “Hey man, you have Aramis Ramirez, Manny Ramirez and Bobby Abreu! That’s fantastic!” And you’d be right. However, winning the championship takes more than big names, it takes solid category management. As it stands today I’m woefully short in my stolen base projections, so I need to do some creative roster management to slot in the steals I need to stay at the top. Willy Taveras (We’ll cover him next week.) is on the wire, but there’s no way I bench a smoking Josh Hamilton for him right now. For the time being my best move is to pick up Ryan Theriot from the Cubs, who has six stolen bases and will qualify at shortstop within a week. Between him, Kelly Johnson, Drew and a healthy Kendrick, I need to find a way to develop balance, and more importantly, I need to create a slot that I can lock up as the place on my roster for speed. But we’ll talk more about roster construction later on.

Lesson learned? Remember, when making deals to fill holes, always be conscious of the holes that you’re going to create.

See you Monday when I’ll cover players that could fly 'under the radar' but will provide a solid profit for you on the basepaths.