Some early stories that may have fantasy legs

	Will David Wells' health be an issue all season long? Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images

By Christopher Harris, Special to SI.com, TalentedMrRoto.com

I refuse to write another "buy low on Dan Johnson article" (though you should buy low on Dan Johnson), or delve into the psychologies of the April-averse Manny Ramirez and Johan Santana. Not that there isn't value in such musings. But it's been done. While the first few weeks of a fantasy baseball season are maddeningly capricious, I think you probably understand the message I and every other fantasy columnist have drilled into your busy mind: don't blow up your team on April 18. Barry Bonds probably won't go the whole year without a dinger. Tim Hudson probably won't have a WHIP over 2.10. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

More interesting to me are the managerial and personnel moves that have the whiff of permanence about them, and that may wind up dramatically altering players' fantasy fortunes. In other words, not surprisingly (considering the source), I'm interested in stupidity.

For instance, it was stupidity that caused the Red Sox to start David Wells last Wednesday, after he got torched on a rehab assignment and seemed quite uncertain about his knees. The fantasy ramifications are several. First, many Wells owners got their hopes up, discarded the pitcher they grabbed when Wells went DL-bound, and took a bawdy seven earned runs and 10 hits allowed in four innings to the (prodigious) gut. Next, it sent a number of AL-only owners scrambling to the waiver wire to grab the immortal Lenny DiNardo, a lefty who, in the same game as Wells' debut, allowed six hits and a walk in three innings of work. DiNardo was fine starting against Seattle on Monday, but starting him next Saturday in Toronto will be fantasy suicide. Finally, there's the question of when the heck his owners can trust Wells again. Do you activate him right away when he comes back? Do you wait? All of this is a mess which probably could've been avoided if the Sox had told Boomer to chill out, maybe avoided what looks like a potentially bad deal (Bronson Arroyo for Wily Mo Pena doesn't look like such highway robbery yet, does it, Sox fans?), and perhaps even gotten Jonathan Papelbon stretched out in time to start games; Pap's obviously been an unmitigated success as a closer, but he'd be a heck of a lot more valuable dominating eight innings per outing, instead of one.

Here, then, are the stories I'm following that may have fantasy implications far beyond a chilly April.

Chris Shelton is still batting sixth. I know I'm supposed to respect my elders, but is Jim Leyland kooky? As of Monday evening, Shelton has hit nine homers in 13 games, which you can add to his five doubles, three triples and 17 RBIs, good for a slugging average of 1.208, and an OPS of 1.708. Gosh, if he did that for the whole year, that would be some kind of record or something. I own Shelton in my primary AL-only league, and I couldn't be happier about how he's begun. But I ask you: should Alexis Gomez really be hitting fifth in front of him, as he was on Monday? Or Marcus Thames, who was hitting fifth on Sunday? Sure, there's something to be said for lineup consistency, but there's also something to be said for having guys on base when the hottest hitter in baseball jacks another one out. Shelton "only" has 17 RBIs. The guy has 17 extra base hits, and nine of them are homers...most sluggers certainly average more than an RBI per extra base hit, but that's because most sluggers bat third, fourth or fifth. With Dmitri Young on the DL, there's no excuse not to move Shelton up.