Good morning, Fantasy Alarm Nation!

With Patriots’ Day in Boston, your morning is going to be stressful enough. You have to get those kids off to school, you have to fight through traffic to get to work and all the while you have to see if your Sunday night waiver claims went through and how you’re going to adjust your roster before the 11:05 am ET lock. I don’t want to pile on concern to your already hectic morning with a bunch of “I told you so’s,” but after a slew of emails and calls on yesterday’s SiriusXM show, I feel we need to discuss the importance of red flags.

When we do our research throughout the spring, we encounter a number of red flags that always seem to be ignored or, at the least, overlooked. Whether it’s a history of injuries, a manager with a strong desire to incorporate platoons or even just someone notorious for a hot start but always disappoints soon after, we should know better than to rely on these guys for long-term use. If a number of fantasy pundits are standing on their respective soap boxes warning you off a guy, you need to pay attention. Sure, there are a few anomalies out there, but how many times does the same guy have to disappoint before you wake up and smell the coffee?

Case in point: Rich Hill

Again, I apologize for the harsh “I told you so,” but seeing all these questions about what to do with Rich Hill makes me want to grab you by the shirt and shake you into submission. Why in the world are we still talking about this guy? Even the Dodgers beat writers are shaking their head on this one.

Yes, in 2015, his final four starts…his only four starts…he looked spectacular. He has three-straight 10-strikeout performances and finished it off with a six-inning quality start where he notched a strikeout per inning. He may have even won you a head-to-head championship. But he was 35-years old at the time and thinking he was going to suddenly put in a full season in 2016 after not having thrown more than 50 innings in a big league season since 2007 was unrealistic.

But you didn’t listen and you drafted him in 2016 anyway. Despite the warnings of fantasy experts across the globe, you still went after him. How did that work out for you? Hmmm. Let’s see. He started the season on rocky terrain, had some ups and downs, threw some decent starts in May and then missed all of June. He came back just before the All Star break, made a couple of starts and was then lost for the rest of July and nearly all of August. His return in September yielded a few more quality starts, but after an entire season of that, you had to know that drafting him in 2017 meant you were going to lose him for a lengthy period of time. Is it worth it?

And now we sit here in 2017, the guy is 37 years old, he’s made two starts, thrown a total of eight innings and is back on the DL for those same blisters that plagued him last year and the year before. And the year before that. And so on. And so on.

How is this red flag overlooked every year? Are you just blindly looking at the numbers from last year and thinking, “it’s just a blister, he’ll be fine,”? There have been countless articles written about Hill and his blisters, yet for whatever reason, people don’t believe them. It’s like trying to talk to Kyrie Irving and explain to him the Earth is round. I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall here.

For those who have failed to investigate properly, here it is in a nutshell. Most blisters that develop on a pitcher’s hand are caused by the friction of the ball rubbing against the fingers, depending on the grip. In Hill’s case, the blister is caused by the seams rubbing against his hand and fingers when he throws his curveball, a pitch he throws close to 40-percent of the time. No one throws their curve as much as Hill does and each and every time he throws it, the seams of the baseball tear at his skin. Because it’s the seams, the blisters have no time to ever callus up and the results are what we see now – a need for the DL and time off from throwing the curve. That’s all well and good, but then he takes the mound again and we start the process over again.

What’s worse is this guy’s age. Nothing against the over-35 crowd, but look at your parents’ or grandparents’ hands. Compare it to yours. If you’ve got kids, compare it to theirs. Throughout the aging process, the skin gets thinner and thinner and things like blisters, cuts, scrapes and even bruises take longer to heal. In the case of Hill, his skin is like rice paper here. It not only tears easily, but it also takes forever to heal.

Now, to make matters worse, it appears as if manager Dave Roberts has had more than his fair share of Hill’s injury problems too. He’s now talking about putting Hill into the bullpen. Maybe he’s going to look at him as an effector, but even so, it’s not like Hill is going to stop throwing his curve. It’s the only effective pitch he has. So maybe the innings limits caused by pitching out of the pen will help in the short-run, but he certainly can’t pitch on back-to-back days and what happens when he’s needed for two or three innings? We’ve already seen the blister develop after two innings.

We’re not telling you these things because we dislike Rich Hill. I don’t even know the guy. And I’m not saying negative things because I don’t like the Dodgers. Couldn’t care less, to be honest. What I do know is that if he can help my fantasy team, I’ll stand by him. If he is a perennial nightmare with excessive trips to the disabled list, I want nothing to do with him and will warn you off him every chance I get.

We go through things like this each and every season. Usually it’s with the injury-prone folk. There was an article in this year’s MLB Draft Guide 30 Strategies regarding the need to avoid injury-prone players and I even wrote a full-featured article there telling you which players to avoid. Rich Hill was there. So was Troy Tulowitzki. So was Stephen Strasburg, Lorenzo Cain and yes, Giancarlo Stanton. Maybe it’s just too tempting to believe what they can do in a full season and think that this might be the year, but come on. Yes, you can take risks in your life and in fantasy baseball, but try to at least minimize the damage.

And just to show you that I’m not standing here blindly preaching, allow me to introduce my fantasy Achilles – Cameron Maybin. I was sitting exactly where you are sitting right now. I believed in the talent. I believed in the potential. I drafted him each and every year believing that this was going to be the year he bucks the trend. Did he? Once. He had that one year in 2011 where he played a full season and stole 40 bases. That, of course, was the one year I said I had enough and didn’t own him. But what did I do then? Yep, went out and drafted him each and every year afterwards trying to get that one big season I already missed. I was like a junkie trying to catch that first high all over again and failed miserably in the process.

Even now, as I sit here and type, I have a certain amount of hesitancy in maintaining my stance that, with a guy like Yasiel Puig, you just have to take that leap of faith and believe that his head is finally screwed on right. Bill Plunkett, who covers the Dodgers for the Orange County Register laughed at me yesterday as I grasped at straws thinking, “Ya gotta believe.” A tiger doesn’t change his stripes, folks. They just don’t.

Now, I’ve minimized the risk here as Puig didn’t cost me anything more than a 19th-round draft pick, but you see what I’m talking about here, right? Rich Hill cost way more than Puig this season. Tulo, Strasburg and Stanton did as well. If you’re going to ignore the red flags being waved in front of you, you have to do it at the most minimal cost possible.

As you move forward now and start scouring the waiver wire or talking trade with your league mates, be sure you see all the red flags being waved. Jason Vargas looks great right now, but go back and look at his track record. Same with Zack Cozart and Avisail Garcia. Past performance can be a red flag. Look at the players currently dealing with back issues. I’ll rarely turn down a deal that nets me Miguel Cabrera, but that’s a red flag for sure and one that makes me less-inclined to pony up what it would take to acquire him. But players like Neil Walker, Matt Holliday and Huston Street? Forget it. Back issues don’t go away, especially in older players. Or how about bone spurs, or forearm strains or partially torn UCLs?

There are red flags to be seen everywhere. Make sure you’re not color blind. See these players for exactly what and who they are.