Fantasy Baseball: Ranking the top 30 IL stashes with Corey Kluber progressing and Tyler Glasnow not

The All-Star break has come and gone. The 2019 season is in its waning phase. Now's when things get serious.

Among them: injuries with indefinite timetables. The baseball season is so long that whenever a star player goes down, provided it's not with what's known to be a season-ending injury, you can trust he'll eventually be back to contributing again and it will have almost certainly been worth the wait.

But now? The distinction between a weeks-long absence and a months-long absence is becoming less and less, to the point that anything short of a firm end date could be inferred to mean "or maybe not at all." 

This is especially true for starting pitchers, who might need close to a month's rehabilitation (meaning actual games) if they've missed upward of a month. Ones who have yet to begin even throwing may simply run out of time.

And the time crunch is only amplified in leagues that don't see this thing through to the end. In a Head-to-Head league, for instance, you may be looking at just a few more weeks of regular-season play. Sure, a returning ace might help you secure a championship, but you have to survive in the interim.

That isn't to say you should drop all of your longer-term injured players for shorter-term injured players. When an injured player becomes healthy, he's no longer stashable in an IL spot, of course, which means he has to be at least as good as your worst player to justify stashing in any capacity. There's still a balance then between how good the injured player is -- what sort of impact he could make at full health, in other words -- and how long the wait will be. It's just that the latter is rising in importance.

The gap is growing for pitchers like Corey Kluber, who has been throwing from long distances already and is set to begin bullpen work, and Tyler Glasnow, who still isn't throwing and won't for at least two more weeks. Both were originally given lengthy timetables with indefinite paths to recovery, and we still don't know what lies ahead for Kluber. But that seemingly small head start makes all the difference now.

It's reflected in their ranking here, among other things.