Fantasy Crystal Ball: Travelers Championship

by Ryan Ballengee on Jun 24, 2009 5:21 PM EDT Comment 0 comments

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This week, the players that were in the Open move from rain to rain as they go up to Hartford, CT, for the Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands. The course is a bit gimmicky in places, but overall, I like it. Has some very visually intimidating holes, but also has some fun risk-reward holes as well. It plays under 7000 yards and yields a lot of birdies. Expect a tight finish. As Sal Johnson points out in his preview, the winner was decided by a single shot or in a playoff over half of the times this event has been played.

The US Open Champion - still hard to believe, huh? - Lucas "G. Lover" Glover will be playing. Ricky Barnes is there, too. He'll hope to ride his good play at Bethpage for a while and to a secured 2010 PGA Tour card. The field is otherwise pretty good as well, considering that the event is the week after a major. Six of the top 25 in the world are entered.

My pick for the week would be Hunter Mahan. He didn't win the Open, but came close and would have been closer were it not for bad luck at the 16th. He won this event two years ago and finished second last year. He's a solid pick.

I'm feeling a Vijay Singh run this week because he has two top five finishes in his last two starts.

Always go with the defending champion. This time, it's Stewart Cink. The guy is playing pretty ok, but he has two wins on this course. I like him anytime the PGA Tour is in New England.

Kenny Perry is yet to come out of that funk from the Masters, but he finished sixth here last year. Maybe he can convince himself that it's time to forget the Masters and focus on something else.

As for my sleeper pick this week, I'm going for a Jonathan Kaye sighting. He seems to like this event and finished second here in 2002.

Of course, I will tell you to keep picking Steve Marino, but I've told you to do that so many times now that you're probably out of starts for him.