2020 Fantasy Baseball Busts? Eduardo Escobar

The Arizona Diamondbacks finished the 2019 season with a record of 85-77, which was good enough for a second-place finish in the NL West but was not quite good enough to receive a Wild Card spot in the postseason. The strong finish came as a surprise to many fans, especially on the heels of what looked like a minor rebuild with the trading of Paul Goldschmidt in the offseason.

Many players had breakout performances for the Diamondbacks, which is what led directly to their success. One of the key cogs in this success was the performance of Eduardo Escobar. Escobar was acquired from the Minnesota Twins at the 2018 trade deadline and has been stellar since that acquisition. In 2019, Escobar had a career year by slashing .269/.320/.511 with 35 HR, 118 RBI, 94 R, 50 BB, and five SB in 636 at-bats over 158 games. He set career-highs in each of the above-mentioned counting stats and had 70 more at-bats in 2019 than in any previous season.

The question for Escobar heading into 2020 in whether or not he will be able to match this performance, as exceeding it would be almost unfathomable. To determine if this was an anomaly season or something to expect from the third baseman in the future, we will need to examine his metrics.

Escobombs Away?

Escobar derives a lot of his skillset and fantasy value from his ability to hit for power and drive in runs. Therefore, let's take a look at his power metrics from 2019 to get a better glimpse of why he had such a career season. 

Given the strength of Escobar's season, you would expect to see his 2019 power metrics jump off the page, but that is not the case here. While Escobar did set career highs in exit velocity (87.8 mph) and hard-hit rate (31.5%), they were not impressive numbers. The exit velocity was only .3 mph above league average and the hard-hit rate was three full points below league average. The same can be said for his barrel rate of seven percent, which was only .7% above the league average. Given this information, it looks like Escobar's season had quite a bit of luck involved in it as you would expect better power metrics from a season that resulted in 35 home runs. In any event, let's look a little deeper to see what else we can dig up from last year on Escobar.

When examining his pitch tracking, we notice a massive discrepancy in Escobar vs. fastballs and breaking balls compared to offspeed pitches. He hit a combined .290 with 31 home runs vs. fastballs and breaking balls, but only .190 with four home runs vs. offspeed. You can feel pretty confident pitchers will have this information heading into 2020 and look to throw him fewer fastballs with such a cliff between those and offspeed pitches.

Another key reason we saw such drastic increases from Escobar is due to the increase in plate appearances. Before 2019, Escobar had never had more than 631 plate appearances in a season (2018), which resulted in 23 home runs compared to the 35 home runs in 699 plate appearances this past season. Escobar hit third in the lineup for 440 plate appearances in 2019. In 2020, he is projected to hit fourth, which should result in a plate appearance loss of roughly 20 appearances. While this may not seem like many, it will have an overall effect on his numbers.

While noting that we expect a decline in Escobar's power numbers, we should also add that he does not have much of a skillset elsewhere to make up for it. He has never stolen more than five bases in a season as he has a sprint speed of just 27.6 ft/sec, which ranked him in the 67th percentile and 217 overall in the league. He has also only hit over .270 twice in his career and owns a career .260 average. The bottom line is that if the ridiculous power numbers aren't there, he will struggle to return value.

Conclusion

Overall, Escobar had a career year in 2019 that is unlikely to be duplicated in 2020. His power metrics were some of the best in his career, yet were not what you would expect from a guy that hit 35 HR and drove in 118 RBI. There was some luck on his side as far as these are concerned. He is also likely to score fewer runs in 2020 with the drop in the batting order. While he will still be a productive player in 2020, it is unlikely he will return equal value on his current ADP of 110. Even though Escobar was a top-100 player in total during 2019, he rated out just inside the top 150 in terms of average stats. Also, in 2018, he rated outside the top 120 in terms of total production and average production. A season closer to these 2018 ranks is what fantasy owners should expect from Escobar in 2020.

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