RADIO
Welcome back RotoBallers to another edition of my "Breakout Hitters To Watch" series. What we're doing here is taking a good, close look at the hitting data each week to see which hitters are standing out the most.
The idea is to find hitters that have made changes and/or really improved this season to find start-worthy hitters for your fantasy teams, preferably on the cheap. We aren't constricting ourselves to players that are available on waivers or anything like that, just looking for some hitters that may be having their breakout seasons that you should try to acquire.
For transparency's sake, we'll do a recap of each week's recommendation at the beginning of each post to track our results and see if we're on the right track.
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Fantasy Baseball Breakouts Recap
Here are all of the names I've recommended so far.
| Week # | Breakout Picks |
| Week 1 (ST) | Julio Rodriguez, Steven Kwan, Kevin Smith, Bryson Stott |
| Week 2 | Steven Kwan, Gavin Lux, Andrew Vaughn, Jesus Sanchez, Austin Nola |
| Week 3 | Seiya Suzuki, Jeremy Pena, Alex Verdugo, Ke'Bryan Hayes, Rowdy Tellez |
| Week 4 | Alec Bohm, Santiago Espinal, Taylor Ward, Cristian Pache |
| Week 5 | Rowdy Tellez, Ha-Seong Kim, Max Kepler, Christian Walker, Pavin Smith |
| Week 6 | Manuel Margot, Brandon Drury, Josh Naylor, Daulton Varsho, Gleyber Torres |
| Week 7 | Brendan Rodgers, Yonathan Daza, Brandon Nimmo, Tommy Edman, Ryan Jeffers |
| Week 8 | MJ Melendez, Kyle Isbel, Patrick Wisdom, Julio Rodriguez, Mike Yastrzemski |
| Week 9 | Alejandro Kirk, Nolan Gorman, Christopher Morel, Joc Pederson, Garrett Cooper, Emmanuel Rivera |
| Week 10 | Andres Gimenez, Jazz Chisholm, Santiago Espinal, Harold Castro, Brendan Donovan, Ramon Urias |
It's certainly a mixed-bag results-wise here. We have uncovered some gems early on, but we have our fair share of bad recommendations here as well. This is getting tougher and tougher as the year goes on and we thin out the field of hitters to pick from, but offense is on the rise so we should be able to locate a few more hitters to help your fantasy team moving forward. Let's get to it.
This Week's Fantasy Baseball Breakout Picks
Matt Chapman, Toronto Blue Jays
Not your typical "breakout" name here, but I think Chapman is about to really crush the expectations we've come to have for him.
This tweet went out on Wednesday afternoon, just before Chapman mashed two homers on Wednesday night
For the year, his expected wOBA (.361) is significantly beating his wOBA (.310), and it's the same for his slugging metrics (.495 expected vs. .389 actual). Even in these last few tough years at the plate for him, he has consistently made hard contact:
| Year | AVG | K% | HardHit% | Brl% |
| 2019 | .249 | 21.9% | 48.1% | 10.9% |
| 2020 | .232 | 35.5% | 51.7% | 18.0% |
| 2021 | .210 | 32.5% | 41.7% | 13.7% |
| 2022 | .223 | 24.1% | 50.7% | 11.5% |
You can see there that the high strikeout rate really trashed his batting average from 2020-2021, which made him tough to roster even while he was hitting homers at a decent clip. What is different this year is the strikeout rate, as you can see there it's down below 25% – an encouraging sign. His contact rate has also reached 74.4% this year, his best mark since 2019.
As we have talked a lot about recently on Twitter, barrels are suddenly going for homers at a much higher rate across the league. This has been especially true in Toronto. From the beginning of the season to May 15th, the HR/Brl rate in that stadium was 49.3%. Since May 15th, it has come up to 61.9%. That increase is pretty much in line with the league increase as a whole, but it does benefit the Matt Chapman type of hitter more since they are hitting more and harder barrels than the average hitter.
I think we're bound to see Chapman's batting average come up towards .240 as we move forward, and it seems like he should be a really nice source of power as well – making him a great guy to acquire right now.
Luis Garcia, Washington Nationals
A middle-infielder with a strong prospect pedigree, Garcia got the call-up at the end of May and has looked pretty strong at the plate so far hitting .352/.368/.519 with two homers in 57 plate appearances. The exciting thing about Garcia is two-fold, he has flashed a great strikeout rate (17.5%), and a very high hard-hit rate (48.9%).
Let's do our classic thing of looking at very specifically crafted statistics to make a certain player look good. Since June 1st, only ten hitters have a K% below 20% and a hard-hit rate above 47%, here they are, sorted by Hard-Hit%:
Even over a small sample with the weirdly specific criteria, this is a pretty good list to be on. Garcia has hit a ball over 113 miles per hour already, showing really great bat speed. The funny thing about him is that his contact rate is pretty bad, below 70%. The way he limits the strikeouts is with the high overall swing rate:
The plus side of a high swing rate is that it's tough to strike out given how many additional chances you're giving yourself to make contact (fewer called strikes against you). If you swing at three pitches and make contact just once, that's a horrible 33% contact rate but a 0% strikeout rate! #MATH!
The downside is that you'll quite often make contact with a pitch you shouldn't have been swinging at, resulting in poor contact. I think that will result in the batting average coming down to .275 or so, but that's very much usable and there should be some homers coming here as well given how hard he's able to swing the bat.
Christian Bethancourt, Oakland Athletics
I nearly wrote him up last week but then decided not to because I really wasn't buying what he was selling me. Now I have changed my tune, and I'm ready to call this guy a breakout.
Let's play a little "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" here.
The Good
- He is catcher eligible in fantasy but has made just 10 of his 31 starts behind the dish – playing mostly first base and a bit at DH. This is huge for fantasy as it keeps him in the lineup every day and even cuts down the risk of injury.
- He has posted an elite 16.3% barrel rate this year and a strong 48% hard-hit rate to go with it.
- His strikeout rate is below 20%.
The Bad
- He is 30 years old and has never been anything more than a mediocre hitter in the Majors.
- All four of his homers have come in June. Before that, he had gone 100 plate appearances without a homer with a much worse (but still decent) 9.6% barrel rate.
The Ugly
- The Athletics are third to last in runs scored this year
So what we have is a guy with no good track record who is benefitting a ton from a hot couple of weeks. The reason he still makes the cut here is that I believe that he has at least league-average power, and that means something when you can get it from an everyday player in your catcher slot.
Oscar Gonzalez, Cleveland Guardians
The 24-year-old got the call-up after slashing .282/.308/.506 with nine homers in AAA (182 plate appearances), and so far in the Bigs, he's hit .377/.386/.507, although he's yet to record his first Major League homer.
The underlying metrics are looking very good in his 70 plate appearances, at least in terms of contact ability and how hard the ball is coming off the bat.
- 14.7% K%
- 74.8% Contact%
- 48.4% Hard-Hit%
We haven't seen a homer yet mainly because of the 56% ground-ball rate, and he's also shown to be a free-swinger (57.8% Swing%), which has his walk rate at a laughable 2.7%. This profile is pretty darn similar to Luis Garcia, but the power numbers in the minors are a bit more convincing for Gonzalez. Across three levels of minor league ball in 2021, he hit 31 homers in 504 plate appearances, a very strong 16.25 PA/HR rate. I think a lot of that should translate to the Majors, especially since he's shown that he's far from overmatched at this level.
As is always the case with rookies with just 75 plate appearances under their belt, there's the risk that the league finds the best ways to attack him and he struggles to counteract that, but for now, this rookie looks like a high-upside bat that can be had for free in plenty of leagues right now.
Luis Arraez, Minnesota Twins
He is not a very exciting fantasy player, and I don't think he ever will be. There's no real reason to use a roster spot on him in shallow leagues, but what he's done this year has been very impressive in its own right, so I want to talk about him a bit.
Arraez owns the league's second-best contact rate at 91.9%, trailing only Steven Kwan. He is only of just five players with a strikeout below 10% (Kwan, Jose Ramirez, Jose Iglesias, and Keibert Ruiz are the others). He also has a 27% line-drive rate that is three ticks above the league average of 24%. All of this means that Arraez just will hit for an elite batting average, as he has done this year with a mark of .354. The reason for pessimism from the fantasy perspective is the lack of power – he's hit just three homers in his 2019 plate appearances. That number has already surpassed his 2021 total of two, and the barrel rate is up a couple of ticks to 4%, so there is the chance he can hit 8-12 homers.
For fantasy purposes, we need guys that can help in more than just one category and for a while there it seemed like Arraez was legitimately just a batting average player. This year though, he has scored 34 runs, which puts him in the top 40 in the league there. He has also chipped in two steals, so that's another category where he's not a zero.
Add this all up, and you have a very roster-worthy player – especially if you have a team build that has a lot of power but not a ton of batting average. Arraez is still just 25 years old and plays all over the field, making him very versatile and even giving us the outside chance for continued power gains.
And that's it for this week's breakout picks, hope this helps. Good luck this week, RotoBallers!
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