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Making the right trades can be crucial to championship success in fantasy baseball, almost as much as the draft, if not more. While most trades can have a significant impact on your fantasy team, it’s the deals where you acquire undervalued players and then see their production improve that can really tip the scales in your favor where the standings are concerned.
The same can certainly be said about trading away players at the right time when they have the most fantasy trade value. Those deals could happen in the second week of April or the last week of August, but they’re impactful all the same.
Here are some undervalued candidates to pursue in trades and some overvalued ones who you should consider dealing for if they presently occupy a spot on your roster.
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Undervalued Players To Trade For
Josh Hader, San Diego Padres
Clearly, Hader has struggled mightily since joining the Padres. He’s pitched to a 12.10 ERA and a 4.67 FIP in 12 appearances spanning 9.2 innings for the National League West club. It’s clearly not what the team envisioned when they acquired him in a blockbuster deal at the trade deadline that saw Taylor Rogers, Dinelson Lamet, Esteury Ruiz, and prospect Robert Gasser head to Milwaukee.
It’s also clearly not what fantasy managers envisioned either, especially with Nick Martinez handling some ninth-inning duties for the Padres due to Hader’s performances.
Still, this a reliever who is arguably fantasy baseball’s best closer when he’s on form, and he’s been on form quite a bit since he’s made his Major League debut. Prior to this season, he’d posted an ERA above 3.00 just once and his career-low for strikeouts per nine innings was a 12.84 metric. Elsewhere, he’s registered 125 saves since the start of the 2019 campaign.
So, for as extreme as his struggles have been early in a San Diego uniform, he could be a league-winning player if he turns things around. Certainly, if he’s been sent to the waiver wire in leagues, he’s worth a pickup immediately if you have the bench space because he might just be starting to do that: Turn things around.
Hader has given up just one run in his last five outings, all one-inning appearances. In those five outings, Hader also has netted three saves. He might not be the full-time closer again just yet, but if he keeps pitching like this he certainly will be.
In a tweet from MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell on August 20, Padres manager Bob Melvin was quoted as saying “Our best team obviously is with Josh Hader in the closer role, and that’s why we got him.”
It's a tiny sample size, but it's a significant step in the right direction after such a horrendous statistical start to life as a San Diego Padre.
Nick Lodolo, Cincinnati Reds
Lodolo’s talent and upside have never been in question. It’s just, like with many rookies, he experienced some growing pains out of the gate in his first taste of life as a major league pitcher.
The 24-year-old gave up eight runs in his first nine major league innings and didn’t reach the five-inning mark in five of his first 10 starts. However, he’s starting to put it all together, and rather quickly too.
Entering play Wednesday, Lodolo had turned in a 2.43 ERA and a 2.61 FIP in his last five starts spanning 33.1 innings. Furthermore, in three of those five starts, he’s thrown at least six innings while giving up two or fewer runs and registering eight or more strikeouts.
And that was all before Wednesday's outing against the Pittsburgh Pirates in which Lodolo punched out 11 Pittsburgh batters in 6.1 innings while scattering six hits and three earned runs. He finished with a stellar 40% CSW rate and logged 16 swinging strikes on 102 pitches.
The only downside here is the lack of pitcher wins. That’ll tend to happen when you have starters who pitch for the Reds on your fantasy roster.
Case in point, at the start of the day on Wednesday, only four rotations had fewer pitcher wins than the 29 that Cincinnati has cobbled together. For reference, the Houston Astros lead the league with 73 pitcher wins from their rotation. All that being said, it’s clear to see that Lodolo is experiencing a late-season breakout.
Ke’Bryan Hayes, Pittsburgh Pirates
Speaking of National League Central players who are producing as of late, Hayes entered play Wednesday hitting .320 with a .414 on-base percentage, a home run, and three stolen bases in his last 29 plate appearances.
For the season, the infielder is hitting .246 with a .317 on-base percentage, seven home runs, and 17 stolen bases.
He’s excelled at making loud contact this season, with a 47.8% hard-hit rate and a 113 MPH max exit velocity, but hasn’t been able to translate that into consistent extra-base hits due to a significant amount of grounders, not to mention a relative lack of barrels – Hayes has logged an 18.3% fly ball rate, 48.4% ground ball rate and a 4.1% barrel rate so far.
Even in his current hot streak, Hayes is still hitting a similar number of grounders, with a 45% ground ball rate. Still, he’s also elevating the ball a bit more, with a 25% fly ball rate during the span, as well as a couple of barrels and a 10% barrel rate.
Hayes’ stolen base potential makes him a potential impact fantasy player down the stretch, but if he can start elevating the ball with a bit more regularity as he has lately and log a few more home runs, he could be a potential league winner, especially considering he might be getting more plate appearances moving forward.
It’s just one game, but Pirates manager Derek Shelton hit Hayes leadoff in Wednesday's win over Lodolo and the Reds – a game in which the third baseman had three hits, a double, and a run batted in. If that trend continues, it’ll only boost Hayes’ fantasy upside in the season’s final weeks.
Overvalued Players To Trade Away
Jose Berrios, Toronto Blue Jays
Jose Berrios had won at least 10 games in each of his previous four full seasons spent in the majors. Berrios had also rattled off a FIP south of 4.00 in four straight full seasons prior to this year.
While he’s continued the streak of double-digit wins with a (so far) 10 pitcher-win season this year, the run of results where the FIP numbers are concerned seems to be drawing to a close. Berrios has logged a 4.69 FIP in 152.2 innings this year to go along with a 5.07 ERA, 133 strikeouts, and 37 walks.
He’s also, by and large, missing bats at the lowest rates of his career. Berrios’ strikeouts per nine innings rate (7.84), K% (20.1%), and whiff rate (21.4%) would all be career-lows in a full season for the veteran if the season ended today. So, all that isn’t ideal.
The 28-year-old has pitched reasonably well lately, with a 2.93 ERA and a 3.12 FIP in his last five starts spanning 30.2 innings. In those five starts, he’s given up two earned runs or fewer in four of them.
So that’s slightly more ideal and more in line with what we’re used to seeing from Berrios. However, proceed with caution here. For as well as the former Twin has pitched lately, he’s still not doing too much in the way of missing bats.
His strikeouts per nine innings rate (7.34) during the span is right in line with his 2022 numbers, if actually a little lower. That metric is thanks to 25 strikeouts in those 30.2 innings, but nine of Berrios’ 25 strikeouts in that stretch came in one outing against the New York Yankees, a team that had the ninth-highest strikeout rate in the league in August.
We’ve also seen this story before this season. Berrios goes on a run of quality outings and then implodes in his next few starts. He started the year with a 4.13 FIP in 24 innings in his first five starts before surrendering 13 hits, 11 earned runs, two walks, and two home runs against just four strikeouts in 10 combined innings in his next two starts.
Then there was the month of July when Berrios logged a 3.00 ERA and a 3.26 FIP in 36 innings of work, winning half of his six starts and striking out 42 batters. He followed that with a two-start stretch against the Minnesota Twins and Cleveland Guardians in which he threw a combined 7.2 innings over two starts and surrendered 14 hits, 13 earned runs, four walks, and four home runs while striking out just two batters.
That’s not to say the veteran is guaranteed to struggle in his next few outings, but he admittedly doesn’t have the best track record on the mound this season.
Jonathan India, Cincinnati Reds
India enjoyed a quality season as a rookie in 2021 for both the Cincinnati Reds and fantasy managers, hitting .269 with a .376 on-base percentage, 21 home runs, and 12 stolen bases in 631 plate appearances.
Limited due to injury this season, India’s surface level numbers are reasonably similar in a slightly smaller sample size. He’s batting .258 with a .327 on-base percentage, 10 home runs, and a pair of stolen bases in 358 plate appearances. His underlying metrics though? Those aren’t so similar.
India logged some quality contact metrics as a rookie, first and foremost, registering a 9.6% barrel rate. There also wasn’t too much separating his wOBA (.363) and xwOBA (.352). Both were solid numbers. He also did reasonably well against offspeed stuff for a rookie, hitting .227 with a .283 xwOBA and four of his 21 homers against offspeed offerings.
Similar to the Reds lineup around him getting much worse from last season to this, India’s quality metrics have also done just that. Gotten worse.
The barrels haven’t come as often. The infielder’s barrel rate has fallen to 4.5% this year. So too has his xwOBA, which has dipped below .300 – it’s at .293 to be exact. Among the 209 batters league wide with at least 350 plate appearances, only 37 have a lower xwOBA.
India’s production against offspeed pitches has faltered too. He’s batting just .107 with a .158 xBA, a .199 xSLG and a .223 xwOBA against offspeed offerings. Curiously, he’s not seeing a significant uptick in offspeed stuff with those struggles. In fact, he’s actually seeing offspeed pitches slightly less often. In 2021, the pitches made up 11.5% of all the offerings India saw. This year, that number is down to 11.2%.
That might be in part due to the 24-year-old’s decreased effectiveness against fastballs. He hit .301 with a .399 xwOBA against them in 2021 but has seen those numbers drop to .286 and .325 respectively. They’re still solid numbers in a vacuum, but not quite on par with his past metrics.
Even his hard-hit rate, which was 38.6% and never incredibly high to begin with as a rookie, has dropped this year. It’s at 29.9%, which as of the beginning of play Wednesday ranked in just the seventh percentile league-wide.
All told, India has been reasonably productive this year, and he’s by no means someone to send to the waiver wire in redraft or (especially) dynasty leagues, but it’s been a down year at the plate for the infielder. And while his surface-level production has been useful for fantasy managers, the (underlying) numbers tell a different story.
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