Breakout Hitters to Watch for Fantasy Baseball Week 1

Jon Anderson looks at fantasy baseball breakout hitters, risers and potential sleepers for Week 1. He looks into Statcast data to identify hitter breakouts.

It is finally Opening Day and I could not be happier to be here writing on RotoBaller to share it with all of you fine readers. We all made it through a particularly rough offseason and now we're ready to get back into the swing of things.

I'm very excited about this series, which I will be writing weekly. The post should drop every Thursday morning, so keep an eye out here around that time if you like it.

The goal here is for me to be constantly monitoring the data, week-in and week-out, in order to spot those breakout hitters before anybody else does. Let's talk a bit more about the process before we get into our first collection of names.

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The Process

The beauty of Baseball Savant is that it gives us one of the richest datasets in the entire world, and I'm not even talking about just the sports world. Every day, tens of thousands of data points are generated from Major League Baseball games, capturing nearly everything that happens on the field. This gives us more powerful and rich data than we ever had before.

More data does not always mean better insights, but in this case, it does mean that if we're smart, we can get find legitimate conclusions and takeaways from the data much earlier than before. We don't really need to wait for a 400 plate appearance sample to feel confident that a hitter has actually improved, we can do that much more quickly now.

That isn't to say that some players won't fool us early on, it's not impossible to luck into a couple of weeks of checking every box at the plate, but the things we're looking for more often than not give us a pretty good idea of what's true.

Some of those things we're looking for:

• Contact Rate. We'll be looking for hitters that are making much more contact on their swings than in years past, which is a tough thing to fake for even a few weeks of time.
• Barrel Rate. These batted ball types (by exit velocity and exit angle) are great indicators of power potential.
• Max Exit Velocity. This gives us a good picture of raw bat speed. If we suddenly see a player beat his career-best maximum exit velocity by three miles per hour, we'll know he's swinging the bat harder than before.
• Plate Patience Metrics. We'll see which hitters are swinging more or less, and we can even break that down by the quality of the pitches they're offering at or letting go by.

Spring Training Disclaimer

Since this post is coming out before regular-season games begin, we will be looking partially at Spring Training numbers here. We're also exclusively focused right now on the exciting rookies that have made their teams. The reason for this is that the upside with rookies is a bit higher than the established Major Leaguers that may have made a change over the offseason. The lack of refined data we have on players that haven't had much time in the Majors limits what we can know about them, but that means it limits what we can know about their ceilings as well.

We are relying just as much on minor league data from past seasons and the scouting reports as we are on three weeks of Spring Training data here, but when we do look at the spring data, I really want to focus on strikeouts and walks. Any rookie facing a lot of Major League pitching and not striking out over a 30+ plate appearance sample definitely opens my eyes, that's a very positive sign for the future. Now, to the names!

Julio Rodriguez, OF - Seattle Mariners

We'll start it off with some low-hanging fruit. The game's #3 overall prospect has made the team out of camp and will be an everyday player for the Mariners this year. J-Rod was always going to spend plenty of time in the Majors in 2022, but he really pushed management's hand by performing amazingly well in the spring weeks. As of April 4th, Rodriguez hit .419/.471/.839 with three homers in 34 plate appearances, being one of the most effective hitters in the whole league in that short time frame.

The M's lineup is looking pretty good this year, but with some success, Rodriguez could find himself in a pretty prominent spot there. Here's where he's hit this spring:

Four games hitting in the bottom-third there, so maybe that's where he starts out, but being in the top third of the lineup is something that is quite likely to happen if he comes out of the gate hot.

The only criticism on Rodriguez would be the lack of experience at high levels, he is completely skipping the AAA level, but he did hit an elite .362/.461/.546 in AA last year, with (more importantly) a crazy 18%-14% K-BB% ratio. That's about as good as you can do, and there is little doubt that he would have had tons of success in AAA as well. His teammate Jarred Kelenic does provide an example of these things going the wrong way, as he was quite a bad Major League hitter last season after lighting up the minor leagues for years.

We can't say without a doubt that Rodriguez will be a fantasy-relevant bat this year, but he should be rostered in all leagues right now - so jump on him if he's available.

Steven Kwan, OF - Cleveland Guardians

At the time of this writing, Kwan had seen 30 plate appearances in spring and had not struck out a single time. Not only that, he had not even swung and missed a single time. Small samples be damned, not many Major Leaguers can go 30 straight trips to the plate without a whiff, and he is now officially a Major Leaguer having made Cleveland's roster out of camp. This is all backed up by the fact that he posted a strikeout rate below 10% in AAA last year. The guy just does not go down on strikes.

That does come with the natural trade-off of not having a ton of power, but he's not so extreme in that regard. He hit a dozen homers last year in 341 plate appearances. That would extrapolate to 20+ over a full season, but of course, there's a big step up in terms of the quality of the opponent coming here as he sets up for his Major League debut.

What we do know is that Kwan will help a fantasy team's batting average. Strikeout rates translate quite well between the minors and majors, so there's no real worry that he'll suddenly be a guy striking out over 20% of the time. That makes Kwan a guy with a solid batting average floor and hopes to be a guy that won't kill your team anywhere else. He is worthy of acquisition in deeper leagues.

Kevin Smith, 3B - Oakland Athletics

The Matt Chapman trade sent Smith from Toronto to Oakland, which seems to have ended up with him in a Major League lineup. This guy was completely off the fantasy radar coming into draft season, but he deserves some hype right now.

Last year, Smith made 410 plate appearances in AAA in the Blue Jays system and slashed a very cool .285/.370/.561 with 21 homers and 18 steals. The strikeout rate was solid at 23.7% and he walked a bunch as well as 11.2%. That is the kind of line we really like to see from guys in AAA, and the fact that he flirted with 20-20 in just 94 games is pretty eye-popping.

He did get a cup of coffee in the Majors in 2021 and struggled mightily in 36 plate appearances with a .094/.194/.188 line and a bad 30.6% K%. We will have to keep a close eye on him out of the gates because it's quite possible that he's just not ready for primetime yet. His spring, however, tells a positive tale as he's hit .333/.368/.667 through 38 plate appearances with a great 18.4% K% and three dingers (off of Randy Labaut, Dallas Keuchel, and Alex Colome if you're interested).

Smith is significantly less likely to help your fantasy team this year than other rookies like Rodriguez or Bobby Witt Jr., but he's quite appealing with the power/speed combination he showed last season and also the fact that he plays at a position that can be pretty tough to fill in fantasy this season. Keep a close eye on Smith over there in Oakland (he might be the only thing worth seeing on that team... yikes!).

Bryson Stott, SS - Philadelphia Phillies

The young left-handed Phillies shortstop should be the Opening Day starter on a really, really good offense. Roster Resource has him penciled in at the #9 hitter, which is probably close to the right since the Phils have five stud hitters that will fill the top half there.

Stott has hit .480/.581/.680 with a homer, a 13% K%, and a 19% BB% in spring, making contact on 78% of his swings. Those are impressive numbers. Stott spent the majority of 2021 in AA, hitting .301/.368/.481 with 10 homers and six steals in 351 plate appearances, and then played 10 games in AAA, hitting .303/.439/.394. The lack of time at the highest minor league level may things tougher for him early on this year, but the contact ability is impressive and he's going to have some total stud hitters behind him even if he does end up at the bottom of the lineup.

Overall Advice

We'll be back next week to review the first week of Major League regular season data, which is thrilling, but for now, let me set the table a bit more. For every hitter, but especially these rookies, we really want to focus on the plate discipline numbers right away. It is really tough to know how long of a leash to give these rookies on your fantasy team since the perceived upside is so high. That means that you can sink a lot of cost into them as you eat bad week after bad week hoping they turn it around (Jarred Kelenic 2021!).

If any of these names come out of the first two or three weeks of the season with a K% above 30%, it's probably time to at least bench them until they turn that around. It's simply too hard to be successful in fantasy baseball with that kind of strikeout rate. Conversely, if they aren't putting up big numbers but going for an 18% K% with some decent exit velocity numbers, it's probably a good idea to hold tight for another couple of weeks.

Check back next week for updates and more potential hitter breakouts!

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