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Willson Contreras 2021 Player Outlook: A Top Catcher By Default
4 years agoA .243 batting average with .164 isolated power is not a good season. That was the line Contreras produced in 2020. It was a disappointing dip in his career path. And yet, those 57 games did nothing to drop him out of the top five at his position in fantasy. There was pretty much nothing he could have done to drop that far. So here Contreras remains thanks to the two sweetest words in the English language: de-fault. Contreras' 2020 did have many positives that make him actually deserving of that ranking though. He set career-highs with a 47.8 hard-hit percentage, 35.8 sweet-spot percentage, 9.1 launch angle, 89.8 exit velocity, and 29.1 line-drive rate. It was a display of quality contact for sure. That strong contact is great, but thanks to a career-worst K% and a 15.9% HR/FB rate, he didn't produce enough. From here, the next step is setting another career-high in launch angle to give his balls a better chance of becoming home runs. It won't take much more than that to be the best non-Realmuto catcher in fantasy, and he could be had 100 spots after J.T. in drafts.
