Champ or Chump: Huascar Ynoa

Is your fantasy team looking for more pitching? Nearly every manager is, making it difficult to find breakout arms on the waiver wire since everybody is looking for the same thing. This situation can also make it far too easy to put more faith in a breakout performance than warranted, potentially leaving you with an empty bag come August and September.

Huascar Ynoa of the Atlanta Braves is at considerable risk of regressing in a major way in this author's estimation. He has been great with a 4-2 record and 3.02 ERA over 44 2/3 IP this season, and his 3.08 xFIP suggests that his success has been mostly deserved. However, his 4.68 xERA on Baseball Savant suggests that he's been hit harder than you might expect while his MiLB track record suggests that his 27.9 K% is heading south.

None of this is to suggest that the 23-year-old will immediately stink as he has a volatile profile that's likely to feature both studs and duds moving forward. However, you might want to pick his matchups carefully or trade him while his value is at its peak, though trading him is going to be very difficult with is diagnosis of a broken hand.

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The Scouting Perspective on Ynoa

Author's Note: This piece was researched, written, and scheduled for publication before news broke that Ynoa would miss a significant chunk of time after punching a wall in frustration. The injury likely obliterates his trade value, and you shouldn't feel obligated to hold him on an IL spot if you are managing other injuries.

Ynoa has always been a polarizing figure in scouting circles as some saw top-of-the-rotation upside while others thought they were looking at a middle reliever. Here are his scouting grades at FanGraphs to help you understand why there was such disagreement:

Both his fastball and his slider grade out as at least above average on the 20-80 scouting scale, so onlookers who value stuff above all else saw what they wanted to see. However, 40-grade command both now and in the future is not that promising, nor is the fact that Ynoa only had two pitches receive scouting grades at all. Starters need both control and arsenal depth to succeed in the major leagues and this scouting report suggests neither. As a result, Ynoa wasn't ranked as an overall prospect at all while coming in at 1oth in the Braves system.

Work Before 2021

Ynoa's advocates argue that his two-pitch repertoire is so good that the standard rules don't apply to him, but he doesn't have the MiLB resume to back that assertion up. Ynoa debuted for Double-A Mississippi in 2019, tossing 13 2/3 IP of 5.27 ERA ball. His 2.85 xFIP was substantially better, likely the result of a .366 BABIP and 22.2% HR/FB. However, guys with two pitches have no margin for error and tend to get hit hard when one or the other isn't working. Those "luck metrics" may not have been total flukes, even considering the small sample size.

Mississippi is also where offense goes to die. The stadium's 0.914 runs factor was in the second percentile of the MiLB landscape in 2019, while its 0.746 HR factor (ninth percentile) is the lowest in the history of this column. If Ynoa got hit hard there, what would happen in a neutral environment?

The Braves couldn't wait to find out, so they promoted him to Triple-A (Gwinnett) midseason. The results weren't great, as his 5.33 ERA was slightly higher than it was at Double-A while his xFIP jumped to 4.82 over 72 2/3 IP. His .332 BABIP and 19.4% HR/FB were both unacceptably high again, while his BB% spiked from 7.9% at Double-A to 10.3% at Triple-A. His K% was just shy of 24% at both stops, which isn't really high enough to justify the risk in fantasy.

Gwinnett was also a pitcher's park by 2019 Triple-A standards, but the league as a whole played like Coors Field. Case in point: Gwinnett's 0.902 HR factor for Triple-A was still in the 79th percentile for long balls across all of MiLB. It's fair to take Ynoa's statistics there with a grain of salt, though you still have to reckon with the low strikeout rate and high walk rate.

There were no minor leagues for Ynoa to pitch in during 2020, but he impressed somebody at the alternate training site enough to log 21 2/3 IP with the big league club. His 5.82 ERA and 5.39 xFIP completely missed the fantasy radar though, especially since they were backed by a 17 K% and 13 BB%. There were quite literally no expectations for him heading into 2021.

Stuff Not as Good as Advertised?

Ynoa is throwing a changeup 6% of the time this season, but his repertoire is still almost exclusively fastball (47.8% thrown) and slider (46%). Neither pitch has the peripheral stats to support his current K%. Ynoa's heater averages 96.9 mph on the radar gun, but its 2,124 RPM suggests that it lacks the late-life of strikeout fastballs. The numbers bear that out as it only has a 6.6 SwStr% on the season. Put another way, Ynoa throws a harder Kyle Hendricks fastball as opposed to a true flamethrower like Max Scherzer's.

Likewise, Ynoa's slider is an impressive weapon with a 19.2 SwStr%, 39.7% chase rate, and 48.1 Zone%. All of those numbers are great for a pitcher's primary strikeout pitch, but they are not otherworldly. Considering that his fastball isn't really a strikeout pitch despite excellent velocity, the slider would probably have to be otherworldly to maintain his 27.9 K%.

Ynoa has also been fortunate to allow just a .264 BABIP on the season, something that's been vital to suppressing the effects of his 19.4% HR/FB on his ERA. While we don't have that much MiLB data on Ynoa, what we do have suggests that the HR/FB is here to stay while his BABIP is destined to rise. Factoring in some K% regression to his MiLB numbers, we get several red flags before even considering how a guy with 40 command only has a 6.1 BB%.

Conclusion

This author began this analysis seeing Ynoa as another Kevin Gausman, who is also a two-pitch pitcher who piles up strikeouts with little room for error. Obviously, Gausman was great in 2020 and even better in 2021 so far. However, the fact that Ynoa's heater isn't really a swing-and-miss pitch puts more pressure on his slider than Gausman puts on his splitter. They aren't that similar despite some points of commonality.

Ynoa is rostered in 82% of Yahoo! leagues, suggesting that he's widely embraced in the fantasy community. It may behoove his managers to try and sell him like he's Kevin Gausman before his numbers more accurately reflect his true talent. Since his current numbers are significantly better than those he's projected for moving forward, Ynoa is a Chump.

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