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Jon Anderson identifies busts from the previous fantasy baseball season who may not bounce back in 2021. These players could be worth avoiding in early drafts.
One of the biggest questions out there as we head into 2021 is how much weight to put on what happened in 2020. Obviously, it was a very odd year for Major League Baseball. Players had a couple of weeks of normal Spring Training before being sent home for four months only to come back to a quick 60 game season where randomness reigned.
The good news is that we are more equipped to deal with this than ever before. We can now quantify so much more of what happens in a baseball game than ever before, and that allows us to make better judgments on what is real and what is random. We are not now and never will be anywhere near perfect at this, but every year we get better as more and more data rolls in.
We will use some of this data to examine some 2020 busts that might not be able to blame their bad performance on the small sample size.
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Javier Baez (SS, CHC)
There is always a reason for skepticism with a guy with a career 28% strikeout rate and a 5% walk rate who continues to hit for a good batting average. It is just statistically really tough to contribute in the batting average category while you're putting so few balls in play. That finally caught up Baez in 2020, as he hit a putrid .203 with an even more barf-worthy .238 on-base percentage. After a career-best (but still not good) 72.4% contact rate in 2019, he regressed significantly to just 67.9%. The swinging-strike rate also increased from the 2019 value up to 16.2%. All of this was while he actually chased bad pitches less, posting a career-best 38.6% out of zone swing rate.
While the numbers are pretty extreme, none of it was super surprising. Baez has always been a guy prone to long cold streaks just because of his lack of contact ability. The more alarming part of his 2020 season was how much worse he was even when making contact. He posted a .369 expected wOBA on contact after seeing that number sit at .460 the two prior years. You can take on some extra strikeouts if they come along with a great contact profile, but that just did not happen with Baez.
I'm not sure saying he will continue to "junk it up" is what I really think, but I do find it unlikely that you ever see Baez be the fantasy stud that he was in 2018. The Cubs are also entering at least a short-term rebuilding mode, and the lineup in 2020 will probably their worst unit in quite a while, lowering the projected counting stats for Baez. Let someone else chase that big name and fill your shortstop slot with someone else.
Jose Altuve (2B, HOU)
Just two years ago, Altuve was a first-round pick on average. He was a top-three pick on average three seasons ago. Those days are long gone, as Altuve's 2020 season made the decline very apparent. In his age-30 season, he hit just .219 with a .344 slugging percentage. The power disappeared (five homers in 48 games) and the steals appear to be a thing of the distant past (eight steals in 172 games since 2018).
What Altuve always did best was make tons of contact. In his best years, he was making contact on nearly 90% of his swings. Over the last two years, that number has fallen to 80%.
When he did make contact in 2020, it was really weak stuff. He had a ground-ball rate of 49% and an expected wOBA on contact of .303, a really bad number. Now we have a guy second baseman that we cannot count on to help in any category. It is possible that the batting average comes back, but it's not the sure thing that it used to be. There are serious questions about whether he will ever hit homers at a high rate, and there aren't questions about if he will steal bases again; it seems certain that he won't.
Everything had been trending in the wrong direction for Altuve, and then 2020 put a final dagger in his fantasy stock. He is sure to be cheap this year, but even at the discount, he will likely be vastly overpriced just because of the name value.
Josh Bell (1B, WAS)
After a breakout 2019 season in which Bell hit .277/.367/.569 with 37 bombs and 116 RBI, Bell fell flat in 2020. He struggled to do much of anything, hitting just .226/.305/.364 with eight homers in his 57 games. He has now been traded to a much better offense in Washington, which could cause some helium in his draft stock. I'm not buying into it.
Most of Bell's career damage came in the first half of the 2019 season where he hit .302/.376/.648 with 27 homers and 84 (!) RBI. It is admittedly arbitrary to just remove a big chunk of games like this, but if we take away that hot streak from 2019, Bell's career would be a .252 batting average and a .426 slugging percentage. That is really dreary stuff for a guy that is drafted as a top-ten first baseman in fantasy.
There were no redeeming qualities to Bell's 2020 season. After keeping his strikeout rate under 20% for the first four years of his career, that figure bloated to 26.5%. His walk rate also reached a career-low at 9.9%. His .354 expected wOBA on contact was also the worst mark of his career and not indicative of a true power hitter. Maybe it is too soon to completely write-off that 2019 first half, but getting ahead of this kind of stuff is how you win in fantasy baseball. Leave Josh Bell for someone else.
Carlos Santana (1B, KC)
Coming into the 2019 season, Santana was a popular late-round first base pick in on-base percentage leagues. His career 15.5% walk rate is one of the highest you'll ever see, and that made him a very useful player in OBP leagues. To the delight of those who drafted him, he added an enormous amount of power to his game that year, hitting 34 homers while scoring 110 runs and driving in 93 runs. He was one of the most valuable hitters in fantasy with how late he was drafted.
This gave merit to drafting him as a starting first base in 2020, but he really did not come through on those hopes. He hit just .199, although his 18.4% walk rate maintained a good enough batting average at .349. The home runs declined down to about a 20 homer pace over a full season, as he hit just eight in 60 games. That was more on pace with what we had seen from him prior to 2019, and the inability to hit for even a decent batting average left Santana as a pretty useless fantasy hitter.
He will continue to walk at an extraordinary rate, and he may very well have better luck in 2021 that will lead to another .260+ batting average. That will make him useful in on-base percentage leagues, but the counting stat production from 2019 seems to be an exception rather than the rule. Santana will be 35 for most of the 2021 season, and with how little upside there is here, it is hard to imagine it being a profitable decision to roster him.
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