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Los Angeles Angels shortstop Jose Iglesias is a 2021 fantasy baseball draft value. His ADP is undervalued, making him a potential draft bargain and late-round sleeper to target.
BALLER MOVE: Draft target ~pick 375
CURRENT ADP: ~403 overall
ANALYSIS: Orioles hitting coach Don Long compared Iglesias to Hanser Alberto just before the start of the 2020 MLB season, suggesting that improved plate discipline rather than a swing change would help Iglesias be a more productive hitter. Four months later, Iglesias finished the 2020 season with a characteristically high 37.7% chase rate (38.4% career average) but a league-best .358 xBA and a career-high .956 OPS.
Instead of changing his plate approach, Iglesias posted career-best contact quality metrics across the board, including a 36.5% hard-hit rate, an 86.2 mph average exit velocity, and a .401 xwOBAcon. After never ranking higher than the fifth percentile in average hard-hit rate since Statcast began tracking the metric in 2015, Iglesias managed to crack the 36th percentile in 2020. Notably, Iglesias’ hard-hit gains were exclusively localized to fastballs, his max exit velocity was not a career-high, and he had a similar hot streak back in 2013. And although hard-hit rate tends to stabilize around 45 batted balls (Iglesias hit 83 fastballs and 43 non-fastballs in 2020), 2020 was still a fairly small sample size for Iglesias. That said, Iglesias never hit the ball so consistently hard since at least 2015, and there’s a real chance that his power increase will stick in 2021 as a result. The move to a loaded Angels lineup rather than the Orioles means fantasy managers should target Iglesias as a high-upside MI pick in drafts as a result.
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