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Corbin Young looks at big fantasy baseball stories from the sixth week of the 2024 MLB season: Jo Adell is making changes, one of Jack Flaherty's best games, and Nationals' hitters making waves.
A friend told me once that the days will be long and the years will be short. That's the case for real-life and fantasy baseball when we're looking at the top stories of the week. Most teams play six or seven games in a week, with about 25 plate appearances for most hitters. For pitchers, it's usually only one start, with several throwing two in a given week.
It's important to keep track of the trends, but not overreact to a week or two of data because sometimes numbers trick us into thinking the player is making a legitimate change. Regardless, we have a few fun and notable highlights, including a post-hype player, revenge game, and hitters that may have burned us in the past.
Take the time to appreciate the days and weeks of the sport we love because time flies.
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Jo Adell is Doing What?
When we remove the games when Jo Adell pinch hit or run, he batted in the bottom third of the lineup in 13 games. Since the Mike Trout injury news, Adell moved up to second in the lineup for a few contests. Though Adell hasn't exploded this past week, the early production warrants our attention. Adell has four home runs, 11 runs, 11 RBI, and five stolen bases (five caught stealing), with a .273 batting average.
Over the past week, Adell has one home run, zero stolen bases, and a .143 batting average in 21 plate appearances, with luck factors shifting away from his favor. We shouldn't overreact to one or two weeks unless the playing time reduces. That's where checking the skill changes comes into play for a post-hype sleeper like Adell.
Plate discipline has been an issue for Adell, with a 37.7 percent chase rate and 73.4 percent zone contact rate from 2020-2022 across 557 plate appearances. Meanwhile, we saw a slight improvement in zone contact rate of 79.3 percent in 2023 and 2024.
The other notable change for Adell involves not pulling the ball as much, with a 45 percent pull rate (2020-2022) to a 37.8 percent pull rate (2023-2024). He hit more line drives with the lower pull rate, with the groundball and flyball rates staying the same, though they may not be correlated.
Hitting the ball hard has never been an issue for Adell, but the challenge involves spraying them at optimal launch angles. That's evident in the barrel rates, yet it's early to declare if that will stick in 2024. Adell destroyed line drives and flyballs in 2023 at 101.8 mph (No. 1) with 99 mph (No. 6) in 2024 among hitters with a minimum of 25 batted ball events. Several of Adell's expected stats point toward the results being legitimate.
We'll see if the skill and batted ball profile changes stick over the long term. The data points to Adell breaking out as a post-hype sleeper in 2024. Given the sample size, the projection systems may not catch up and realize what Adell is doing before it's too late.
Jack Flaherty Had One of the Best Games of His Career
Besides Tarik Skubal, it might be challenging to identify which Tigers' starting pitchers have been performing well to begin the 2024 season. Many of us playing in deeper leagues know the names, but the casual fan might not realize they have an underrated group of starting pitchers. One to highlight is Jack Flaherty, who dominated against his old team, the Cardinals, on April 30.
Speaking of Flaherty, he had a career-high in strikeouts at 14, with the second-best strikeout minus walk rate (56.5 percent) and third-best swinging-strike rate (22.8 percent) in a game throughout his career. Flaherty likely had the adrenaline flowing because the four-seam averaged 95.1 mph, over one mph above his season-long average. The last time Flaherty reached 95 mph or higher on the fastball in a game came on August 24, 2020.
Flaherty's four-seamer never had above-average induced vertical break. However, his four-seamer shifted back to 15.4 IVB with more than an inch less arm-side run in 2024 than the career average. Flaherty's career-best swinging-strike rate on the four-seamer at 12.7 percent seems partially inflated by Flaherty's career-best recent outing. We can't expect the ace-like outcomes often for Flaherty, though the underlying metrics appear to be bouncing back closer to his peak seasons.
Nationals' Hitters Having Career Revivals
The Nationals have several hitters seemingly reviving their careers, and this isn't a joke. Over the past week, Nick Senzel is the most notable, with Jesse Winker also showing signs of life. Senzel hit two of his five home runs and four of his three barrels in the past week. That raises eyebrows because Senzel is nearly halfway to the 2022 and 2023 marks with over 220 batted ball events each season.
Senzel might be making a swing change with a career-high flyball rate of 47.2 percent by a longshot, over 12 percentage points above his career norm. Unsurprisingly, Senzel's home run rate ballooned to 29.4 percent, nearly three times his career average. Interestingly, Senzel has been pulling the ball 32.4 percent of the time, over six percentage points below the norm.
Besides barreling up the ball more often early in 2024, Senzel averages 93.2 mph on FB/LD (No. 155), up over two mph from 2023 (91.1 mph) and 2022 (90.6 mph). While it's not a drastic improvement, Senzel elevating the ball more and posting slightly better exit velocities will translate to middling power production of 15+ home runs. There's something intriguing brewing with the Nationals.
From one afterthought to another, we have Winker, who is healthy and playing nearly every day. Though Winker will likely platoon at times, he played against three lefties over the previous six contests. He has 49 plate appearances against left-handed pitchers, accounting for 38.2 percent of the total. For context, Winker faced left-handed pitchers in 20.6 percent of his plate appearances in 2022-2023.
After four weeks of being red hot, with a .300 batting average or higher in each. Winker posted a .946 OPS and 172 wRC+, with a .400 BABIP in the first four weeks of the season across 82 plate appearances. Since then, Winker cooled off over the past two weeks, with a .130 batting average, .411 OPS, and 23 wRC+ in 51 plate appearances. Unsurprisingly, Winker's BABIP fell to .156 over the past two weeks, indicating some luck factors impacting the results.
That indicates Winker's productive start seems fluky with the zone contact (83.2 percent) and chase rates (25.7 percent) looking similar to past seasons. It's early, but Winker is hitting tons of groundballs (50.6 percent), nearly seven points above his career average. Besides Winker's days with the Reds, injuries and power metrics haven't reached those peaks since. Hitting too many grounders could negatively affect the power if he doesn't destroy flyballs and line drives.
Winker has been on a downward trend in EV on FB/LD since 2021, but playing with the Mariners in 2021 and injuries in 2022 caused the numbers to plummet. He might be slightly bouncing back via the EV on FB/LD in 2024, but we'll need to see more than luck factors to buy into the sustainability.
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