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I hope you all are having a fantastic All-Star break. I made it about a day and a half before I had the itch to get back here and write more fantasy baseball stuff.
Plenty of people are transitioning to fantasy football this week, but the fantasy baseball season is just about to get really interesting. I'm here to give you a handful of names to consider acquiring or shedding for the fantasy baseball stretch run (focusing on redraft leagues).
These will mostly be players that are rostered in your league already, but they are players I recommend going after. Sometimes you have to be aggressive and give up more than you're comfortable with, but these are players I would vouch for as we move ahead towards the playoffs/end of the season. Let's get into it!
A .279/.383/.403 line at the break isn't going to make the LeMahieu owner in your league anxious to get rid of him, but when you look under the hood, you see that LeMahieu has been underperforming that line quite a bit. His xBA is up at .303 and the xSLG is towering above the actual at .489.
He is the first player I've found with the green line here hovering above the red all season long:
The uptick was already underway well before the break, as he slashed .329/.471/.415 with two homers and a .438 xwOBA over his last 100 plate appearances. Again, he won't be easy to get - but he's definitely someone to pay the market price for right now, especially if you're looking for a runs and batting average guy.
I have nothing bad to say about McClanahan, and in fact, I've benefited quite a bit from his huge first half. The reason for the sell recommendation is just that right now is the peak of the trade value, and it's usually a good idea to sell assets when they reach a new peak of their value (hello, cryptocurrency!).
There is no doubt that McClanahan will dominate when healthy and on the bump for the rest of the year, but you can certainly get another ace in return for the guy that doesn't have the innings questions. McClanahan's career high in innings was last year at 123.1, he's about two starts away from matching that total.
It is not as though the Rays are going to shut the guy down at 140 innings, there's no way. I do think it's pretty likely that they'll start taking him out of games a bit earlier and may even have him skip a turn in the rotation at some point - slight things like that.
The Rays are firmly in the Wild Card mix right now, but they are also 13 games behind the Yankees in the division, so there's a chance they could really not be playing for much come September - and at that point, you'd get really worried about McClanahan's workload. I would be taking a Gerrit Cole or a first-round bat for him at this point without much hesitancy.
It's been a segmented season for Marte. Let's look at his monthly production in our favorite categories:
A horrid April, a strong May-June but without any power, and then an elite 59 plate appearances in July.
We know that Marte is capable of being one of the most impactful bats in the game, and we've seen that recently. He has hit more balls in the air recently (his ground-ball rate currently sits at a season-low 43.9%), and that has driven the power surge.
Marte is a guy that could get 15 homers while holding a .320 batting average and even stealing a few bags for the rest of the season. It's far from a sure thing given the inconsistencies in his career, but the upside is worthy of going out and paying a big price.
Maybe this is an oversimplification, but I am who I am:
The 19.5% K% just doesn't support an ERA anywhere near 2.54, and I would be looking to sell Mikolas for a player of perceived equal value right now (or better, of course).
Here are top-10 hard-hit rates for hitters with strikeout rates under 20%:
Looking at the top-five here, you might think it's a list of top MVP candidates. It's a really, really good list of hitters - and Vaughn's name sticks out. The reason we can get a good price on Vaughn right now is that he has ~only~ 10 homers with a low 6.9% barrel rate. That is because of a high 48.7% GB%.
But remember back a couple of years ago when people were tearing their hair out about Vlad's inability to get the ball into the air? Well, we've seen time and time again how quickly that can turn around for a young player, and Vaughn just might be one of the game's best hitters for years to come - and I think it starts now. Go get him.
We talked a lot about Javier in the first edition of the OUTLIERS series (read that here), but it's worth re-iterating. Javier has had most of his success with the strikeout. His walk rate of 9.4% is mediocre, the barrel rate (8.2%) is league average, and the ground-ball rate (26.3%) is atrocious. The way he's pieced together a strong first half is with the 35.2% strikeout rate.
That means that if the strikeout rate plummets, he could have some real trouble. That's not good to hear, given that his strikeout rate is one of the league's biggest outliers.
This chart shows SwStr% vs. K% with the dot colors being represented by CSW%. You can see Javier is far away from the trend line, and he's the lone green dot in the top right quadrant. That means the strikeout rate is very, very likely to head downwards, which makes right now a great time to hop off the train.
It has been a bumpy 2022 season for Clevinger; he may have even been dropped a time or two in your league. For the season he has fine numbers:
With that has come an inability to stay on the mound and just two wins. He has just 46.1 Major League innings on his arm, which is both good and bad news given that he missed all of 2021 after Tommy John surgery. It's good news because he hasn't put a ton of work on the arm, but also bad news given that health is the main question and he hasn't exactly passed that test with flying colors.
The reason for the buy is that none of the injuries have been arm related, and he's looked really sharp lately. In his final start of the first half, he put up a beautiful 34.0% CSW% and a big 17% SwStr% as he threw six strong innings against Arizona. I want to be on the buy-side of a guy that was one of the game's best young pitchers in 2018-2019 and now seems to be back on track.
Remember that we are just talking about redraft leagues.
It just doesn't appear that Cruz is ready for The Show. He has a 40% K% in July with a .196/.233/.375 line and a bad 62% contact rate. For his short season, he's gone .204/.240/.398 with four homers, a 36.5% K%, a 4.8% BB%, and a 65% contact%.
His raw power and speed will turn into some homers and steals through the rest of the year, but I don't think they'll do enough to justify the likely bad batting average and lack of counting stats. I'd be looking to sell Cruz while some of the hype is still there.
Highest K% Since 6/15 (100 PA Minimum)
For more in-depth analysis on Cruz, check out this article by our own Eric Samulski.
The 4.69 ERA and 1.40 WHIP have to have your league-mates no longer viewing Giolito as a fantasy ace. He might not be, but look at the White Sox's second-half schedule:
That's 36 games against the Royals, Guardians, Tigers, and Athletics. If Giolito starts the first game out of the break and then every fifth game (this is almost sure not to happen, but just for an example), his schedule would be:
vs. CLE vs. OAK vs. KC @ KC vs. DET @ CLE @ BAL vs. KC vs. MIN @ OAK @ DET vs. CLE @ MIN
And he hasn't been a total gas can by any means with a 31.5% CSW%, a 13.8% SwStr%, a 27.2% K%, and an 8.3% BB% this season. I think Giolito just might pitch like a fantasy ace the rest of the way, and you don't have to pay that kind of price for him right now.
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