Fantasy Baseball Do Not Drop List: Holding Ceddanne Rafaela, Jack Leiter, more

I'm just going to briefly start with the players you know you're definitely not cutting. However, they qualified on this list, so I wanted to list them just to show that the underlying metrics are OK and there doesn't seem to be any immediate cause for concern. Yes, there may be things going on underneath the hood that could lower our expectations a bit, but the season isn't even one month old, so I'm not panicking on layers you drafted this early on. Sadly, Wyatt Langford was hurt on Tuesday night, so just keep an eye on his injury status over at the Rotoworld Player News page.

In short, if a hitter is on this list, I'm inclined to give them a little more leash. Their qualifying for this article means that they are making better-than-average contact in the zone, not swinging and missing too much, and also making hard contact when they do make contact. Yes, if you're in a shallow league, there are certainly players on this list that you could move on from (Alec Bohm, Eduoard Julien, Kyle Karros, Brandon Marsh) for a hot hitter on the waiver wire, but each of these players at least still has some redeeming value. I'm going to focus on a few of them in more detail, who I think deserve to stay on your rosters. Last week, I also mentioned adding Miguel Vargas because of his underlying metrics, and he appeared on this list as well, which might be a bit of a sign. Ivan Herrera also appeared in that article.

Ceddanne Rafaela - 2B/OF, BOS

Technically, Rafaela shouldn't be on this list because his wRC+ is over 100, so he has been an above-average hitter this year. However, I'm getting tons of questions about whether or not people should drop him in fantasy leagues because he has one home run and no stolen bases. On one hand, I get it. He has stolen 19 and 20 bases the last two years, so getting a zero there is not what you signed up for. However, he didn't become slow; he's just never been an efficient basestealer. He made some improvements last year and has, according to Statcast, been taking shorter leads so far this season, which may be why he was caught stealing twice. I think this is just some small sample size anomaly, and I'd still expect the 17-18 steals most projection systems have for him.

Another part of the reason you should hold onto Rafaela is that he's improving as a hitter. He's shortened his swing a bit this season and is not swinging hard as often as he did last year. That has allowed him to square up the baseball more and cut his swinging strike rate by 3%. He's also been far more patient at the plate. My counterargument to that is that he's being a bit too patient in the zone and taking too many called strikes on pitches he could do damage on, which is why his home run totals are low. The barrel rate and hard-hit rate are in line with last year, so I think this is a 25-year-old who is making an adjustment in his approach and just trying to find the right levels for him. With the team around him also struggling, he may not be looking to make "careless" mistakes. However, the underlying tools are all here, and the process is improving, so I think we're going to see results coming soon.

Cam Smith - OF, HOU

Cam Smith is another player who technically doesn't belong on this list, but he's one of the most dropped hitters on Yahoo this week because he's 0-for-19 over his last five games. I know that's bad, but we have to exercise a little bit of patience in the early going with young top prospects who are still evolving as players. Smith was electric to start the season. Then he wasn't, so we have to find the most likely "true talent" level for him. He has an 47% hard-hit rate and 16% barrel rate. His 12.9% SwStr% is below league-average, but is in line with what he did last year, and his zone contact is league-average. So we have a young player who is getting pitched outside the zone more often and is offering at those pitches too much. But, when pitchers do some into the zone, he's making enough contact and making authoritative contact, all while showing a 3.5 mph increase in bat speed. We're not even asking Cam Smith to demonstrate a new skill; we're just asking him to get back closer to last year's chase rate. Even just getting that could get us closer to the breakout we thought we were getting in the first two weeks of the season, and there is always the potential for further growth considering how young he is.

Trent Grisham - OF, NYY

Yes, last year was probably an outlier career year for Grisham, and I'm sure the Yankees wish they hadn't given him a $21 million qualifying offer. That being said, Grisham is not this bad. His chase rate is better than last year, his 93% zone contact is elite, his 5.6% SwStr% is minuscule, his exit velocities are better than last year, and his 57% hard-hit rate would be a career high. Grisham is getting attacked inside a little bit more than he was last year, and there's a chance he's been impacted by some of the cold weather lingering in the Northeast. He's also sporting a .163 BABIP, a .242 xBA, and a .474 xSLG that are far better than the surface-level results he's gotten. As the weather heats up in New York, I think Grisham will as well, and it wouldn't surprise me if he hits about .230-.240 from here on out with 20+ home runs.

Jose Fernandez - SS, ARI

People were so ready to move on from Fernandez after he didn’t match the production of his two-homer debut, but we have to have more patience than that. An injury to Carlos Santana has opened more at-bats for Fernandez, and he is now an everyday player in Arizona. He hasn’t hit a home run since his debut, but the tools you were enamored with - his elite bat speed and sprint speed - still exist. He also has a 42% hard-hit rate and a league-average swinging strike rate. Yes, he's chasing out of the zone more than we'd like to see, and pitchers will continue to pitch him there until he learns. However, an 89% zone contact rate, which his hard-hit numbers and pull rates should begin to lead to solid production. As it stands, he hasn't been bad, hitting .297 with 11 runs scored and nine RBI in 64 plate appearances. I'm not expecting some 20-home run season here, but I think he could be a 15/10 guy if he continues to play regularly, and that's worth holding onto in deeper formats.

Jung Hoo Lee - OF, SF

Lee was off to an abysmal start to the season, but hopefully you've held onto him because he has hits in eight of his last 10 games, going 15-for-41 (.366) with one home run, five runs, and four RBI. That's probably enough reason to hold onto him, but his exit velocities are up two mph from last year, his hard-hit rate is up 7% from last year (still just under league-average), and his SwStr% is just 5%. He makes elite swing decisions and is hitting the ball harder than he did last year. He's also using the whole field more often, so I'm not sure he's going to hit more than 10 home runs, but the batting average should be .270 or better while hitting in the middle of the Giants' lineup. If he can also duplicate his 10 steals from last season, that's going to be a boring but solid player for you all year.

Bryson Stott - 2B/SS, PHI

It has not been a strong start to the season for Stott, who is hitting .210/.269/.242 with just two extra-base hits. He is also swinging outside of the zone 11% more often and making less contact than he ever has outside of the zone. Despite those issues, he still has a 95% zone contact rate, a 6.6% SwSt%, and the quality of contact he is making has been good. His hard-hit rate is 50%, which is up 20.5% from last year, the 4th-biggest improvement of any hitter in baseball. His average exit velocity is up two mph, his bat speed is up one mph, and he is pulling the ball 12% more. His attack direction, which measures the horizontal angle of the bat's sweet spot at the point of contact, has gone from two degrees towards the opposite field to four degrees to the pull side, which is tied for the 4th-biggest change in baseball. So what we're getting is a player who is making elite levels of contact, hitting the ball harder than ever, and making a conscious change to pull the ball more. He's also a player who has stolen at least 24 bases in three straight seasons. All of that should entice us. The walk rate is down, and the power hasn't shown up yet, so I understand if you wanted to be more cautious in OBP or OPS leagues, but I think a good stretch of production is coming for Stott.

Bo Bichette - SS/3B, NYM

Look, Bichette qualified for this list, but I don't love what we're seeing. If we start with the good, he has a 42% hard-hit rate, a 91% zone contact rate, and continues to swing and miss better than league average. He also has a .291 xBA, which is far more attractive than his .219 average and a .274 BABIP that is well below his .337 career mark. However, he has also dropped his pull rate 7%, and he was never somebody who pulled the ball much to begin with. His groundball rate has also jumped to 53%, which is going to limit a lot of authoritative contact. Some of this could be attributed to learning a new defensive position or trying to earn his contract, but this is the profile of a hitter who will hit 8-10 home runs and hasn't stolen more than five bases since 2022. That being said, the batting average should be way higher, and Bichette is a good enough hitter that he could be sticking with an opposite-field approach to let the ball travel until he starts to see some hits consistently fall in. I think this entire Mets offense is going to wake up at some point, and Bichette will join them.

Jakob Marsee - OF, MIA

Marsee is fascinating to me. How is he hitting .176 when we know that he has high-end speed, and he also has a 96% zone contact rate and just a 4% swinging strike rate? That's the profile of a guy who should be closer to Chandler Simpson than what we're getting. Part of it could be that Marsee has increased his flyball rate almost 10% from what we saw last year. That's probably not what you want to see from a player who had an 89 mph average exit velocity last year, but good speed. Yet, I don't know if that's an intentional approach. Yes, Marsee's bat is a touch steeper at the contact point than last season, but his overall swing tilt is actually flatter. I don't really believe he's trying to lift as much as he has been. It may be more that he's being pitched up in the zone 10% more often than last year because pitchers are trying to get him to elevate or swing and miss. It's just an adjustment that he needs to make as a hitter. Considering he has an established track record of having a great understanding of the strike zone, I think it's an adjustment that he can make. He's also already stolen eight bases despite being on first base only 27 times this season. I think the hits are going to start to fall, and the stolen bases will continue to explode.

Fantasy Baseball Starting Pitchers to Hold

Much like with the hitters, I automatically deleted any starting pitcher who had thrown 20 innings this season and had an ERA that was below 4.03, since that's the league average mark right now. I then removed pitchers who have been worse than league average when it comes to Stuff+, Swinging Strike Rate (SwSr%), and K-BB%. This should have given us a list of pitchers who had below-average ERAs but had done a good job of missing bats and shown plus raw stuff. I then also removed any stragglers who had poor SIERAs because I think that helped us to further lock in on pitchers who have been pitching better than their results.

Much like with the hitters, some of these guys you know you're not cutting (Garrett Crochet, Freddy Peralta, Jesus Luzardo, Kyle Bradish, Nathan Eovaldi), but they have not met our expectations so far this season. Eovaldi's Stuff+ is a little bit lower than we'd like to see, but he has a long track record for us to fall back on. I should also note that, as of this publishing, FanGraphs has not yet changed Kyle Bradish's stat line from 4/15 to remove two earned runs that were charged to him on Weston Wilson's (now) error. That correction should lower his ERA to 3.96 and give him an above-average ERA.

Reid Detmers - Los Angeles Angels

I covered Detmers in some detail this Monday when I went over his pitch mix changes in my streaming starting pitchers article, so this section may be a little more granular than some of the others. Before his start last week against the Yankees, Detmers said that he “found” his changeup grip. He has been using the changeup again earlier in the season, but it was functioning more as a splitter. This new changeup grip led to a pitch that was over three mph faster than what we had seen before. It also had 2.5 inches more drop and about two inches more run. Detmers seems to have better command of this changeup, despite it having more movement. His zone rate on it improved from 41.7% in his first three starts to 57.1% in his last two, and his strike rate on the changeup jumped from 62.5% in the first three starts to 78.6% in his last two. That has enabled him to keep it lower in the zone more consistently, with a 33% low location rate in his first three starts, and a 46.4% rate in his second. That could also be the reason he has started to use it more in two-strike counts. He used his changeup 25% of the time in two-strike counts in his first three starts, but that has exploded to 39.3% over his last two starts. It has a 36.4% PutAway Rate in that stretch, which measures how often a two-strike pitch leads to a strikeout.

Again, we're dealing with a small sample size here, but Detmers, with his new changeup, has a 3.46 ERA, 0.85 WHIP, 27.5% strikeout rate, 32.8% CSW, and 15.3% SwStr% in two starts against the Blue Jays and Yankees. That's enough to add him in most league types.

Jack Leiter - Texas Rangers

I get that people are fed up with Leiter. He looked so good at the start of the season, and then he was so uninspiring in his next two starts. Well, that is just a bit of who Jack Leiter is. However, we should also remember that his last two starts were in Los Angeles against the Dodgers and in Sacramento, which is one of the worst parks for pitchers. Overall this season, Leiter has been far less fastball-dependent, which we like to see. The start in Sacramento was the only one in which he used his four-seam fastball more than 39% of the time. The addition of the cutter has been a solid pitch for him as a supplemental part of his pitch mix, his changeup has taken a small step forward, and his slider is missing more bats at a slightly slower speed with more vertical movement. He has the fifth-best Stuff+ of any pitcher on this list and the fourth-best SwStr%. Yes, there will be some volatility, but this is a 26-year-old who is deepening his pitch mix and getting more whiffs. I'd rather bench him for his tough matchups than outright cut him.

Shane Baz - Baltimore Orioles

I get more questions about dropping Shane Baz than anybody else, but I keep telling people to hold. I know you see a 5.08 ERA and a strikeout rate that has dipped to 18%. I know he has a career 4.32 ERA that doesn't match the hype you've been sold. I get all of that. I'm just saying that he's a better pitcher than this, and the underlying metrics support it. For starters, his 4.42 SIERA and 4.39 xFIP are better than the surface-level ERA. He still has a 100 Stuff+, which is league average and is allowing just a 38% hard-hit rate. I know the swings-and-misses haven't been there and, after his start on Tuesday, his SwStr% is far too low for this list, but I kept him on here because I see the path forward.

This season, he's leaned into his cutter far more, throwing it 42% of the time against righties after using it just 14.3% of the time against them last year, which was his first year throwing the pitch. The cutter now has a 14% SwStr% and an elite 36% PutAway Rate against righties, but he's using it mainly early in the count. He has a solid 22% strikeout rate against righties this season, and they're not hitting the ball hard. I think he could increase the impact of his cutter by doing one of two things. First is that he's throwing his four-seamer away from righties more often and using it up in the zone less. I'd like to see him go back to trying to jam righties inside with the four-seamer, which will set up that cutter more in two-strike counts. Also, Baz threw a sinker in Tuesday's start. It wasn't a good one, but it highlights that he and the Orioles are probably having the same conversations and thinking that a sinker inside to righties would also set up the cutter away a bit more. I like that development if it comes to fruition.

Against lefties, he still has a league-average 11.7% SwStr%, but they're making harder contact and not striking out as much. The four-seam usage has been similar, and he's not really throwing the cutter to lefties much, so I think there are two issues at play here. One is that Baz's changeup is struggling. The zone rate and strike rate on the pitch are way down, so he's not using it as much against lefties. Last season, it was a pitch he used 64% of the time early in counts and was able to get ahead with. That set up his curveball, which was a great two-strike pitch for him. Now that he's using the changeup less, he has to use his curve more often, which means he's not saving it for when he's ahead in the count as much, and it hasn't been as impactful overall as it was before. If Baz can get his changeup back, I'd imagine he reverts right back to his previous approach, and I see no reason why that changeup won't eventually come back to his previous levels.

Mike Burrows - Houston Astros

I get it, you are done with Mike Burrows. I don't blame you, and in a 12-team league, I understand moving on if there's an attractive waiver wire option, but I don't think you HAVE to. There are some issues we'll get to with Burrow, but he has also been incredibly unlucky to start the season. He has an egregious .378 BABIP. According to Statcast, he also has the worst defense behind him, with the lowest Outs Above Average behind him among all starting pitchers. He's given up just a 35% hard-hit rate and a 5% barrel rate, which might be why he has a 4.09 SIERA and 4.24 xFIP. Both of which are much better than his 6.75 ERA.

Even though he is having issues getting strikeouts, he has a 12.7% SwStr%, which is well above average, so what's going on? Well, for starters, his Stuff+ is not great, and that does highlight a larger issue that he's covering for. His fastballs simply aren't that good, but his changeup is elite. So you'd be surprised to know that, despite having an elite changeup, it's lefties that are doing the most damage against him this season. Against righties, he has a 26.3% strikeout rate, an 18.2% SwStr%, a 31.5% CSW, and just a 2% barrel rate allowed. His changeup has been an elite two-strike pitch to righties, perhaps because he also has the threat of the slider. Against lefties, he doesn't have a great "out" pitch, even though his slider has had a well-above average PutAway rate. He simply doesn't use it often with two strikes. To me, this is a sequencing issue. Last year, his changeup had a 27% SwStr% and lefties and carved them up with two strikes. It's a legitimately good pitch. There is no reason it should be performing this poorly, so the Astros need to figure out why lefties are having so much more success this season. Is he not setting it up the same way? It's added some run but lost drop this season, so maybe the shape is tipping them off? I think we're a small tweak away from a strong run of production.

Ryne Nelson - Arizona Diamondbacks

The Ryne Nelson argument is simple, so we'll end with that. His last start was awful, allowing eight runs on eight hits while getting just one out against the Blue Jays. If we remove that, then he has a 3.54 ERA, 1.03 WHIP, and 22.1% strikeout rate in 20.1 innings over four starts. Now, I know removing a start is a lazy way of doing analysis, but the point is just to show that we are letting one start drastically impact our opinion of Nelson. Up until that point, in four starts against the Orioles, Dodgers, Mets, and Braves, Nelson still has an elite four-seam fastball and has located his slider and cutter well enough to lefties this year to eliminate any splits issues. Teams are going to hunt his four-seamer, but it's not like the Blue Jays were hitting home runs or crushing the ball around the yard. It was a lot of weak contact that continued to find holes. Nelson is never going to be a huge strikeout arm, so I do think he's a fringe guy to roster in 12-team leagues, but I think his ratios are going to wind up being just fine, and he will pitch deep enough to give you wins on a decent team.