2016 Fantasy Baseball Hitter Review: Wk.3

THE STRIKEOUT

While I keep talking about the asinine strikeout work of Trevor Story who is up to 25 strikeouts in 15 games, there are actually worse offenders of late. The last week Story is third in baseball in K-rate (strikeouts / plate appearances) of 43.3 percent. Leonys Martin is at 44.4 percent to push his overall mark up to 36.7 percent. He’s never been worse than 23.1 percent in a season and simply put he isn’t going to remain in the daily lineup for the Mariners much longer if he doesn’t start putting the bat on the ball. The worst offender the last week though is no stranger to the punchout – Giancarlo Stanton. Over the past seven days he’s K-rate is 46.2 percent. The punchout is one of the main reasons that Stanton is batting a mere .224 in the early going. Long a strikeout lover, per 162 games Stanton has averaged a whopping 193 punchouts. Stanton can power the baseball, but as I’ve pointed out many time before he’s a career .269 hitter who has failed to hit .266 in four of his six seasons.

HOTTEST CATCHER IN BASEBALL

Jarrod Saltalamacchia has a .602 wOBA for the Tigers, the best mark in baseball the past week. He’s gone deep three times with six RBI and five runs scored as well. He also has a 1.476 OPS. Salty will be the leader behind the dish until James McCann returns in Detroit. Jarrod is a .241 hitter who owns a .312 OBP for his career, and he has 20-homer power (career best is 25). Alas, he’s a limited guy who strikeouts out a ton (even this year he has 13 punchouts in 32 at-bats). Limited and a slump is coming soon, but he’s locked in right now.

WORST HITTER IN BASEBALL

It’s seven days, but the worst wOBA in the game in that time belongs to Maikel Franco with a .091 mark. A pathetic week fir Franco who produced three measly singles. Folks have gotten so far out ahead of themselves with Franco. He had an impressive season as a rookie last year, but you can’t just say he hit .280 last year with 14 homers and 50 RBI in 80 games so he’s going to go .280-28-100 over a full season this year. The early returns, and it’s just 15 games, aren’t great. Franco has walked just three times this season giving him a mere 30 walks over 111 big league games. Terrible. He’s also struck out 15 times this season with a K-rate of 24.2 percent, well above his 15.5 percent mark from last season. On the plus side Franco has an impressive 25.6 percent line drive rate and a solid .293 BABIP on the year, just four points off his rate last season. He’s also the owner of a 15.4 percent HR/FB ratio this season, half a percentage point below his mark last season which also hints that it’s not all doom and gloom.

Franco will be fine. He will also likely fail to live up to expectaitons if you were in the group of folks that thought a .280-28-100 season was coming.

RUNNING

Rajai Davis isn’t a very good hitter but he’s had a nice week. Davis leads baseball with four steals the past week while posting a .365 wOBA. Michael Brantley’s return is imminent and that will likely eat into Davis’ playing time a bit.

BRYCE

Bryce Harper has five homers, a 1.040 SLG and 16 RBI in seven games. This just in… he’s pretty effective.

THE LINE DRIVE

Here are the leaders in line drive rates this season. Probably going to be pretty surprised by some of the names on the list.

Why do people keep asking me about dropping Gordon or trading him on the cheap? He’s been one of the most consistent options in the game the past five years.

Sano is hitting the ball hard – when he hits it. He has 20 strikeouts in 51 at-bats. That’s pathetic.

Howard is batting .188 though he’s hit a lot of balls hard. He’s hit under .230 the last two years though he has averaged 23 homers and 86 RBI the past two seasons.

Tulowitzki has a 19.5 percent line drive rate for his career. He’s been over that mark each of the past three seasons.

Hosmer is batting .304 despite not squaring the ball up with any frequency.

Pujols has an 18.8 percent career line drive rate. The mark has been over 19 percent just once in seven years. Yikes.
 

THE LAST SEVEN DAYS

Batting average marks for folks the last week.

Ray Flowers can be heard Monday through Friday, 7 PM EDT and Friday on SiriusXM Fantasy Sports Radio (Sirius 210, XM 87). You can also hear Ray Sunday nights at 6 PM on the channel talking fantasy sports. Follow Ray’s work at Fantasy Alarm and on Twitter (@baseballguys).