Judging Dread: Which cold starts in fantasy baseball should worry you

Jonathan Lucroy

Lucroy has arguably been the biggest bust of the 2017 fantasy baseball season so far. A consensus top-100 pick, Lucroy is hitting .206 with just a single home run and 10 RuBIns (runs + RBI). At a position (catcher) where production is hard to find, drafting Lucroy was supposed to be the prefect remedy for those issues. However, if you drafted Lucroy, you have likely had to use another roster spot on a backup catcher, especially considering Lucroy has started losing some playing time to Rangers backup Robinson Chirinos. Lucroy is a catcher who typically starts in the range of 140-150 games in a season when he is healthy, but this season he has already been given eight games off just in the month of April.

As noted in our fantasy baseball blind resume quiz, the biggest worry for Lucroy right now may be the fact that Chirinos is tearing the cover off the ball from the backup backstop role, meaning the Rangers won’t feel as bad giving Lucroy even more days off to get things right. Chirinos is slashing .320/.433/.520 for a 244 wRC+ that is very nearly six times Lucroy’s wRC+ (41) this season!

Now Lucroy is far from a dead commodity. He is getting terrible batted ball luck, with a .211 BABIP that is nearly 100 points below his career rate (.309). He has struck out only five times the entire season, and his contact rate is higher than ever.

That being said, maybe he would be better off swinging a bit harder and missing every now and then, as his hard hit ball rate is down nearly 10 percent (25.9 percent down from 35.4 percent in 2016), and his line drive rate (17.2 percent) is down over five percent from his career rate.

Lucroy is likely neither a Votto nor a Fielder this season. He should definitely see some positive regression sooner than later, but there’s plenty to show that he simply isn’t hitting the ball as well as he was in 2016 when he hit .292 with 24 home runs. If you can buy him for 60 cents on the dollar, by all means do it. But don’t pay 80 cents on the dollar figuring he’ll be right back to his 2016-levels of production the rest of the way. Especially with Chirinos emerging as a solid backup in Texas.

Judge Dread level: You’re 10 minutes late for work for the second straight day. You see your boss headed your way. 6/10.