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

In true arbitrary end-of-month tradition, it is time to look back at the first month of fantasy baseball and reflect. We’ll look at six players (four hitters, two pitchers) who had rough Aprils and decide whether there is truly cause for concern, or whether it’s just a case of the first month blues.

We all know the baseball season is a marathon not a sprint (check that bad boy off your overused baseball sayings bingo card), and there are plenty of cases in which a cold April is followed by a scorching final five months of the season. Heck, just last season Joey Votto was slugging .313 at the end of May before tearing the cover off the ball the rest of the season to the tune of .342/.453/.592 and a near-fantasy MVP performance. If you traded for Votto at the end of April you were a genius. You bought at the lowest point and enjoyed a beast five months.

On the other hand, Prince Fielder came into 2016 as the 58th-ranked player on Tristan Cockcroft’s big board. This is not to poke fun at Cockcroft, he simply had the most public venue with his rankings, everyone was a bit high on Fielder, he was fresh off a 2015 season in which he had bounced back with a .305/.378/.463 campaign. Of course, Fielder was slashing just .207/.265/.310 by the end of April last season, and prospective owners were wondering if they should buy low. You all know how this one ended, as Fielder was retired by the middle of the summer, and if you bought low on Fielder at the end of April, it was a complete waste of whatever player you traded away for him.

That’s the part of fantasy baseball that makes it seem like a crap shoot at times. However, if you look close enough, there are signs. Despite their similar struggles, Votto was sporting a hard hit ball rate of 43.9 percent in April; Fielder was down at 25.4 percent. These are the types of numbers that can show whether a slow start is legitimate or just a consequence of bad luck. Now simply looking at a few numbers isn’t going to guarantee you know which players will break out of their April slumps and which will continue to struggle, but it’s the best chance we have at present.

Over the next six slides, we’ll be looking to find 2016 Joey Vottos for you to target and 2016 Prince Fielder’s to sell while you still have time.

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.

Felix Hernandez

The first month has seen King Felix knocked off his throne a bit, as he has a 4.73 ERA and is currently on the DL with a shoulder injury. Combine this with a 2016 in which he had a career-high ERA and career-low strikeout rate and folks are starting to wonder if all those early-career innings are finally catching up with one of the best pitchers of his generation. He was even dropped in a ten-team league in which I play, and while he was scooped up quickly, that’s telling about where owners are in regards to Felix right now – there’s just not much trust.

With Felix, there are some positive signs, but there are also plenty of negative signs. Let’s look at the positive first.

In his limited sample of 2017 (26.2 innings), Hernandez has been pounding the strike zone. His 51.6 zone percentage is the highest it has been since 2007, and the result has been a career-low walk rate (1.01 BB/9); he has walked just three batters this entire season. Hernandez has also been victimized by a high home run rate, as more than one in four fly balls he has allowed have left the yard, a seemingly unsustainable rate that should come back to earth, bringing his ERA down a bit with it. Due to that high home run rate, his xFIP sits at just 3.30, his lowest since 2014 when he sported a 2.14 ERA for the season.

However, we can’t simply be sure that his HR/FB rate will regress as far as we would like to see. Hernandez has been sitting below 92 mph with his fastball for over a season now, a far cry from his 95 mph heat in his prime. There’s also the aforementioned pounding of the strike zone, which is good for a low walk rate, but the more a pitcher lives in the zone, the more that pitcher has a chance of being punished for it, especially when that pitcher’s fastball has lost plenty of zip from its prime.

Overall, Hernandez has gotten pretty unlucky in 2017. His .388 opponent BABIP added to the bad home run luck means he likely won’t end the season with an ERA over 4.00. However, Felix simply doesn’t have great swing-and-miss stuff anymore. We also don’t know how this latest injury will affect Hernandez, and he’s a pitcher I wasn’t even that high on before the season. It’s a mixed bag with Felix right now.

Judge Dread level: You have a 15-page term paper due in a week – you haven’t even started doing the research yet. But, hey, you’ve got a week to go. 6/10.

Xander Bogaerts

Bogaerts may seem out of place on this list at first glance, as he is currently hitting .315 and that batting average is what you got him for after all. However, when you add in zero home runs and just 14 RuBIns (he does have two steals), he has been just about replacement level in the world of fantasy baseball this season His 0.67 value on the ESPN Player Rater ranks him 21st among shortstops – this was a player going around 21st overall in drafts this season.

What we are now seeing is the problem in selecting a player whose main skill is contact with a pick that high. If he has a bit of bad luck on home runs, the value plummets even if the contact skills are still there. Bogaerts isn’t going to keep a HR/FB rate of 0.0 percent for the entire season, obviously, but it’s certainly possible that he won’t even reach double-digit home runs. Bogaerts is hitting ground balls on 54.0 percent of his balls in play, a career high.

He is also hitting the ball softer (22.2 percent hard hit ball rate) than he has in any other season of his career. Those two factors, combined with the fact that last year is beginning to look more and more like a fluke in terms of power rather than the beginning of a trend, mean owners might be very disappointed when it comes to Bogaerts’ overall production this season. His HR/FB rates over the past three-plus seasons:

7.1, 5.3, 11.4, 0.0.

Yes, this season’s 0.0 stands out, but so does last season’s 11.4 percent. If he settles around 7.0 percent and is hitting fly balls just 23.8 percent of the time, ten home runs looks like his ceiling. Add in the fact that the Red Sox offense isn’t quite what is was last season with Big Papi, and the fantasy value of the young Sox shortstop could drop significantly in 2017.

Bogaerts is a classic case of better real-life player than fantasy player. This may be the season we all realize that in full as a fantasy community.

Judge Dread level: The scene in The Office when Michael Scott realizes he will be making payments on his new home for 30 years. 7/10.

Carlos Correa

After disappointing slightly in 2016, a slow April has fantasy baseball players a bit worried about Correa. The 22-year-old looks like the prototype of a baseball player you would create in a lab – a 6’ 4”, 215-pound shortstop – but just because a player looks great doesn’t always mean he’ll be great.

Correa is hitting just .233 with two home runs and 19 RuBIns despite a powerful Astros lineup. His walk rate is down to a career-low 8.2 percent and his strikeout rate is a career-high 23.7 percent. His wRC+ of 86 puts him on par with Jorge Polanco – you weren’t planning on drafting a Jorge Polanco clone with your late-first/early-second round pick this season.

Good news, there are some definite signs that Correa should get things going soon. His aforementioned walk and strikeout rates aren’t backed by actually slips in swinging strike rate or a propensity to swing at pitches outside of the strike zone more frequently this season. He may end up striking out a bit more than his first two seasons, but with league-wide strikeout rates up, that’s not the end of the world. His walks should start returning, and even better so should some hits and home runs.

Correa currently sports a .290 BABIP, over 20 points lower than his career BABIP (.313), and while his line drive rate (18.8 percent) has indeed dipped a bit this season, his hard hit ball rate (45.3 percent) suggests it is not a failure to square up the ball, but rather a change in swing path.

Going with the last comment, Correa has seen a large jump in his fly ball rate this season, up to a career-high 39.1 percent (career: 29.0 percent). Given that jump, plus the fact that he is hitting the ball so hard, it is somewhat unimaginable that he has only two home runs this season. His HR/FB rate is down at 8.0 percent and screaming for some positive regression to around his career rate – 18.8 percent. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if he rattled off a 10-homer May.

Judge Dread level: Did I lock the front door? Yeah, I definitely did. Right? 2/10.  

Kevin Gausman

Last season looked like the breakout year we had been waiting for with Gausman. After flashing years of potential as a big-name prospect, Gausman finally put together a full season of innings (179.2) and finished the 2016 season with a 3.61 ERA and an 8.72 K/9. He won only nine games, but was a tough-luck loser and the lack of wins seemed to only help mask a potential next-level breakout for 2017.

That has not been the case so far this season as Gausman was hammered throughout April, taking a 7.50 ERA and 1.97 WHIP into May. Gausman is striking out just 6.00 batters per nine, and his K%-BB% is a paltry 2.0 percent, fourth-worst in the league. Speaking of “worst in the league,” his ERA is second-worst and his WHIP is dead last. He has arguably been the worst pitcher in baseball this season.

The signs aren’t better heading forward either. His FIP is fifth-worst and his xFIP is third-worst. He’s been a bit unlucky in terms of BABIP (.350) and left on base rate (67.8 percent), but even regressing those numbers to league-average paints a rough picture of Gausman. Gausman simply isn’t getting batters to bite outside the zone this season (27.4 percent O-Swing%) and when he does come in the strike zone, it’s getting hit hard. His four-seamer has lost a half-mile of velocity, but the biggest issue seems to be his inability to adjust to hitters swinging at fewer pitches out of the strike zone. If he can make that adjustment, maybe there’s some hope, but for now consider Gausman a Major Stay Away.

Next: Fantasy baseball blind resume quiz

Judge Dread level: Is that an alligator? Yup, that’s an alligator! 9/10.