4 Fantasy Baseball Players to Add for Week 5
As the calendar flips to May, fantasy baseball really starts to get fun. The standings start to have some meaning. You have some apparent strengths and weaknesses on your team and we are pretty close to the end of the “slow start” narrative. I hate to let good players get away in April because the season is so young and sample sizes are so small. It may still be a couple weeks too early to move on from a slumping star you paid a premium for on draft day. However, for a middle of the road player, or a back of the roster player, my patience has run out. It’s not time to panic yet, but it is time to make moves.
Here are four players that are rostered in fewer than 75 percent of leagues according to Yahoo that I am all in on adding to my teams this week.
Carlos Santana- 1B- Kansas City Royals
Old reliable Slamtana. A ten year major league veteran who has had one of the most underappreciated careers of any active major league player. He’s at it again with his new team in the Midwest and has been an instrumental part of their division leading start to the season. The most encouraging thing for Santana is that he’s not playing outside of his skill set and he’s not a beneficiary of good luck.
Santana is just flat out raking. He’s been known to go on significant hot streaks before cooling off before and these heaters tend to come early in the year for him, so keep that in mind. But, the fact that his BABIP, K rate, Walk Rate and hard contact rates are all right in line with his career norms, tells me he isn’t going to simply turn back into a pumpkin during the coming weeks.
Santana will never be a batting average anchor and it’s worth noting he bats second in the lineup, which will put a ceiling on his RBI potential. He’s a good bet to finish with 30-plus homeruns and 80-plus runs to go along with still respectable RBI and batting average totals. Even if he does fall short later, he has been one of the ten best players in the game the last couple of weeks and demands to be rostered above the 75 percent mark.
Jesus Aguilar- 1B- Miami Marlins
A big week for first basemen. Aguilar is a bit of a different story than Santana and a guy I’m not as optimistic about long-term. I don’t think I’m writing him off as a flavor of the week hot streak just yet though. Aguilar seems to have found a new approach at the plate, which is fueling his recent success. Aguilar no longer possesses top-tier hard contact at the plate, nor does he have an elite hit tool.
What Aguilar has seemed to find is command of the strike zone. His chase rate is down 3 percent, as is his swinging strike rate, which shows he has stopped chasing junk, but has maintained aggressiveness on pitches in the zone with a 6 percent increase in his contact rate. That would help explain him hitting almost 40 points above his career batting average despite having a lower than baseline BABIP figure. He’s got a career high walk rate and career low k rate, at 15.5 and 12.6 percent respectively. That’s right, he is actually walking more than he is striking out, which for a guy like Aguilar is very unexpected. Unexpected, but not unsustainable.
Like I said, Aguilar’s hard contact is no longer where it once was, but Statcast puts him at 35 percent which is still respectable. The increased contact rate is still netting him a lot of homeruns (for now at least) and any fantasy owner loves that. Especially from a first baseman. I’m probably not dropping a top 100 player for Aguilar, but I would gladly drop any Utility or bench level player for him in a heartbeat.
Huascar Ynoa- SP- Atlanta Braves
Injuries opened the door for Ynoa to take on a starring role in the Braves rotation and he has yet to look back. The kid throws gas and is striking hitters out at the highest rate since he was pitching high A ball. Despite averaging a hair under 97 MPH on his fastball, his slider is his best pitch and according to Baseball Savant has 42.5 inches of vertical movement. This makes it top 50 in the game and is his primary put-away pitch.
Now, Ynoa does get hit hard. He’s only in the 7th percentile there, but a lot of that can be attributed to his fastball. What comes in fast, goes back out faster. That explains the 23.8 homerun to flyball rate What redeems Ynoa though is that he generates a lot of ground balls. Hard hit ground balls may end up being base hits, but they won’t be homeruns. He does strike a lot of batters out and rarely issues walks, so he definitely doesn’t beat himself out there.
I like Ynoa and while he’s got his warts, he’s only 22 years old. He’s a legitimate talent with a bright future and he’s got a real chance to emerge as the ace of the Braves staff. I don’t expect him to be your frontline fantasy ace, but I think he’s a real season-long boost to a struggling fantasy staff. Mix in that he’ll take two turns this week (Nats in D.C and Phillies in Atlanta) and the time to hit that add button is now.
Madison Bumgarner- SP- Arizona Diamondbacks
It feels like Bumgarner is so much older than he is. Did you know he’s only 31? I guess when a player finds a lot of success at a young age, it makes it seem like he’s been around forever. People wrote Bumgarner off after three bad starts to open the season but his seven inning no-hitter last weekend brought him back on the radar. Obviously, you never want to overreact to a pitcher who throws a no-no. It’s not a sign of a superstar and it’s a once in a career event for most pitchers. But Bumgarner sandwiched that no hitter between two other strong outings.
Bumgarner’s FIP is 4.01 and his expected ERA is a 4.36. Far from elite levels, but serviceable and much better than his surface stats would lead you to believe. I’m willing to write-off the bad outings for him. He got knocked around by the upstart Padres, the Rockies at Coors and the A’s in the height of their two week long air-raid on major league pitching. His strikeout and barrel rates are at the best levels they’ve been since 2016, which in many ways was the best year of his career. He’s not going to pitch like it’s 2016 again overall, but a target of 180 strikeouts and a 4.50 ERA feel within reach.
His velocity is back up from 2020, but still a couple of ticks down from his former standard. Let’s face it, it’s not coming back. That doesn’t bother me much though, as he’s shifting more and more to his curveball as he ages. The NL West is not a great division to pitch in, with regular meetings against the Dodgers, Padres and Coors field. But, Bumgarner faces the Marlins in Miami this week. Put the aforementioned Aguilar to the side and who in that lineup scares you? The fish hung four runs on the Nats this weekend. Key word there is weekend. Four runs in three games. I’m grabbing Mad-bum this week and hoping he can have a mini-career renaissance. But even if he can’t, I am riding with him this week.
