The curtain is raising for the third and final act of the 2024 fantasy baseball season.
It’s another important weekend for pickups — especially in mono leagues with the new arrivals to each league’s player pool — launching us into the final two months, where surprising endgame contributors are waiting just around the corner to help carry us to championships.
While fantasy football drafts on the horizon might be drawing away the attention of some of your struggling league mates, the door remains open to continue improving your teams.
The recap is back after an unexpected two-week break, and we have a lot of ground to cover.
Listen to Rates & Barrels wherever you enjoy podcasts — including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, the ad-free option within The Athletic app.
Trade Deadline Winners
We spent a large portion of the August 2 episode discussing the depth charts that changed the most thanks to activity at the trade deadline.
(Eno Sarris also wrote about the topic this week: Ten intriguing players who should get a shot to shine after the MLB trade deadline)
Time prevented us from turning each of the players we discussed as major playing-time winners in the form of a “Would You Rather?”, so let’s do that here.
Miguel Vargas, OF, CHW — Vargas’ defensive woes shouldn’t cost him any time with the White Sox, and he will likely pick up another position or two before season’s end in leagues with low in-game qualification requirements. The BAT X has a rest-of-season projection of .248/.322/.415 with six homers and three stolen bases in 41 games — a low 20s homer pace with double-digit steals and a steady average. It’s enough to roster Vargas in leagues where at least 50 outfielders are rostered, and he’s an upgrade over MJ Melendez, Max Kepler, Michael Conforto, and Sal Frelick, among others.
Kyle Stowers, OF MIA — For now, Stowers is a tier or two behind Vargas, and he should be rostered mostly in 15-team leagues and deeper (75+ outfielders). The swing-and-miss in his profile is a concern, but as we suggested on the show, the sporadic nature of his big-league opportunities didn’t help his cause as far as getting acclimated against big-league pitching. Stowers is a power-over-everything bat right now, where those chasing homers and RBIs might be more enticed by him in the short term, especially if the potential hit in batting average (a .227 ROS projection from The BAT X) won’t hurt you. Stowers’ current firm hold on a big-league roster spot makes him an upgrade over his recently-demoted former teammate Heston Kjerstad and big-side platoon power bats who are unable to push their way into every-day opportunities.
Jonny DeLuca, OF, TB — DeLuca started for the seventh time in the past eight games on Saturday, as the Rays continue to tweak their lineup after trading Randy Arozarena to the Mariners. Five of those starts have come against same-handed pitching, which bodes well for his chances of playing enough to be useful in weekly leagues. DeLuca is a good defender, and he’s playing all three outfield spots, giving the Rays flexibility with the other players they want to rotate in and out of their lineup on a regular basis. He also boasts 98th percentile Sprint Speed, with plenty of stolen base potential if he’s able to get on base enough to utilize his wheels. Questions about DeLuca’s power output against top-level pitching will persist until he proves it over a prolonged stretch, as his 27.6% hard-hit rate would rank in the eighth percentile if he had enough batted-ball events to qualify. DeLuca has shown an ability to pull fly balls, however, which might help him unlock more in-game power than his raw numbers would suggest. If I had to set-and-forget a lineup, I would rather have DeLuca than Leody Taveras or Garrett Mitchell to see how things unfold for him with the opportunity to play regularly.
Marco Luciano, SS, SFG — Luciano is now the DH in San Francisco, and Saturday’s start marked his fourth straight in the role. Tyler Fitzgerald is the actual shortstop for the Giants right now and he’s more interesting to me over the final two months than Luciano from a traditional 5×5 perspective. Luciano hits the ball hard, with an elevated but not unreasonable amount of swing-and-miss in his profile. Even though I’m confused by his sub-.400 slugging percentage in the PCL this year, I think there’s a very good chance that Luciano will exceed current expectations in the long run, but I’m expecting the growing pains to be present for the rest of 2024 and the payoff to begin next season. If you’re currently rostering Orlando Arcia or Javier Báez, Luciano should be on your radar as an upgrade.
Hayden Birdsong, SP, SFG — Birdsong has a good four-pitch mix, and his fastball is still a slight work-in-progress even though he averages 96 mph with it. The home park helps a lot, as far as increasing the immediate trust in using him in your lineup, but I think he’s a fringe top 50 starter the rest of the way, putting him ahead of Luis Severino (my most rostered player this season) and Brayan Bello, to name a couple of pitchers I had higher expectations for in 2024.
The Best Pitching Staffs in Baseball Right Now
Wondering which teams are best equipped to dominate with their pitching in October, we looked at the best pitching staffs in baseball by grading out the top-three starters in each rotation.
Bullpen quality and depth will be a bigger part of the conversation as we get closer to October, but the Red Sox popping at the top of the list by Stuff+ among their top-three starters is surprising to me — especially after they traded away Chris Sale this past winter. Most of us don’t think of Nick Pivetta, Tanner Houck and Kutter Crawford as a trio that we would want to avoid in the playoffs, and some of that is reflected in the ppERA projection at 3.95 (Fenway Park is a factor in that number being higher than other top-end trios as well.)
The D-backs and Brewers didn’t get any attention during the show Thursday, but reinforcements are on the way.
For Arizona, Eduardo Rodríguez could return during the upcoming week, and Merrill Kelly is currently on a rehab assignment. For Milwaukee, DL Hall is progressing through a rehab assignment with slightly better stuff and velocity than he was showing earlier this year, and the Brewers may have a wild card contributor looming in the upper levels of the minors with Jacob Misiorowski recently promoted to Triple-A Nashville. Misiorowski showed improved control over the past two months, carrying a 10.8% BB% since the start of June while still missing bats at an elevated clip.
The Pirates and Giants, while long shots by playoff odds to reach to the postseason, have the potential to wreak havoc on the league’s best offenses and make a run if they can find ways to score runs more consistently during the final two months.
Bridging the conversation from best pitching staffs to worst pitches of 2024 (so far), I’m still in disbelief that Tanner Bibee’s four-seamer has been such a bad offering for him (.505 SLG against) given how well he manipulates the rest of his stuff to get excellent results. The Guardians as a team have an astonishing number of poorly-graded fastballs and a tendency to have their pitchers throw a lot of them.
Re-Thinking How We Rank Pitching Prospects
In the process of preparing a future recap segment ranking the top of the first-year player draft, I began to wonder if the overall approach to ranking pitching prospects will change as the ability to quantifying pitch qualities through modeling is more prevalent.
Here’s my top five coming out of the 2024 MLB draft from a keeper/dynasty rankings perspective:
- Charlie Condon, OF/3B, COL — There were two teams with very hitter-friendly home parks drafting in the top three of the 2024 MLB Draft — Condon had the inside track to this spot by landing with the Rockies or the Reds, and there would still be a case for him if the Guardians had selected him with the first overall pick. For me, the added risk of swing-and-miss as Condon adjusts to upper-level professional pitching is offset by the Coors factor.
- Travis Bazzana, 2B, CLE — Bazzana’s story is a fascinating one, and it leaves us all to wonder if there is more growth potential before he reaches his eventual ceiling. On our Day 1 draft recap episode with Melissa Lockard, I wondered if the new restrictions on infield shifts might lead some teams to increase the value of a capable defender at the position. Regardless of where he eventually fits defensively in Cleveland, Bazzana’s combination of plate discipline and power give him a great floor.
- J.J. Wetherholt, SS, STL — The Cardinals appear to have their long-term shortstop in place already with Masyn Winn, so the expectation for Wetherholt includes a move to second or third base. Nevertheless, Wetherholt was a candidate for the 1.1 pick and it might have been a nice gift for the Cardinals to land him at No. 7 overall.
- Chase Burns, SP, CIN — As pitchers make faster ascents through minor league systems, the risk associated with building around them in dynasty leagues has fallen slightly. Injuries are still a massive problem, but having better detailed insights into the quality of a pitcher’s arsenal goes a long way toward making better apples-to-apples comparisons across the broader pool of pitchers. Yes, Great American Ball Park is a slight negative, but Burns’ electric stuff includes a high-iVB four-seamer and a plus-slider atop his arsenal, with a curveball and change available to mix in as well. No, I don’t think this is another Paul Skenes situation — Skenes looks more like a once-in-a-decade type pitching prospect — but Burns should be very good for a long time.
- Jac Caglianone, OF, KC — Top-of-the-scale power alone is fun, and I’m trusting Keith Law’s assessment that Caglianone isn’t going to be more than a reliever if he continues as a two-way player. By all accounts, the risk comes from the uncertainty about his plate discipline, but even if the outcome is a Kyle Schwarber offensive profile with steady defensive value in the outfield, the Royals will be happy. The other possibilities are fun to dream on.
Oh Yeah…Good for Victor
It was easy to look past it, because injuries limited Victor Robles to 36 games with the Nats last season and only 14 to begin 2024, but an uptick in hard-hit rate has been right there in front of us since last season. Maybe this is just a great month, but maybe this is the encore I was always looking for after the 17-homer, 28-steal breakout in 2019. While it’s only 122 plate appearances, Robles has a double-digit barrel rate for the first time in his career, and he’s done it with an excellent strikeout rate (14.6% in Seattle compared to a 22.9% career rate).
A 40-steal pace with intriguing underlying power metrics and a sub-15% strikeout rate is valuable in plenty of leagues. It will be interesting to see how things play out in the final two months since Robles should have a prominent role for a Mariners club desperate for answers in the every-day lineup.
Join our Discord! — Rates & Barrels returns Monday!
(Top photo of Nick Pivetta: Justin Edmonds/Getty Images)
