Eric Samulski's "My Guys" for 2022 Fantasy Baseball

FSWA award winner Eric Samulski names his favorite players to draft in 2022 fantasy baseball leagues with detailed breakdowns on each.

Throughout fantasy baseball draft season, we get a lot of fantasy baseball sleepers or fantasy baseball busts articles, which are useful in finding guys who may be valued too high or low by ADP and can return a nice profit on our rosters. However, we also talk a lot about reaching a point in the draft where you just want to "get your guys." What we usually mean is that if you believe in a player, you should try to get that player, regardless of what ADP might tell you. After all, it's your team, and it should be filled with players you believe in.

So with that being said, I thought I'd put together an article of just those players that I am actively trying to get in drafts. Some of them might be early-round picks and some are late-round flyers, but these are all players who I believe will have good seasons and who I want to have on my roster. Obviously, there are other players I like and some who have really caught my eye in recent weeks (Matt Brash and Jesus Luzardo, etc.), but I wanted to stay true to the players who appear on the majority of my rosters; guys who I have been actively trying to have shares of for a while.

My hope is that this can provide you with some good information on each of these players which will allow you to think about where you stand on them. I hope that by also getting some insight into what I'm looking for or what stands out to me in the stats or past performance, you might be able to crystallize your own thoughts on other players and feel more confident in getting your own guys in these final drafts or early rounds of FAAB.

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Mitch Garver, Texas Rangers

Plain and simple: injuries derailed Mitch Garver's season in 2021. Garver only played 68 games for the Twins in 2021 thanks to a long stint on the injured list after taking a foul ball to the groin that required surgery. Garver missed two months and then, after coming back, landed on the IL with both rib and lower back injuries. However, before that, Garver had been tearing the cover off of the ball. In May (Garver played only one game in June), Garver hit .281 with a 1.017 OPS, four home runs, and eight RBIs.

On the season, Garver hit the ball in the air (FB/LD) 8% more than any season in the last three years, had the lowest groundball rate of his career, and had the highest barrel rate and average exit velocity rates of his career. In fact, Garver was 97th-percentile in exit velocity on balls in the air during the first half of the season, and his HR/PA rate was 93rd-percentile. Remember that this is a guy who hit 31 home runs in 2019, so it was nice to see his xSLG spike back up towards those highs.

Garver had fixed the swing-and-miss issues that plagued his short 2020 season, lowering his SwStr% to 2019 levels while raising his overall contact% by nearly 8% and being as aggressive in the zone, in particular on first pitches, as he had been in 2019. In fact, when looking under the hood, I believe Garver could have had a better overall 2021 than his 2019 season had he not been beset by injuries. Let other people get turned off by his low season-long totals, but I think you could draft Garver and be looking at a catcher who hits .260 with 25+ home runs, which is a rarity at the position.

Alex Kirilloff, Minnesota Twins

I seem to be writing a lot of words about Kirilloff this offseason. Early in the offseason, he featured in my barrel rate improvers article, and now he finds himself here. It shouldn't come as a surprise since he was such a highly-touted prospect, but it's interesting considering he currently has an ADP of 175. In 2021, Kirilloff hit .251/.299/.423 with eight home runs, 34 RBI, and 23 runs in 59 games. However, with xBA of .291 and an xSLG of .541, Statcast seems to be telling us that he had a much better season than we're remembering.

For starters, his 12.8 barrel rate was 87th-percentile and his xWOBA was 91st-percentile, so Kirilloff had an elite quality of contact. A potential issue for the rookie was that his fly ball rate was below 30%, and he was hitting nearly 50% ground balls, which is not ideal. However, I believe a breakout was coming before injuries cut short his season. As the season went on, Kirilloff became more selectively aggressive, not swinging at the first pitch so much. He also became more pull-centric with his contact and his launch angle began to rise.

Considering Kirilloff was in the 87th-percentile on average exit velocity on balls in the air (96.2 mph) and was in the 90th-percentile on rate of balls in the air hit over 100 mph (45.1%), elevating the ball more could easily lead to more home runs. To sum up, this is a high-level prospect who made elite quality of contact all season and who began to hit the ball in the air and to the pull side more as the season went on. Yes, please. He's locked into near everyday at-bats on the Twins and is absolutely somebody we should be scooping up even though he has had a slow spring training. I'm not scared off by that one bit.

Jorge Polanco, Minnesota Twins

The Jorge Polanco evolution is pretty interesting. The Twins' middle infielder seemed primed for a breakout after in 2017 season, where he hit .256 with 13 home runs and 13 stolen bases as a 23-year-old. However, he was suspended 80 games to start the 2018 season for testing positive for a performance-enhancing substance, so most people ignored his solid 77 games to finish that season and still considered him a "steroid guy" before the 2019 season. However, after hitting .295 with 22 home runs in 2019 and .269 with 33 home runs and 11 stolen bases last year, it's time to forget the suspension and take Polanco seriously.

For starters, he's always been a high contact rate player. He's never had a strikeout rate above 19% in his entire MLB career and his zone contact (Z-Contact%) always hovers around 90%, while his overall contact rate is often around the 80th-percentile. Historically speaking, he's been more of a patient hitter with a below-average overall swing rate, but in 2021 he became far more aggressive. His overall swing rate jumped up 6%, which put him in the 67th-percentile in the league and his swing rate at pitches out of the zone (O-Swing%) also jumped 6%. This change in approach hurt his ability to make contact outside of the zone; yet, given how patient he was coming into this season it only had a minor impact on his overall contact rate. He still put up a 9.1% swinging-strike rate, which is high for him but still a pretty strong number.

Polanco's shift to become more aggressive is pretty clearly connected to this rise in pull rate. Polanco has never had a Pull% over 44% but rocketed it up to 52.7% last year. He was hunting for pitches that he could drive to the pull side. As a result, a rise in barrel rate followed, since he was searching for pitches he could do damage on. His barrel rate jumped to 10.1% in 2021, which is a massive improvement from his career-high 6.3% rate in 2019. What's more, he was also hitting 60% of his contact in the air (fly balls or line drives) as opposed to 54.8% in 2020. So Polanco searched for pitches to drive, made harder contact, and made more of that contact in the air, which is exactly why his home run total jumped.

This is not a fluke. Polanco has always had max exit velocities around 109 mph and his max exit velocity in 2021 was 110 mph, so he's not showing new top-end power, he's simply getting closer to that top-end more often and doing so with clear changes to his approach.

His 15.8% HR/FB ratio is also not an unsustainable number seeing as how that ranked 60th in MLB behind Jose Altuve and Jonathan India. As a result, I'm not sure why projections see Polanco dropping down to 24 home runs. I think he could push for 30 home runs again while keeping the .260-.270 average that seems to be his new normal with his more aggressive approach. Add possibly ten stolen bases and 170 Runs+RBI to that total, and I'm taking Polanco ahead of 2B like Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Brandon Lowe, who are currently going ahead of him.

Josh Donaldson, New York Yankees

Listen, I did not expect to start this with four 2021 Minnesota Twins, and I promise you that I am not a Twins fan. These just happen to be players that I have been gravitating towards this season. There seems to be a prevailing thought that, at 36-years-old, Josh Donaldson's years of fantasy relevance are behind him. I wouldn't be so sure of that. Despite battling injury in 2018 and 2020, Donaldson played in 135 games this year and 155 games in 2019. He's also been in the top 5% of the league in terms of barrel rate in 4 of his last 5 fully healthy seasons. The only year he missed was when he was in the top 10%.

Like Ohtani, Donaldson raised his flyball rate in 2021, back to levels he was getting regularly in 2016 and 2017, when he was hitting 30+ home runs for Toronto. He also was more aggressive, raising his swing rate by 6%, which allowed him to make more contact in the zone and cut down on his SwStr% overall. As a result, his strikeout rate dropped to 21%, which was his best performance in that area since 2016. In fact, Donaldson may have actually been unlucky that season. His .268 BABIP is thirty points below his career average, and Statcast has Donaldson with a .267 xBA and 31 expected home runs. Now, he hasn't had an average that high since 2017, but we're also talking about him making changes to his profile that reflect the hitter he was back then, so we shouldn't be surprised if he's pushing a .260 average in the future.

The only question for Donaldson remains health. However, I do believe the Yankees will make sure they're working Donaldson into the DH rotation alongside Giancarlo Station. The Yankees played Stanton in the outfield a good bit last year, so I think they'd feel comfortable doing that every now and then in 2022 to allow Donaldson a day at DH. The trade of Luke Voit to San Diego will allow for that to happen; although, admittedly not as much as it would have if Donaldson had stayed in Minnesota. More time at DH would likely be a good thing for his health, which is why I believe Donaldson is a better fit in daily-moves leagues, but I see him as a .250-.260 hitter with 30+ home run upside and good run totals since he has actually been hitting leadoff in Spring Training in a strong lineup.

Avisail Garcia, Miami Marlins

Avisail Garcia doesn't get enough credit. I don't know if people assumed his 2019 was just some Rays' voodoo magic or they bought too much into his 2020 short-season struggles, but Garcia went under-drafted in 2021 and was on a lot of waiver wires for too long. He came close to putting together his second 20 HR/ 10 SB season in the last two full campaigns and did so while getting a little BABIP unlucky. Garcia has a career .326 BABIP but registered a .291 mark in 2021. It's part of the reason his xBA was .278 despite finishing at .262 and why his xSLG was .515 while his final slugging percentage was .490.

Garcia's barrel rate in 2021 is closer to his 2018 mark of 11.6% and 2019 mark of 11.7%, so it's no surprise to see him hitting the ball well. He also was 79th-percentile in average exit velocity on balls in the air, after finishing in the 34th-percentile in 2020. However, Garcia was 91st-percentile in the 2nd half of 2021, which would be a career-best. Part of that could be because his launch angle in the 2nd half rose two degrees, while his groundball rate fell slightly.

Even if we don't believe the slight change in launch angle and average exit velocity in the air are harbingers of a change, we should be viewing Garcia as close to the hitter he was in 2019. That hitter batted .282 with 20 HR despite being only 50th-percentile in HR/PA. If you give him a HR/PA that's an average of his 2018 and 2021, Garcia would have hit 28 home runs in 2019. With seemingly guaranteed at-bats in the middle of the order for Miami, Garcia could be looking at another season with a .270-.280 batting average 27+ HR, and 8+ stolen bases, which makes him tremendous value where he's currently being drafted at pick 187.

If you want to put my love of Garcia to music and images, you can check out this video of him I made:

Chad Pinder, Oakland Athletics

Did you know that Chad Pinder had a 16.3% barrel rate in 2021? You'd be forgiven for not knowing that since he only played in 75 games and is often an afterthought as the A's versatile utility man. However, when I saw Pinder's name come up on this leaderboard, I decided to dive in, and HOT DAMN.

It starts with Pinder's barrel rate but then extends to the fact that the 29-year-old was in the 94th-percentile on barrels that went over 100 mph and the 99th-percentile on balls in the air hit over 100 mph. Chad Pinder hit 55.4% of his fly balls and line drives over 100 mph. His average exit velocity on balls in the air was 98.7 mph.

This also isn't really new for Pinder. In 2020, his max exit velocity was in the top 4% in the entire league. He's had an average exit velocity over 90 mph in every season since 2018. At 6'2" 210 pounds, Pinder is also way bigger than middle infielders like Bo Bichette (6'0" 185 pounds) who people have no problem projecting for power. The biggest issues for Pinder's power profile have been that his launch angle usually overs around 8-degrees, causing his FB% to stay in the low to mid-30s and his groundball rate to be near 50%. He also has some swing-and-miss to his game with a career 13% SwStr% and a contact rate of 75%, which is fine but not great, and why his strikeout rate is usually around 25%.

However, Pinder hits the ball incredibly hard and has for a while. As of this writing, he is penciled in as the starting left field for the Athletics, but he's also been playing a lot of 3B in spring training, so it's possible that he could play 130+ games while having multi-position eligibility. Even without a swing change, Pinder is likely to be a 15+ home runs bat who can hit .250 and have a combined Runs+RBI total of around 130. If we were to see him begin to add more loft to the swing, a power breakthrough could push him to be a 25+ home run guy which is why I love Pinder as one of my end-of-draft multi-position bats.

Harrison Bader, St. Louis Cardinals

Bader finds himself climbing in ADP as people search for more players with power and speed, but whether you want to draft him where he's going is all about whether or not you believe in small samples. During the first half of the season, Bader hit .234/.308/.439 with six home runs, five stolen bases, and a walk rate of just over 9%. Granted, it was only 120 plate appearances, but it seemed like the Bader we've seen before, until you dug until the surface.

During that first half, Bader was swinging at the highest rate of his career, with a Swing% just over his 2018 previous high, and was also making contact at an 82.2% clip, which was in the 89th-percentile in the league and was more than 15% higher than his previous rates. He also only had a 15.8% strikeout rate, which would have been almost twice as good as his career average, so Bader was swinging more, making more contact, but only barrelling the ball 5.6% of the time and not seeing great results on the field. Something had to give.

In the second half, Bader began to see results, hitting .281/.331/.469 with ten home runs in 281 plate appearances. Those numbers were despite a 26- game cold stretch in August where he hit .152/.229/.192. If you remove those 109 plate appearances, then you're looking at just 172 plate appearances of plus production from Bader, which comes back to what we were talking about earlier in regards to the small sample size. Can we believe in the 92 hot plate appearances in July and 117 across September and October? I'm inclined to believe yes, to a degree.

See, in the second half of the season, Bader increased his swing rate even more, up to 48.1%, when he had hovered around 42% for the last two years. He also raised his O-Swing% and Z-Swing% to career-high rates, and even though his contact rate dipped to 74.6% in the second half, that was still in line with his previous career marks and his O-Contact% remained a career-high. It's clear from those numbers that Bader was being more aggressive at the plate, but was hunting pitches that he could put in play. He was also producing with this approach, registering a .892 OPS and .541 SLG on the first pitch, which helped compensate for the rise in SwStr%. Bader swung and missed more but struck out less since he was being aggressive early in the count as well. Yet, part of the reason I think we saw Bader have a big second half is because of one final adjustment.

Sometimes plate discipline approaches can take a few months to settle, so it's possible that Bader was always going to have a strong second half, but another thing I noticed was that a lot of Bader's rolling averages showed a clear spike around the middle of August.

His hard-hit rate:

His xSLG:

And his xBA:

So did something change for Bader in the middle of August? One potential answer is that Bader's launch angle dropped from 15-degrees before this point to 11.3-degrees from August 14th on. That may not seem like a lot, but a four-degree change in swing path in the middle of the season likely signals a clear shift in approach and one that plays to Bader's strengths. Since Bader has 97th percentile sprint speed and had a .303 batting average on ground balls (the third season he's batted above .300 on grounders), keeping the ball out of the air is better for his average. He also only hits the ball in the air at an average exit velocity of 91.3 mph, which is just 17th-percentile in all of baseball, so he's not exactly benefiting from lifting the ball.

As a result, I think the newfound aggressive approach and hitting the ball low and hard could make his high batting average from that final stretch more believable. He also hit seven home runs during those 171 plate appearances, which is a third of his projected plate appearance total on the season, meaning that 15+ home runs doesn't seem out of the question even without the lift in his swing. This new version of Bader won't help you in OBP leagues, and he's likely to run hot-and-cold due to the swing-and-miss in his game, but I also think he could hit .260 with 15+ home runs and 15 stolen bases, which is a pretty solid value for where he's going.

Reid Detmers, Los Angeles Angels

I also listed Reid Detmers as one of "my guys" on Jon Anderson's podcast and had him featured in my top 100 starting pitchers article so I'm all in there. People may look at Detmers' 7.40 ERA from five starts last year and forget that he was a 21-year-old in his FIRST SEASON OF PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL. The Angels drafted Detmers 10th overall in June of 2020 and he was in the majors almost a calendar year later. That's insane for a starting pitcher.

Detmers throws mid-90s from the left side, but has two really solid breaking balls in a slider and a curve. The curve had just a 2.66 deserved ERA in 2021 with a 12.1 SwStr% and a 35.4% CSW, which is why it was Detmers' second most-used pitch. It also hits hit into the ground a lot with a 53.8% groundball rate, which is a good thing because it allowed a 7.7% barrel rate but doesn't often lead to much damage due to the low launch angle allowed.

The slider was Detmers' best swing-and-miss pitch with a 17.6 SwStr%, which is why he throws it 30% of the time in two-strike counts. It had a 3.19 dERA and allowed just a 4.3% barrel rate in 2021, so both of the breaking balls played up in the limited sample. The problem for Detmers was that his fastball got hit hard, and he didn't seem to have a strong enough fourth pitch between the change-up and sinker.

However, my hope is that Detmers' fastball will be more effective in his second season. Often rookies learn about fastball location the hard way in adjusting to the majors, realizing that good velocity isn't enough when it doesn't come with efficient command. I like that Detmers worked up in the zone with his fastball, but he needs to mix inside and outside a bit more and keep working on the sequencing of his arsenal, two things that are incredibly common for young pitchers.

So far in the spring, Detmers has shown improvements in his changeup, which will be crucial for him going forward, and he's won a spot in the Angels' six-man rotation. I know the six-man turns some people off because it means fewer innings, but Detmers only threw 80+ innings last year, so he's likely capped around 130 this year, regardless. We also don't know how effective Michael Lorenzen will be as a starter or Jose Suarez will be in his first year in the rotation. Plus, with Patrick Sandoval's injury history, there are myriad ways this becomes a more traditional five-man rotation, and I'm happy to bet on Detmers' talent while others are rushing to true rookies like Matt Brash, Hunter Greene, and MacKenzie Gore.

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