The Baller Ranks: Top 200 Hitters Weekly Rankings (Week 6)

August 28, 2020

David Emerick's Baller Ranks for 8/27/20 are weekly fantasy baseball rankings for the top 200 hitters. He ranks and analyzes updated hitter values for Week 6 of MLB.

The Baller Ranks have a new player at number two, and his name is not Tatis, Yellich, or Acuna. While all three of those players have their claims to the second spot, the change is primarily based on volume. With that hint, can you guess which superstar has more remaining games than any other player in the top 10?

As we turned the halfway point in the baseball season, we've been exposed to a slew of postponed games. That change is wreaking havoc with the projected values. Players with extra games are getting meaningful bumps, and players with fewer are seeing their values decline by comparison.

That means that players for teams like the Cardinals, Phillies, Marlins, and Pirates are seeing a boost in their value. I started documenting this two weeks ago with the dramatic changes to the Cardinals' schedule and how that caused the fantasy value for their players to skyrocket. In the interim, several other teams have seen their schedules changed. Here are the teams with the most games remaining in the season. Last night's cancellations will impact this some, but it captures the most notable teams.

Schedule Shenanigans

While most teams have only 28 or 29 games remaining, there are many with 32 or more. For players on those teams, we're seeing value increases from 5% to 25%. The simple reality is that five or six games can mean another two or three home runs, four or five runs and RBI, extra weight for a player with a strong batting average, and another steal or two.

The answer to the question about which superstar has the most remaining games probably depends on whether you consider Bryce Harper to be a superstar. Harper does have more remaining games than anyone else in the top ten, but I don't think he's quite earned honorary of "superstar." Our new number two in the rankings is none other than Juan Soto.

The schedule anomalies I referenced above are particularly significant for players like Harper, Soto, and Goldschmidt, who are not only offensive heavyweights with excellent production per game, but also players who hit at the top of their team's order every single day.

That said, working from the list above, here are the players from those teams with the highest plate shares.

Soto is conspicuously absent from that list because his quarantine period cost him eight games.

For Soto, the bonus games are bumping his value by about $5. He's earned the rest of his increase with his performance. Over the last two weeks, he's hit six home runs, 13 R, 13 RBI, and hit .380.

The spike in Soto's projected value is not merely based on the increase in his counting stats, but his ability to contribute a high average. That's not an expectation that he'll hit .380 all year long, but if he just manages his career average of .293, it will have significant value relative to the .242 league-wide batting average this season.

As I said, Harper is a similar case. The Phillies have even more games remaining than the Nationals, and Harper has had a superlative season in his own right. His barrel rate (17.5%), wOBA (.448), and xwOBA (.463) are all in the top 5% of the league right now. Given an extra five or six relative games, there's an argument for pushing Harper's value up to Acuna's at $43.

Young Superstars

The shift to Soto's value is tied to another, larger conversation about whether we are being too slow to accept young superstars as the value equivalents of older, more established players. Baseball's aging curves have shifted, and I can't remember any other time when three of the ten best players in baseball were 22 years old or younger. I am, of course, referring to Ronald Acuna, Fernando Tatis Jr., and Juan Soto.

That list omits many other excellent young players who are either on the cusp of ascending to a new level or who did not arrive in the majors until they were older because their teams deemed it financially beneficial to hold them back.

To that end, I'd love to hear more about how to weigh the performances of young players. While I have no intention of discarding what we know about small sample sizes and data stabilization, baseball is doing better at helping young ballplayers reach their ceilings at younger and younger ages.

Having wandered into that quagmire, here are the Meta Report for week 6 and the Baller Ranks Top-200 hitters. If you're unfamiliar with the Meta Report, here's a quick guide on how to read it. And if you missed Nick Mariano's pitcher rankings yesterday, here are his top 101 relievers and his top 101 starters.

Week 6 Hitter Rankings

Key Rankings Movers

Eric Hosmer (1B, Padres)

No batter has surprised me more than Eric Hosmer this season. For years, Hosmer has been a fantasy afterthought: a stable but unappealing player whose ceiling was barely rosterable in many leagues.

Hosmer may be a year late to the party, but he's become a devout follower of the church of Latter-Day Launch Angles. Hosmer's launch angle this season is 11.9°, almost double his previous career-high of 6.0° in 2015. That change has improved Hosmer's barrel rate from the 5.8% he maintained from 2015 to 2019 to the 13.3% that he has this year.

That launch angle change seems to be driving Hosmer's entire improvement. His exit velocity is almost identical, and most of his plate discipline numbers are remarkably similar. One key difference in Hosmer's plate discipline is that his contact rate has improved. With that, his swinging-strike rate has dropped from 13.4% to 7.3%, and his contact rate has jumped up from 73.0% to 84.7%. Meaningfully, Hosmer has seen more first-pitch strikes. It's possible that change is related to the improved Padres' lineup, but we know that lineup protection has very little evidence behind it.

Regardless, we have a certified swing change with enough data behind it to indicate that fantasy managers can bank on Hosmer's power surge as being real. Whether he ends up as a player with 30 HR power remains to be seen, but his previous pace of 25 HR/162 games seems a very safe projection.

Jonathan Schoop (2B, Tigers)

Schoop has had a few weeks of climbing projections, but unlike Hosmer, there hasn't been an evident change in his game that has improved his value. Instead, Schoop's move to Motor City and its supply of unlimited at-bats is helping to bolster his value.

Despite being an eight-year veteran, Schoop has only gotten full playing time twice in his career. In 2016, he had 647 plate appearances and hit 25 home runs. In 2017, he had 675 plate appearances and hit 32 home runs. Keep in mind those seasons were in the pre-rabbit-ball era, so the power output is even more impressive.

Granted, other factors have hurt the second baseman's value since then. In particular, Schoop's profile shows years with spikes in ground-ball and infield-fly rates, hard-hit rates that plummeted, and walk rates that have been in the bottom tenth of the league. Despite that, Schoop has managed to put it all together in Detroit this year. The consistent playing time and some modest improvements to his plate discipline are allowing Schoop to maintain a pace that would equal his 2017 season.

He's been around so long that it's easy to assume that Schoop is 30 or older, but this is only his age-28 season. While Hosmer, JD Martinez, and Lance Lynn are reminders that a player will sometimes develop dramatically in their later careers, that's not exactly what Schoop has shown. So far, it seems to be more a case of the player we knew, but finally in a situation where he can put his talents to their best use.

Adalberto Mondesi (SS, Royals

When managers drafted Adalberto Mondesi this summer, they were probably taking him as a top-50 player. Mondesi has fallen to 80^th in this update, and there are probably many managers who feel he should be lower than that.

Believe it or not, the projection systems have barely changed their outlook on Mondesi since the start of the season. I'm not sure what part of Mondesi's dataset keeps his projection so stable, but the machines have real confidence that he will rebound.

It's not clear to me that he deserves all of that confidence. The $9.5 tag on him isn't a total collapse of Mondesi's projected value. However, it is a definite correction that accounts for his inability to barrel the ball this season and the fact that critical numbers like his barrel rate (5.3%), walk rate (1.8%), and hard-hit rate (30.7%) have started to stabilize.

I worried in the spring that Mondesi would struggle this season because of the combination of his high-strikeout tendencies and his recovery from shoulder surgery. I also thought that the delayed start would give him time to recover, but that's not what he's shown so far this season.

Free-swingers like Mondesi are always prone to bouts of extreme streakiness, and the frantic nature of this season is distorting our ability to regard players like him with the perspective they deserve. However, it's hard to dismiss a 31-game, 115 PA period with a .199 xwOBA as a negative indicator of his status.

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