Breakout Hitters for Fantasy Baseball - MLB Batters Rising for Week 16

Jon Anderson looks at fantasy baseball breakout hitters, risers and potential sleepers for the rest of the fantasy baseball season, written in week 16 of the season. He looks into Statcast data to identify hitter breakouts.

Welcome back RotoBallers from the All-Star break, and to another edition of my "Breakout Hitters To Watch" series. What we're doing here is taking a good, close look at the hitting data each week to see which hitters are standing out the most.

We'll get back to basics this week after going a little bit different from last week. We'll just be checking on hitters popping up in the data lately, doing all of the right things.

Before we get to the names this week, I've included a brief intro and also a recap of all the names we've talked about throughout the year in this weekly piece.

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Fantasy Baseball Breakouts Recap

Here are all of the names I've recommended so far.

Breakout Picks for the Week 16

Josh Rojas, Arizona Diamondbacks

Rojas was an exciting prospect after the 2019 season, when he stole 33 bases and his 23 homers in 479 minor league plate appearances. In his 1,041 Major League plate appearances so far, he's only managed 25 steals and 18 homers while slashing .256/.335/.380. That's a pretty underwhelming line, and he hasn't done much to help fantasy teams over the last few years.

However, he's having a much better month of July right now, and this may be a sign of better things to come. Check out his hard-hit rate plot:

The hard-hit rate is 54.5% in July and has aided a .353/.439/.515 slash line in 82 plate appearances. He's never had much trouble with the strikeout (23.7% career K%), but he's improved there in 2022 with a mark of 20.1%, and an 18% mark in July.  He has six of his 11 steals this month as well, and he's been quite useful for fantasy purposes.

So can he keep it up? I don't know if a hard-hit rate over 50% is really a thing we'll get from Rojas for long, but it's very encouraging to see the improvements in K% and BB% that we have seen from him in 2022. He is newly 28 years old, so pretty far past the "young player" label, but the talent is real and Rojas could be taking a significant step forward in 2022.

Carlos Santana, Seattle Mariners

It's extremely weird to call a 36-year-old a "breakout", and Santana is certainly the oldest player we have talked about this season. However, he's had quite an interesting season and he's really been amazing over the last month or so, so I want to talk about him.

He has always had an extremely high walk rate, and that has continued this year with a 15.8% BB%. He's also been elite at avoiding the strikeout at 14.5%. The high walk rate was a detriment to his fantasy stats early on in the year because he just wasn't getting any balls in play to do damage with, and when he was hitting the ball, it wasn't very loud contact. More recently, however, he's walked a touch less and the quality of contact has exploded.

Let's compare his stats between Kansas City and Seattle.

It's possible that he's decided to swing the bat a bit harder since joining the Mariners. Maybe that's something the team asked him to do, or it's some kind of adrenaline, or maybe it's just not true at all – but the heightened K% along with the added barrel rate suggests that there might be something like that going on.

Either way, Santana has been a pretty darn good fantasy player in OBP leagues this year, and he's homered at a really great rate since switching teams. He's probably worthy of an add for the stretch run.

DJ LeMahieu, New York Yankees

Maybe this is like a re-breakout after LeMahieu's career trajectory took a major dip in 2021.

The wRC+ is back up to a very good spot at 130 after a mark of 100 in 2021. He has also found a bit more of a power swing since June 1st, hitting six dingers in 210 plate appearances for a home run rate right around the league average. That's great news for a guy that hits for a strong batting average and can steal a base here and there.

His fantasy value comes primarily from runs scored, he's tied for second (with Dansby Swanson) in the whole league in that category since June began with 39 runs scored (teammate Aaron Judge is the only player beating him).

If LeMahieu can be elite in runs (he can), continue to hit for a strong batting average (he can), and hit homers at a league average rate (not so sure about this now), he's darn close to being a fantasy stud – and you might even still be able to get him for a pretty good price right now. Go see what you can do.

Austin Riley, Atlanta Braves

2021 was the breakout year for Riley, but he's taken his play to a whole new level recently. He has slashed .432/.474/.898 in July. He has 10 homers (leads the league), a 21.4% Brl% (fourth-best), and a .494 xwOBA (second best), all the while striking out just 18.9% of the time. Here's what the career marks look like year over year.

You can see that it really was 2020 when he made the improvements in the strikeout rate, but it really took until 2021 for that to be solidified in our mind given how short the 2020 season was. We knew he had serious raw power this whole time, it was just a matter of seeing how much he could improve his contact ability and plate discipline.

Well, he has figured something out this season as he's knocking on the door of 30 homers with more than two months left to play. He has a top-ten blast rate in the league this year, and he's one of just four players with a barrel rate above 15% and strikeout rates under 26% (Yordan Alvarez, Shohei Ohtani, Joc Pederson).

There's not much actionable advice to give on Riley since he's a known stud now and probably not someone you can acquire in a trade, but maybe this will help you to just hold on tight in keeper/dynasty leagues – it should be a really great career for the 25-year-old.

Ezequiel Duran, Texas Rangers

I'm not sure if he's ready for the show quite yet, and he's been up-and-down between the majors and minors, but the raw skills are here for Duran. I like to check max sprint speed along with max exit velocity for the league's hitters and see which guys have put up strong numbers in both.

Here's the list of all players that have hit a ball above 110 miles per hour this year and notched a sprint speed (feet per second) above 29.

Since returning from the minor leagues, Duran has made 21 plate appearances and has hit .316/.381/.368, albeit with a bad 62% contact rate. For the year, his big league slash line is .272/.306/.420 with two homers, a 25.9% K%, a 4.7% BB%, but a quite weak .216 xwOBA.

There are clearly steps forward to be made before he's ready to really be a fantasy asset, but the raw talent is worthy of note and we could see him put up a nice combination of homers and steals as we move forward, even in 2022.

And that's it for this week's breakout picks, hope this helps. Good luck this week, RotoBallers!

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