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Jon Anderson looks at fantasy baseball breakout hitters, risers and potential sleepers for Week 8. He looks into Statcast data to identify hitter breakouts.
Welcome back RotoBallers 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.
The idea is to find hitters that have made changes and/or really improved this season to find start-worthy hitters for your fantasy teams, preferably on the cheap. We aren't constricting ourselves to players that are available on waivers or anything like that, just looking for some hitters that may be having their breakout seasons that you should try to acquire.
For transparency's sake, we'll do a recap of each week's recommendation at the beginning of each post to track our results and see if we're on the right track.
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Fantasy Baseball Breakouts Recap
Here are all of the names I've recommended so far.
| Week # | Breakout Picks |
| Week 1 (ST) | Julio Rodriguez, Steven Kwan, Kevin Smith, Bryson Stott |
| Week 2 | Steven Kwan, Gavin Lux, Andrew Vaughn, Jesus Sanchez, Austin Nola |
| Week 3 | Seiya Suzuki, Jeremy Pena, Alex Verdugo, Ke'Bryan Hayes, Rowdy Tellez |
| Week 4 | Alec Bohm, Santiago Espinal, Taylor Ward, Cristian Pache |
| Week 5 | Rowdy Tellez, Ha-Seong Kim, Max Kepler, Christian Walker, Pavin Smith |
| Week 6 | Manuel Margot, Brandon Drury, Josh Naylor, Daulton Varsho, Gleyber Torres |
| Week 7 | Brendan Rodgers, Yonathan Daza, Brandon Nimmo, Tommy Edman, Ryan Jeffers |
This Week's Fantasy Baseball Breakout Picks
MJ Melendez, Kansas City Royals
Melendez earned the call-up to the Royals a few weeks back despite starting the year slow in AAA with a .167/.286/.295 line in 21 games. Surprisingly, he has hit the ground running in the Majors with a .259/.317/.483 line in 18 games with the club. The underlying numbers are quite impressive as well as he's put up an 11.4% barrel rate with a 63.6% hard-hit rate all while only striking out 22.2% of the time. Even over a small sample like 63 plate appearances, that's pretty darn impressive.
The other thing working in his favor is that he's a catcher. He's already popped three homers and if the hard-hit and barrel rates stay anywhere close to where they are now, there are plenty more to come. It's possible the league adjusts to him and he becomes another mediocre hitting backstop, and the everyday playing time is far from a sure thing with Salvador Perez returning, but for now, Melendez seems like someone who should probably be started in most leagues.
Kyle Isbel, Kansas City Royals
Two Royals this week, yikes! We have not seen much at all of Isbel, as he's below 150 Major League plate appearances at the time of this writing, with just 61 coming this season. What he's done so far is make contact on 83.2% of his swings with a hard-hit rate above 64%. That mark is sixth-best in the entire league for hitters with 50 or more PAs this season.
He is yet to see one of those hard-hit balls find a fence to fly over. That often suggests a high ground-ball rate, but it's not the case with Isbel. If we look at his launch angles, we find that he's hit a ton of balls in the "line-drive" angle range, between 10 and 20 degrees. Those won't be going for homers, especially in the current environment, but it does show up that he just needs a tad bit more list to start seeing some of these 100+ mph batted balls go for round-trippers.
The other huge reason to consider adding Isbel is the steals. He has tons of speed and swiped 22 bags in AAA a season ago, and he's already stolen two bags on three attempts in his 23 games. He's mostly slotted into the 7th and 8th spot in the batting order, but with more hard-hit balls and steals, I think he can move his way up towards the top – it's not like there's a ton of guys knocking down the door in Kansas City. Keep an eye on Isbel!
Patrick Wisdom, Chicago Cubs
This isn't really a "breakout" pick. I don't think Wisdom is going to be anything other than what we know him to be – a good power hitter with a massive strikeout rate that keeps his batting average insanely low.
The reason for the elevated interest here is the league context. We are still sitting at a 37.6 PA/HR rate league-wide, much worse than in previous years. A "barrel" really isn't doing enough this year, with only about 40% of them going for homers. That means we need to look for guys that are really hitting the ball hard if we're looking for trustworthy power sources. Wisdom is one of these guys.
His 74% hard-hit rate is second in the league for qualified hitters behind only Aaron Judge. His barrels are performing well, going for a homer 62% of the time – and that is something that can be sustained given the raw power he possesses. The 40% strikeout rate is still a huge problem, but despite that, he's still managed a .226 batting average which is just 12 points behind the current league average.
So Wisdom isn't really "breaking out", but the game is "breaking" in a way that benefits his style of hitting. Wisdom is worth an add if you are really hurting for pop.
Julio Rodriguez, Seattle Mariners
J-Rod makes a re-appearance. He has vindicated me on the pre-season pick of him as a "breakout", although it's not technically correct to call a rookie a breakout.
Things were looking awfully dreary for him early on as he hit .167 with no homers and a 44% strikeout rate over the first two weeks of the season. However, we have seen Rodriguez improve greatly as the year has gone on, and now all of the sudden he sits with a really nice .272/.318/.414 line with five homers and a dozen steals (that 17 HR+SB puts him in a tie with Kyle Tucker for second in the league in the category behind Judge).
The main reason for the improvement is the improving strikeout rate:
It's still at a bad 31.5%, but the mark has been under 26% in the month of May. A strikeout rate in the mid-twenties will work just perfectly for a guy with this much power and speed. J-Rod is a budding fantasy star, it would seem.
Mike Yastrzemski, San Francisco Giants
Yaz already had his breakout year, but he might be about to top it in 2021. He's hitting .339/.449/.565 in May with two homers, a 9.6% barrel rate, a 58% hard-hit rate, and more walks than strikeouts (16% BB%, 15% K%). The 83.6% contact rate is really good.
I don't think he's going to hit a ton of homers in the new environment, but he'll be good enough to maintain league-average power while providing a strong batting average and OBP. The Giants lineup also generates a lot of counting stat opportunities, and Yastrzemski is one of the guys in that lineup that can more or less avoid the platooning thing they love to do so much.
And that's it for this week breakout picks, hope this helps. Good luck this week, RotoBallers!
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