Breakout Hitters to Watch for Fantasy Baseball Week 9

Jon Anderson looks at fantasy baseball breakout hitters, risers and potential sleepers for Week 9. 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.

We didn't see much of Isbel last week, but the good times kept rolling for Melendez, Wisdom, and Yastrzemski! Let's highlight another handful of names.

This Week's Fantasy Baseball Breakout Picks

Alejandro Kirk, Toronto Blue Jays

Blue Jays fans and fantasy die-hards have long expected Kirk to turn into a very good Major League bat, but that has been put on hold a bit by sparse playing time driven by injury and lack of defensive acumen. Kirk's play, as well as other circumstances going on with the Blue Jays offense, have led Kirk to be in the lineup quite often this season. He has made 25 starts behind the dish and ten more as the designated hitter.

He has taken that opportunity and run with it, hitting .304/.378/.432 in his 143 plate appearances. The power numbers haven't been there. He had just one homer on the year before a double-dong day earlier this week. That one game forced his slugging percentage up to truly useful territory:

Most impressive for Kirk is the strikeout rate, which currently sits at just 8.4%. That is the fourth-lowest in the league for hitters with at least 100 plate appearances (only bested by Jose Ramirez, Yonathan Daza, and Steven Kwan). More excitingly, he adds to the mix a pretty decent 7% barrel rate and a 40% hard-hit rate. Those numbers are just decent, but typically you're not getting anything close to those marks for hitters striking out so rarely.

Of course, the big reason to be excited about Kirk's season is the fact that he plays the catcher position. He appears to be an above-average bat at worst and you can throw him into a position on your fantasy roster which you're probably not used to getting positive production from. He will have to maintain the health and keep earning those DH appearances (that may be tougher with Teoscar Hernandez back) to really pay off in a big way, but he is definitely a talent that could seriously boost your fantasy team in the right direction.

Nolan Gorman, St. Louis Cardinals

Rookie #1 of this week's pick is Gorman, the Cardinals' young third baseman. We have seen just 36 plate appearances from this guy at the time of this writing, but his game has translated just fine to the Majors thus far.

Gorman earned his call-up by slashing .308/.367/.677 in AAA with 15 homers in 147 plate appearances. He was your prototypical big swinger, however, with a high 34% strikeout rate. A K% that high in the minors typically means we're heading for 40% or so in the big leagues, which would make it very tough to stick with the big league club and certainly not enticing for fantasy purposes. Gorman has, however, managed strikeouts thus far with just a 28% K%, and he's added on an elevated 14% BB% to go with it.

It's pretty surprising to see him improve in both K% and BB% after coming up to the majors, and I don't necessarily expect it to stick. The reason for optimism is the raw power, which plays quite well in the climate of 2022. He has hit two homers in his 36 plate appearances with an elite 19% barrel rate and a 52.4% hard-hit rate. He is hitting almost no ground-balls with a GB% of just 9.5%, the lowest in the entire league by more than five points.

2022 Lowest Ground Ball Rates - Hitters

Again I'll say that we could quickly see Gorman's strikeout rate heading into the upper thirties and more ground-balls leading to fewer homers and less RBI production, but we at least have to say it's possible he is immediately a great source of power for your fantasy team – and he should be rostered out of speculation if nothing else right now.

Joc Pederson, San Francisco Giants

I don't think Pederson really fits in the "breakout" category no matter what is happening on the field, but he has done some stuff this year that I can't ignore, so I'm jamming him in here.

The Giants have proved to be a perfect fit for Pederson. They are a platoon-happy team, which works just great for a guy who has these career splits at the dish:

So far in 2022, Pederson has 125 plate appearances against righties and just 11 against lefties. That is clearly going to boost his numbers in a big way, and in daily changes fantasy leagues, you can really take advantage of it by sliding in another hitter when the Giants are facing a southpaw.

So what has all of this turned into for Joc? Just a .277/.353/.613 slash line with 12 homers, a 21% barrel rate, a 57% hard-hit rate, and a career-best 18% strikeout rate. That strikeout rate is a bit hard to believe, but his career mark has settled at 24% so with the more advantageous hitting schedule it's feasible that he could finish in the 20-22% range.

Joc is a bit harder to roster and start in weekly lock leagues where you're only going to average around four games per week from him, but in a league where you can change your lineup every day, he's not too far away from elite.

Christopher Morel, Chicago Cubs

Rookie #2 here is a Cubs hitter that I admit I had never heard of before this season. The 22-year-old infielder has busted into the bigs with a .283/.387/.491 slash line in his 62 plate appearances, hitting two homers and quickly swiping five bases (he has been caught stealing twice as well).

The underlying marks are encouraging as well (otherwise we wouldn't be here writing about him...) with a 10.3% barrel rate, a 46% hard-hit rate, a 22.6% K% and a very nice 12.9% BB%.

He has shown quite a bit of swing-and-miss with a low 68% contact rate, but he has shown a strong knowledge of the strike zone with a respectable 23.7% chase rate (about five points better than the league average).

For fantasy purposes, players that steal bases are always safer bets since you can more or less count on these guys doing that as long as they're getting on base. Fast players near the top of the lineup with high walk rates are the perfect place to go for stolen bases, so Morel can be started just on that basis – throw in the encouraging power numbers and we have a really impressive looking rookie that should be rostered pretty much everywhere, at least for now.

Garrett Cooper, Miami Marlins

I was all over Cooper last season as he was just tearing it up in the middle of the year before an injury derailed his season. Then a really bad first two weeks of 2022 (.205 AVG, .308 SLG, 31% K%) for him had me near giving up. He has turned it back on of late and has his season line at a pretty strong .277/.360/.426 with three homers, and he has the strikeout rate down to 24% to go with his always-good walk rate of 9.3%.

For how little hype he's gotten in the fantasy world, this guy is a career .281/.355/.449 hitter in 282 games. The knock on him would be the relative lack of power, but we've seen progression on that front this season with an 11.9% barrel rate for the year. Over the last 15 days, we've seen him pile up a 17% barrel rate with an 80% contact rate, two things that are not easy to do at the same time.

5/14 - 5/30, Hitters with 15% Brl% and 75% Contact%

The reason I'm adding Cooper everywhere is the safety. He's just always been a solid batting average and OBP guy, so at worst you'll get that from him, and now we're seeing that he could be a 20-25 homer guy to boot. He is a bit too old to be expecting major improvements from this year (he's 31), but I think if we can just get a nice long sustained run of health for him, the numbers could be really great for your fantasy team.

Emmanuel Rivera, Kansas City Royals

Well, he qualified in that data table above, so I figure let's throw him in here. The 25-year-old Royals third baseman has put up some encouraging metrics in 2022 behind his lackluster .231/.287/.474 slash line. His K% is around league average at 23%, and that has come with a very nice 15.3% barrel rate and a 78% contact rate.

He did more of the same in the minors this year before the call-up, hitting .288/.382/.530 with three homers in just 18 games. There was never much prospect hype on Rivera, but he's in the age range where it's believable he's just really improved skill-wise and can be a bat worth rostering in fantasy moving forward. I'm not jumping on him quite yet, but third base has been tough to fill and Rivera has had a really impressive month of May. Maybe throw him on your watch list, or add in deep formats.

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

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