Breakout Hitters Watch for Fantasy Baseball - Ezequiel Duran, Triston Casas, and More

May 11, 2023

Jon Anderson looks at fantasy baseball breakout hitters, risers, and potential sleepers for the rest of the fantasy baseball season, written in Week 7 of the season. He looks into Statcast data to identify hitter breakouts.

We are back for the fifth iteration of breakout hitters!

There will be different player profiles included in all of this. I try to keep the majority of the names as hitters that are available on waivers. Or at the very least, players you could trade for before the breakout really hits. However, sometimes I just want to highlight already highly regarded hitters that seem to be going to the next level. These would be considered "buy highs" that you could still try to pry away from their owner with a fair offer.

For full transparency, I also track the picks every week, so you can go back and see who I picked. There will be some misses, but hopefully, we'll have enough hits to make this a worthwhile endeavor. I'll give you the tracker first and then we'll get into the five names we're picking for this week.

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2023 Breakout Picks Tracker

Week 7 Picks

Ezequiel Duran, Texas Rangers

We have back-to-back weeks with a Duran being featured, and this week it's Ezequiel. The Rangers have been one of the league's top offenses, and Duran has been a part of that. The 23-year-old is slashing .307/.337/.489 with four homers and two steals in 92 PAs.

Duran had a couple cracks at the majors in 2022, but couldn't stick as he struggled to the tune of a .236/.277/.365 slash line without anything better to see in the expected stats. He has made the step forward this year by getting more balls in the air and hitting the ball harder on average while maintaining a solid strikeout rate of 23%.

So you can see the average launch angle has remained the same, but the change in the fly ball and line drive rates have been great. The reason the numbers don't seem to add up there in the GB%, LD%, and FB% is that he had a ridiculously high 17% pop-up rate last year, and that has cut down to under 2%.

We liked Duran a little bit last year because of his speed. Clearly, he still has that going on, and the growing barrel rate (+3 points this year) could make him a borderline fantasy stud if these improvements keep up. Check out his Statcast page:

Someone in your league may have already jumped on him, but if not-- give him a look. There is the chance of some lesser playing time when Corey Seager returns, but the good news is that he has already logged plenty of games at second, third, and the outfield -- so if he keeps hitting, they'll find him PAs.

Joey Gallo, Minnesota Twins

Let's get the disclaimer out of the way first. Gallo is still striking out 33% of the time with a bad 64% contact rate and a horrifying .184 xBA. Those things aren't likely to change.

But this is Joey Gallo we're talking about, so we need to look at this through a different lens. 2018 was the last time Gallo was truly a useful fantasy player. He hit 40 bombs that year with 92 RBIs, and that was enough to offset the .206 batting average he gave your team.

So if we're going to have Gallo as a player worth starting, we're going to need well over 30 homers from him. The good news is that I think he can do that based on the improvements he's made where it matters most (again, it's not to say these underlying numbers are good, but they are getting back much closer to where they were in that 2018 season), let's check that out:

The xSLG really sums it all up in the bottom row there. That stat even takes into account the strikeouts, and that's important. Gallo absolutely needs a SLG above .550 to matter in fantasy given the batting average he's going to give you. It's incredibly encouraging to see that xSLG is way up there again this year after three years of mediocre values and unusable ones in his case.

This is more of a re-breakout pick, but I think it's possible that this change of scenery has gotten Gallo back to his old ways. He could be a good enough source of power to overcome the damage he puts on your fantasy team's batting average.

Ke'Bryan Hayes, Pittsburgh Pirates

Yandy Diaz has taught us a lesson this year. Never fully give up on a player just because he can't stop hitting groundballs. Yandy seems to have turned his ways around (or at the very least made a significant improvement) after years of having the groundball problem, so let's talk about another player that has been plagued by this in his young career.

Pirates third baseman Ke'Bryan Hayes has long limited strikeouts and hit the ball hard; however, he just couldn't lift the ball enough to generate power. He has just one homer to this point in the year, but the underlying improvements are there:

I looked up similar seasons in the Statcast era to see what kind of home run output is reasonable to expect, here are the results:

So there are some downers in the data there. Nick Markakis's 12-homer season there doesn't make us very excited since that's about the conservative projection Hayes was. We also see some good news there with two of the examples climbing well above 20 homers.

What we can say is that his single homer total so far this year doesn't make a ton of sense given the inputs, so we should expect more dingers in the future. Even if he does only manage 10-15 homers, he will still play as a lead-off hitter with a good batting average and steals.

It's possible that Hayes puts up a really, really nice season and shoots himself way up the 2024 draft boards. I view him as a guy to acquire at third base because he's not going to kill your fantasy team by any means. The upside is there for him to be a real help to your overall numbers.

Triston Casas, Boston Red Sox

This is more of a low-confidence pick here, but I did find something interesting in the data. Casas makes for a more exciting guy to potentially pick up as a high-upside prospect that showed some good signs last season. I'm just trying to say that I don't have high confidence in Casas, but it does always feel a little bit better to take a shot on a young talented guy like this.

I really hate when people cut data samples in half to make some point because you're never going to learn more about a player from a smaller data sample as compared to a bigger one. I'm going to commit the sin and do it myself. Check out Casas' stats broken down by half-seasons:

In recent weeks, he has lowered the K% and raised the Brl%. That's great news, and the overall numbers aren't all that bad either at 11% and 28%, respectively. Again, I really hate looking at half of an already small sample, but no doubt we'd rather see the good numbers be more recent than the bad.

Casas still has upside at the first base position, and he just might be available for free in your leagues.

Zach McKinstry, Detroit Tigers

McKinstry has been a journeyman in recent years. He's played on three different major league teams in the last three years and has not been able to lock down a starting job at any of the stops. That itself is probably reason to just leave him on the wire despite his early season success. In very deep leagues, he might be someone to have a look at.

It's not like we've never seen good hitting from McKinstry. He did some interesting things with the Dodgers when filling in for some injured players in 2021. Overall, the numbers weren't anything to get excited about, but a league-average 8% Brl% with a good contact rate is nothing to sneeze at either.

Now, he's settled in as an everyday player for the Tigers and he's made the most of it, hitting .260/.345/.411 with two homers and four steals. He has scored 1.85 DraftKings points per plate appearance, which is well above the league average of 1.75.

He is one of just 13 hitters to have a barrel rate above 12% and a contact rate above 75%. The other names on the list:

• Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
• Ronald Acuna Jr.
• Yandy Diaz
• Ozzie Albies
• Jonah Heim
• Max Kepler
• Shohei Ohtani
• Yordan Alvarez
• LaMonte Wade Jr.
• Jason Heyward
• Corbin Carroll
• Rowdy Tellez

That's a good group to be a part of. The other good news is that the changes made to Comerica Park have rocketed that park up the list in terms of best hitter parks.

I'm not saying you're going to be thrilled to have started McKinstry most weeks. I'm not even really recommending anybody pick him up except in very deep leagues (AL-only leagues maybe?), but I do think McKinstry is quite undervalued and his performance thus far deserved some attention.

There you have it, five more breakout hitters! Hope this helps, and I hope you can find some offensive help throughout the year with the help of this article series.

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