Expectations are a privilege, but they can be burdensome to live up to. One need look no further than the greatest of expectations, Dickens’s Great Expectations. The main character, Pip, inherits money from a secret benefactor. Pip thinks the money is the bridge or gateway to marrying the girl of his dreams. He ultimately learns that the money wasn’t part of the larger plan, and he screwed up by taking for granted many important relationships and gifts in his life. His great expectations didn’t allow him to fully appreciate his reality.
There are plenty of other examples of failing to meet the hype; of falling short of expectations.
Even if you weren’t alive to see it, you may have heard of Geraldo Rivera opening up Al Capone’s vault. I don’t remember what he *expected* to find in it, but it was emptier than Lennay Kekua’s coffin. Another blast from the past is Y2K–if it had met expectations, we might not even be here using the internet to discuss fantasy baseball.
As a middle-aged gamer dad, I have great expectations for the new EA Sports college football game. I have early access starting July 16, and I feel like I’m back in college, waiting for the clock to strike midnight so I can have an absolute marathon gaming session. I don’t know if I’ve ever anticipated a game’s release as much as I’m excited for this one, so if it doesn’t live up to expectations, it would feel like a bigger disappointment than an unfrosted cupcake.
When we sat at our (metaphorical or literal) draft tables this spring, clicking names and making bids, hopefully, you looked at your teams, saw so many of your targets sitting on your roster at the prices/selections you wanted, and thought, “Man, I killed this draft. I’m going to make this league read my Nikes.” (Geto Boys forever). Ahh, if it was only that simple.
In this installment, I’m going to take a look at some of the hitters you spent a high or decently-high pick on and use some analytics to decide if you’ll eventually get your pick’s worth out of them or if the cost is more sunk than Gollum’s face. Shorter: hope or nope? I used wRC+, BABIP (to see who may be getting unlucky), EV, HardHit% (the previous two for batted ball quality), and finally, O-Swing% and SwStr% (to look at swing decisions and contact).
It’s impossible to get pick value for first-rounders Corbin Carroll and Julio Rodriguez, so you either sell low, or you hope they get hotter than Zach Wilson’s mom (cross-sport reference alert!). Carroll’s wRC+ of 81 is the 13th worst in MLB, and Rodriguez’s 89 is the 26th. If you own them, none of this is surprising to you. Carroll’s BABIP of .261 is sixty points worse than either of his first two years, which could point to bad luck. But is it? Carroll’s EV of 87.6 is 26th-worst in MLB and his HardHit% of 36% is 33rd-worst. Simply, Carroll is probably earning his BABIP at this juncture. Carroll is middle of the pack in O-Swing%, but is top-30 in SwStr%, so he’s hitting strikes–just not very hard. He’s been a top-100 player on the Player Rater the past 30 days, but when him ranking 91st on the Player Rater is his high-water mark for the year…ouch. You’re expecting more. Using these stats, there’s not enough in them to think that Carroll will perform like anything resembling a first-round pick the rest of this year and it may be time to sell low in redrafts. I’m willing to stay patient and even recommend acquiring him in dynasty, as it’s entirely possible some of his batted ball data is lacking due to lingering effects of a shoulder injury. For the rest of 2024, Corbin Carroll is a NOPE.
J-Rod is our other first-round flop. Interestingly, his BABIP of .336 aligns with his career norm and shows no lack of luck. He’s top-30 in EV at 91.7 mph, again around a percent lower than his career norm. Rodriguez’s HardHit% is 49%, 22nd-best in MLB. So what gives? To start, his O-Swing% of 40% is 11th-worst in MLB. That tells me that pitchers are getting him to swing at their pitches rather than hunting his pitches, the ones he can do the most damage with. Lastly, his 15% SwStr% is 10th-worst in MLB. Rodriguez seems to be a pitch-selection tweak away from seeing an immediate improvement, though it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to start hitting strikes more often. Regardless, Rodriguez’s underlying metrics give me HOPE.
Many ‘perts had Michael Harris II ready for his big 30/30 breakout, but the breakout may have to be postponed. Harris’s BABIP is a career-low by thirty points, but it’s still not necessarily bad comparatively to the league. His EV is within about a percent lower than his career norm–not enough to blame for the sluggish performance thus far. His HardHit% is top-60; not super, but again, portends that he has a little more to give than he’s done so far. Now, the bad news. His O-Swing% is the fourth-worst in MLB at 46%–nearly half of every ball, he’s swinging at. He’s got the 25th-worst SwStr%, so he’s basically swinging at pitchers’ pitches almost half the time, and when they do throw him strikes, he’s simply not hitting enough of them to let his reasonable HardHit% and EV to play. He’s too young to give up on in dynasty unless you’re working to acquire a similarly young and tooled-up player, but in redraft, Harris II is a NOPE.
Randy Arozarena has been one of the more exciting and consistently productive hitters through his career–he doesn’t put up crazy stats in any one category but has given his owners three straight 20/20 seasons. Rice Bowl is still on pace for the 20/20, which is great, but he’s pairing it with a batting average that would make Mario Mendoza laugh. The biggest culprit is his 6th-worst BABIP of .228. Randy’s EV is the second-highest of his career, but his HardHit% is a career-low. He’s got the 22nd-best O-Swing% in MLB, so his poor average doesn’t point back to bad swing decisions. His 8th percentile Whiff% may point back to a bad average, however. I think there are enough indicators that point to him being able to bat .250 from here on out, and he’s still given owners a 20+/20+ pace even with the horrific average–I have HOPE for the Rice Bowl.
I’m burying the lede here because I want you to read the entire article, but we’ve got to take a look at Vinny Pasquantino. Vinnie’s wRC+ is right at 100 (the baseline for league average), and he’s given an underwhelming .236 BA with 8 HRs–definitely not what you were buying/expecting on draft day. The Pasquatch’s BABIP of .245 is almost the same as last year’s, but sixty points worse than the year before–in almost the same PAs both years. It’s hard to make heads or tails of whether he’s underperforming or almost exactly performing a career norm here. What we do know is that it’s a really low BABIP compared to the rest of MLB. He’s got a career-high EV (34th best in MLB) and is within a percent of a career-high HardHit% (42nd best). Vinnie P is middle of the pack in O-Swing%, but is elite at SwStr%, 10th best at only 6%. His xStats are terrific, and his Statcast page is littered with red (though there’s some blue in their new bat speed and LA data). I didn’t start the article with him because you didn’t have to spend a top pick like you did on these guys, but he’s a *strong* HOPE, and I recommend aggressively pursuing him both in redraft and dynasty.
