The 2024 Major League Baseball season only has about five weeks left, and even less if you’re dealing with fantasy baseball playoffs. With only 27 total weeks in the fantasy baseball season, even a couple of weeks of information should help guide us to decisions about who deserves a valuable roster spot on our teams and who deserves the bench or deserves to be cut. These past two weeks saw many players impress and digress as the season winds down.
With the small sample size caveat pushed to the side for this exercise, most players are about 125 games into the 2024 regular season. This piece will look at some MLB fantasy assets that have seen their fantasy value rise and fall through the past couple of weeks of Major League Baseball games.
Fantasy Baseball Risers
Zach Neto (SS), Los Angeles Angels
Are we looking at the age of the young shortstops 2.0 right now? No, it’s not Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Nomar Garciappara, and Omar Vizquel. But with Bobby Witt Jr., Zach Neto, Gunnar Henderson, and Elly De La Cruz, the position is in good hands over the next 10 years. No one has been better than Bobby Witt Jr. over the last month or so (unless your last name is Judge), but Zach Neto has moved up player raters all across fantasy baseball.
In the last two weeks, Neto is hitting .304/.371/.643 with five home runs, 12 RBI, and two stolen bases. He is just about the one bright spot left on a soulless, meandering Los Angeles Angels team. In August, he has bumped up his hard-hit rate by 12 points over July and finally started taking some walks (over 10% for the month). Add in a 52% pull rate on his batted balls for the month and you have a recipe for astounding success at the dish.
Yainer Diaz (C), Houston Astros
Credit where credit is due. Whenever Yainer Diaz hits a home run, Geoff Blum yells out “Yainer Bomb!” on the Astros’ home telecast. And he has been shouting it a lot lately. Including a mammoth walk-off home run off of Kenley Jansen this week, Yainer Diaz has five home runs and 12 RBI in his last 53 plate appearances and now has the clean-up spot locked down in the Astros’ lineup until Kyle Tucker returns. He is hitting .324/.360/.563 in August and has helped keep the team in first place with Tucker and Alex Bregman on the shelf.
Diaz’s success this month comes from a renewed commitment to hitting the ball in the air, plus a little luck in the home ballpark department. Diaz’s flyball rate jumped 23.5% in July to almost 31% in August, which is perfect for a right-handed power hitter in Houston. His 29.4% HR/FB rate is clearly a product of luck and a short porch in left field, but it’s where he gets to call home for 81 games a season.
Jose Berrios (SP), Toronto Blue Jays
As the Toronto Blue Jays get worse, Jose Berrios gets better somehow. Despite the Blue Jays falling to last place in the AL East and 11 games out of a Wild Card spot, Jose Berrios is becoming more and more unhittable. In the last two weeks, Berrios has pitched 21 innings across three games, earning three wins, a 1.71 ERA and 20 strikeouts. That is the most innings, most wins, and ninth-most strikeouts in that span. He has simply been incredible, but the Blue Jays are squandering it.
In August, he has increased his strikeouts per nine innings by almost two over what he did in July and and his walk rate has almost been cut in half. It can be traced back to the fact that Berrios is rarely using his primary fastball anymore. At just 18% usage in 2024, it’s the lowest of his career and has afforded him the opportunity for his change up and cutter to be used more than 60% of the time. Those pitches are his two most effective and are what have caused this mini-breakout towards the end of an otherwise lost season.
Fantasy Baseball Fallers
Lane Thomas (OF), Cleveland Guardians
Lane Thomas is a good-stats-on-a-bad-team guy? It would sure seem like it for how he is playing since being traded to the Guardians before the deadline by the Washington Nationals. With Washington, Thomas hit .253/.331/.407 with eight home runs and 28 stolen bases. With Cleveland, despite being protected by Steven Kwan and Jose Ramirez in the lineup, Thomas is hitting .127/.226/.182 with no home runs and one stolen base. He looks absolutely lost with a 39% strikeout rate with his new team, so the question we must ask is “Can Lane Thomas be trusted for the rest of the season?”
Thomas’ batting approach and plate discipline have gone completely backwards since joining Cleveland. He is 35% of his balls to the opposite field and is now barely pulling the ball 20% of the time. However, there could just be some bad luck at play here. His hard-hit rate is up since the trade, as are his line drives. His BABIP has dropped in the toilet at just .226 with his new team, so this may just be a matter of his luck in that regard needing to turn around.
Anthony Volpe (SS), New York Yankees
Chicken or egg situation here. Anthony Volpe is underperforming (an understatement) over the last two weeks, so the Yankees as a team are suffering? Or the general performance of the New York roster is horrific and is taking Anthony Volpe down with them? Anthony Volpe is one of many Yankees not named Aaron Judge or Juan Soto to be struggling mightily. Over the last two weeks, Volpe is hitting .140 with three runs and two stolen bases. The power is gone. The batting order slot has dropped. It looks bad for the young pinstriped shortstop.
Teams must be solving Volpe and the holes in his swing because much of this drop can point directly to a 28% strikeout rate in August as the culprit. In July it was just 17.6%. And I am aware of how fast Volpe is but he does not have a month this season where his groundball rate has been below 50%. That’s not sustainable if you’re trying to put together multi-hit games. Is Volpe just caught up in the Yankees’ hive-mind of suckiness or is he just struggling on his own? Truthfully, it’s a little of both.
Taj Bradley (SP), Tampa Bay Rays
After a six-start stretch from late June to late July, Taj Bradley was the king of the fantasy baseball world. He allowed just two earned runs in those starts, accumulating 44 strikeouts along the way. In the four starts since, however, it has been a complete disaster. Over his last two weeks, Bradley has an 8.40 ERA and a 2.00 WHIP across three starts. It is about as far removed from his elite stretch a month ago as a pitcher can be. He has a 17:9 strikeout-to-walk ratio and has allowed five home runs after giving up one through the previous six starts.
So what happened here? To start, the walk have been a big issue. Between July and August, his walk rate more than doubled (2.32/9 to 4.80/9). His strikeout rate fell by almost 2.5 per nine innings and his slugging rate allowed ballooned from .255 to .587. Much of it could be BABIP-related. After getting the luck of the BABIP gods in July (.203), they struck back in August, causing Bradley to endure a .373 BABIP so far this month. The real performance is somewhere right there in between those numbers and the luck should (repeat: should) even out over the rest of the season.
