Has anyone wondered before if Josh Rojas was simply the Latin Josh Reddick or is Josh Rojaspinga an entirely different player who hates that you confused him with Josh Rojas? These are the questions that keep me up at night. That and do pandas shorten their names to P&A’s in texts because they are lazy? Imagine my head is a spaghetti squash that’s totally baked and now you’re scraping out faux noodles that are curly-Q’s and the Q’s stand for questions. Last year, Josh Rojas just exceeded his rookie eligibility, gathering 17/2/16/.217/4 in 138 ABs, which is about six weeks of juiced ball as The Ghost of Abner Doubleday once called it, and that’s about a quarter of the season, so Rojas is an 8-homer, 16-steal guy? Oh, Mr. Prorater is ashen with embarrassment. Please say there’s more. Of course there’s more! It’s why I’ve trekked you up the side of Sleeper Mountain with nothing but a can of beans and one undersized sleeping bag! So, what can we expect from Josh Rojas for 2020 fantasy baseball and what makes him a sleeper?
Josh Rojas is nothing like Josh Reddick or Josh Rojaspinga, thankfully. (Unless Rojaspingas are your thing, which is fine, we do not judge here.) Last year’s major league cup of coffee is only telling one small sliver of the story. It’s more like Sanka. His entire year last year when combining Double and Triple-A was 25 homers, 37 steals and around a .300 average. I’m sorry, you foxy now, huh? He regularly had a 38% fly ball rate in the minors, and a 15% HR/FB, that’s essentially Charlie Blackmon’s 2019 when he hit 32 homers. That feels high, so let’s just say 33% fly ball rate, which feels low, but that was his rate after his call-up when he struggled. With a 15% HR/FB, that will still produce around 18 homers. Eighteen home runs is not exactly the meow’s cat, but if it’s coming with speed, it’s more than doable. So…speed? He had about the same sprint speed last year as Jarrod Dyson. Smaller sample, but I don’t think someone who comes with 37 steals across three levels is just going to stop running. He had 49 attempts, by the by. This is actually a good thing in my spaghetti squash brain. He knows he has to make himself appear valuable to the team and the niche he’s carved out is running plus the occasional over-the-fence bazinga. As for his .217 average in one-hundred and thirty-eight how’s your fathers, I’m gonna write it off completely. He was not who he is. His strikeout rate doubled from the minors and he appeared to be pressing. Now, if he was just overmatched, then he won’t make the team out of Spring Training and this post will be forever ignored. Thanks for reading, don’t tell anyone you did! However, he’s going to be 26 years old in June and it’s now or never for him. Diamondbacks know it; he knows it. So, he will get an opportunity, and I think he can be very valuable with it. Plus, he is so cheap in drafts you cannot go wrong with a flyer on him. Currently seeing him drafted around 275th overall, that’s about a 150 spots later than I could see him being worth. For 2020, I’ll give Josh Rojas projections of 75/16/62/.268/24 in 556 ABs with a chance for more.
