It’s unlucky season in fantasy baseball right now. We have official and terrible news on players like Lance McCullers, Vinnie Pasquantino, Yordan Alvarez, Chris Sale, and Jazz Chisholm this week. There are no less than five dozen players on the MLB injured list right now. With the dog days of summer officially upon us and all this terrible news, it’s about to get really tempting to start flipping the switch to fantasy football.
Stay strong my friends! We are going to be with you the entire way and help you navigate these injury storms. Today’s injury is tomorrow’s opportunity for another prospect or bench player to step up and help your team. But don’t look to the AL East for your first baseman. With two guys below plus a Boston-sized mess for the Red Sox, that position needs some work.
With that in mind, here are six players whose fantasy values I am watching closely based on injuries, their recent play, and team context.
Risers
Josh Naylor, 1B/OF, Cleveland Guardians
Just one month ago Josh Naylor was on the verge of having to fight for his everyday job. He was battling the Mendoza line, hitting .205/.265/.361 with five home runs in 35 games. But since then, however, Naylor has changed from Mario Mendoza to Mickey Mantle, and is essentially carrying the Cleveland offense on his back. Since May 14th, Naylor is slashing .405/435/.607 with three homers, eight doubles and 25 RBI in 23 games. It’s been even better the last two weeks, with him posting a ridiculous .477 average across 11 games.
Most of the success for Naylor during this stretch is due to the fact that he has once again started hitting the ball in the air again. In May, he hit almost 43% of balls in play on the ground, but he has cut that to just 36% in June. That’s allowed his hard-hit rate to balloon from 30% last month to almost 45% in June. But the truly funny thing? Naylor has been supremely unlucky lately with home runs. He has a 0.0% HR/FB rate in June despite 47% flyballs and a 45% hard-hit rate. Once that luck starts to kick back in, we may see Naylor lay waste to the league for the rest of 2023.
Jake McCarthy, OF, Arizona Diamondbacks
There is really no other way to say it. Jake McCarthy – after a fantastic 2022 – was BRUTAL in his first month of his sophomore season this year. Through April 25th (when he was sent down to the minors) McCarthy was hitting .143/.229/.238 with one homer and two steals. After an 8/23 season in just 99 games in 2022, many fantasy drafters were projecting big things in both departments this year. His demotion allowed him to work on his plate approach and figure out what was causing him to collect just nine hits in his first 70 plate appearances.
He accepted his demotion with grace and went down to AAA where the proceeded to fix the problem in a big way. Across 22 minor league games this year, McCarthy slashed .333/.419/.533 with four homers and four steals in 22 games. Using that new confidence and approach, he made his way back to the majors on May 26th and has hit the ground running. He doesn’t have a home run yet, but he is hitting .300/.357/.400 with a crazy 10 steals in just 16 games. That’s exactly the kind of production we were hoping for when McCarthy was the 109th pick off the board in offseason drafts.
Since returning, McCarthy has catapulted his line drive rate from 18% in April to over 26% in June. His hard hit rate has also spiked up to 28.6% from 21.3% earlier in the season. This turnaround could be for real, and if it is, McCarthy can win you a steals category all by himself the rest of the season.
Jon Gray, SP, Texas Rangers
Some pitchers just like it hot, I guess. Jon Gray just needed the Texas summer temperature to rise to unbearable levels before he could flip the switch to “Most Dominant Pitcher This League Has Ever Seen.” It may seem like hyperbole, but Gray has basically been unhittable for a month and doesn’t even need the oversized Texas offense to carry his starts right now.
The first month of Gray’s season was not horrific or anything. He had a 4.40 ERA, a 2-4 record, and just 19 strikeouts in 30 innings pitched. In his first six starts, he made it out of the sixth inning just one time. But beginning May 8th, something flipped and he has basically been Sandy Koufax ever since. Over his last six starts, Gray has a 0.84 ERA (and 2.76 FIP) to go along with a 5-1 record and 44 strikeouts across 43 innings. His OPS allowed is .449, or essentially what Tony Kemp is doing.
It looks like the difference has been his ability to significantly increase the velocity of his fastball and slider over the last month. In Gray’s first month of the year, his fastball sat just above 94 miles per hour. This month, it has consistently been around 96. But the slider is an even bigger difference. That pitch was around 84 mph through one month, but he has ramped it up to just under 88 mph in the last six starts.
Fallers
Anthony Rizzo, 1B, New York Yankees
Count me among those who thought Anthony Rizzo would revitalize his career with the move to the short right field porch at Yankee Stadium. Bronx Bombs would be a-plenty and he could age gracefully while still providing plenty of pop. Uh, NOPE. His 2023 season started well enough, as he was batting .303 with 11 homers through May 20th. At the end of that day’s game, Rizzo had crushed three homers in his last six contests and was slashing .303/.385/.531. Since that time, the wheels have come completely off and I have even seen Rizzo start to get dropped in some of our Razzball internal writer leagues.
From May 21st through June 13th, Rizzo slashed .175/.224/.191 with zero home runs, one double, and four RBI. His overall slash line has tumbled down to .269/.345/.441 on the season. The culprit? For some reason, he has just stopped hitting the ball hard. In April, his hard-hit rate was 39.7%. In June, that has dropped to a nasty 20%. His strikeout and walk rate haven’t changed much, but his unsustainable .397 BABIP in May has plummeted to just .080 in June. Clearly, neither of those is the real player, and the actual almost-34-year-old Rizzo is lurking somewhere in the middle of all of that. But as he gets older, he is likely to be more prone to these types of slumps. Even if he is at one of the best possible parks for left-handed power.
Ryan Mountcastle, 1B, Baltimore Orioles
When I wrote in the preseason that I thought Ryan Mountcastle would take a step back due to the new dimensions at Camden Yards, I definitely have “IL trip due to vertigo” on my bingo card of reasons why he would have no power. Exactly one month ago, Mountcastle was hitting .250.277/.464 with eight bombs and 27 RBI. Not elite numbers, but respectable compared to where he was drafted. Since that time, Mountcastle is hitting .176/.238/.324 with three homers and two doubles. Whether it’s the park, vertigo, or a combination of both, Mountcastle has been the odd man out with the recent offensive surge by the Orioles.
What was originally just described as an illness by Baltimore brass evolved into something more serious and, eventually, a vertigo diagnosis. We have seen players deal with this condition in the past (Austin Meadows, Nick Senzel, and Clint Frazier, to name a few). In each of those cases, it was a significant time before the offensive production returned to normal levels. With players like Meadows, it has not returned and led to more serious issues. We, of course, wish Ryan Mountcastle a speedy, full recovery, but his time as a fantasy-relevant player is over for the time being.
Lance Lynn, SP, Chicago White Sox
I guess we should cut Lance Lynn a little bit of slack. Or should we? He is old, he was hurt half of last season, and the offense around him is already filling up a medical ward as the Chicago White Sox tend to do each season. But as we are cutting him some slack, we might need to be thinking about if we can cut him from our fantasy rosters. What’s that? you already have? I don’t blame you. And even if you haven’t he deserves a long stretch of bench time to think about what he has done to us fantasy managers this season.
Are there still some positive signs? Meh. His 10.01 K/9 is near the highest of his career, and his BABIP is out of whack at .338. But so is his ERA (an ungodly 6.75 through 14 starts). He looked strong in his first outing of the year against the Astros, but the wheels have basically fallen off since then, including allowing eight earned runs to the Angels at the end of May. Both his fastball and his sinker have lost more than a mile per hour since last year and his fastball is down two miles per hour since 2021. That pitch specifically is what has let him down so far in 2023. In the past four years, his fastball has ended the season anywhere between -6 to -32 runs below average. So far in 2023, that pitch allows 7.5 above average.
Time to turn it around? Certainly, but he isn’t sniffing my starting lineups until I see a LONG stretch of solid play.
