The 2024 Major League Baseball season is now five weeks old, which means we finally have meaningful numbers that count to start evaluating our fantasy squads. With only 26 weeks in the fantasy baseball season, even a few 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.
With the small sample size caveat pushed to the side for this exercise, most players are 30 to 32 games into the 2024 regular season, so 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
Luis Rengifo (2B/SS/3B/OF), Los Angeles Angels
Let’s see. No Shohei Ohtani anymore. Mike Trout is hurt again, right on cue. Anthony Rendon doesn’t like baseball. Troy Glaus and Garrett Anderson retired like 20 years ago. Who do the Angels turn to for offense these days? Luis Rengifo, apparently. All Rengifo has done over the past two weeks is hit .381 with two home runs, eight RBI, eight runs, and five stolen bases. He is the 13th-most valuable hitter in rotisserie baseball in that span.
Rengifo has been so valuable to his own club and to fantasy managers, he is already outperforming what he has done over whole seasons in some categories. He had six steals each of the last two years, and he has nine already his year. At his current pace, he will score more runs and bat in more runs than in 2023 by sometime in August. But the crazy thing about Rengifo’s season is that he is producing at such a high level with a 0.0% barrel rate. He hasn’t hit a single one this season.
Once he gets the barrel on the ball and lifts the launch angle, there is a chance it gets even better for the versatile Angels breakout player.
Mike Tauchman (OF), Chicago Cubs
Teammates Shota Imanaga, Pete Crow-Armstrong, and Michael Busch have gotten the lion’s share of the headlines this year for the Chicago Cubs, but it’s Mike Tauchman who might be their most consistent hitter over the last three weeks. His .307/.435/.520 is fully supported by an improved walk rate (16.3%), and an improved strikeout rate (19.6%). He has nudged up his hard hit rate to 42% this year, and more than doubled his barrel rate from 5.5% last season to over 12% in 2024.
But Tauchman’s most valuable asset right now might be playing time. He only started in five of the Cubs’ first 11 games of the season. Lately, however, he has started 12 straight games, including hitting second in seven of their last eight contests. The biggest question for Tauchman, of course, is what happens with Seiya Suzuki and Cody Bellinger come back from injury? It’s likely to all come down to Pete Crow-Armstrong (or PCA, as they call him at Wrigley) and how he performs during this call-up.
Tauchman is close to hitting himself into a full-time role even when the Cubs are healthy, and he has options if the Cubs decide to send Matt Mervis or PCA back down.
Ryan Pepiot (SP), Tampa Bay Rays
Ryan Pepiot is one of the prized pieces the Rays got back from the Dodgers in the Tyler Glasnow trade, and he has certainly lived up to expectations in his first six starts with his new team. In a way, he has reproduced what Glasnow would have given them including a 3.12 ERA, 10 strikeouts per nine innings, and an average of just under six innings per start.
His strikeouts are up but so are his walks from his time with the Dodgers in his first season last year. But more importantly, his fastball velocity is up by over one mile an hour which has helped set up his cutter and changeup nicely. This velocity bump has allowed him to to get only 77% contact in the zone when he was around 85% last season. Unlike other pitchers on the same staff (more on that below), Pepiot has been a rock of consistency with only one game in his last five with more than one unearned run allowed.
Fantasy Baseball Fallers
Corbin Carroll (OF), Arizona Diamondbacks
Five weeks in, it’s fair to start wondering if some of fantasy baseball’s best players are in a prolonged slump, secretly hurt, or are just flat out playing badly. With Carroll, it might be a little bit of everything. We know Carroll has been hurt multiple times over the past year (including a shoulder injury he elected to not have surgery on). He certainly has been in a prolonged slump that has dropped him to eighth in the batting order most nights. And most of all, he may just be facing extreme bad luck this year.
Carroll’s batting average on balls in play (BABIP) this season (.231) is about 100 points lower than his marks from the last two seasons and he has basically stopped hitting the ball hard as well. His 40% hard hit rate from 2023 has plummeted to 27% this year, resulting in an average exit velocity of 84 miles per hour (six mph slower than last season). His contact rates and swinging strike rates remain excellent, so this lack of power and ability to drive the ball points to an injury, but until we have definitive word on that, Carroll needs to fall down the rankings.
Corey Seager (SS), Texas Rangers
Another player who absolutely dominated the last time we saw him in 2023 is now crashing back down to earth: Corey Seager. Seager won the World Series MVP in 2023 after hitting .286/.375/.762 with three home runs and six RBI. So far in 27 games in 2024 he has only two bombs and eight RBI. The .236/.319/.311 line is horrific and is explained by a low .274 BABIP and a drop in hard hit rate from 53% to 38%. His poor start is one of many reasons the Texas Rangers have hovered around .500 all season.
Seager underwent surgery this offseason to fix a sports hernia that was apparently nagging him during the 2023 campaign. He returned in late March, apparently healthy, but didn’t have much of a Spring Training. Two possibilities I see are that he is either way behind schedule and still ramping up his swing or he is not fully recovered and needs a stint on the IL. For fantasy teams who drafted Seager in the third round, the first option is certainly preferable, but a five-week slump has to have an explanation somewhere.
Zach Eflin (SP), Tampa Bay Rays
Zach Eflin, drafted as a top-30 pitcher around pick 84 in NFBC drafts this spring, has at times looked like an ace. Other times, he has looked like it’s the first time he’s faced Major League batters. Before Wednesday afternoon’s mediocre outing, Eflin had three starts where he allowed a total of one run against the Yankees, Angels, and Rangers. But he also had another three where he allowed to the White Sox, Angels, and Blue Jays. None of those teams are offensive powerhouses this year, so the struggles there are worrisome.
In many ways, Eflin is the ying to Ryan Pepiot’s yang. The walks are still elite (1.02 per nine), but the strikeouts have tumbled to just 7.64 per nine. He has dropped from 50% ground balls last year to 42% in 2024 and is allowing six percentage points more contact in the zone over 2023. His BABIP is in line with league average, as is his left-on-base percentage, so it’s not been luck this year. In consistency has killed Eflin this season, and he needs a string of strong starts before I’ll feel like he belongs in the top 30 pitchers again.
CES is killing me! Gotta hold…