The 2024 Major League Baseball season is now just three weeks old, which means we finally have 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 17 or 18 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 first few weeks of Major League Baseball games.
Fantasy Baseball Risers
Colton Cowser (OF), Baltimore Orioles
The reigning American League Player of the Week has kept raking as we push past mid-April, collecting four hits in the last four games. He is now batting a cool .400 with a 1.229 OPS on the season. Cowser has been a revelation at the dish this season and has held his own in the outfield, and he is now single-handedly responsible for the fact that Heston Kjerstad and Coby Mayo are not in the big leagues.
Call Cowser names like The Milkman or Holy Cowser or any of a number of nicknames the Baltimore faithful are using to describe their latest young phenom, he can hit no matter what. In just his second taste of MLB pitching, he has improved his barrel rate, hard hit rate, launch angle, and max exit velocity. Through three weeks he has one fewer hard hit ball (16) than he did in in his 26 games last year (17).
Michael Busch (1B/3B), Chicago Cubs
Michael Busch may not have homered for a sixth straight game on Wednesday, but he made up for it with two more hits and an RBI in another Cubs win. Busch is now hitting well over .300 for the year (.317) and has increased his OPS to 1.067 over the last week. Brought over from the Dodgers in a late offseason trade, Busch has been one of several sparks that has ignited a powerful Cubs’ offense en route to an 11-7 record and second place in the NL Central Division.
The crazy thing is, if you play in a shallow league on Yahoo or another popular fantasy site, there is still a significant chance Busch is still available. He is rostered in only 80% of Yahoo leagues as of Wednesday despite being one of the best hitters alive for more than a week. But even with all of the power, the best thing about Busch’s full rookie season this year is his 13.6% walk rate. His plate discipline is allowing him to focus on smashing the pitches he likes, and his 51% hard hit rate is all the proof we need.
Michael King (SP), San Diego Padres
Recency Bias? Perhaps, but Michael King has been much more than his 7.2 innings, 1 ER, 10 Ks that he threw against the Milwaukee Brewers in a masterful start on Wednesday. He got the loss because the Padres are the most maddening offense in the history of professional baseball, but there was no denying Michael King (the prize of the Juan Soto trade), is here to announce his stardom.
Four of King’s first five starts this year have done for three or fewer runs, and his ERA currently sits at 3.33 with 1.20 WHIP and more than a strikeout per inning. The funny thing about what he’s doing, however, is he is having tremendous success while the velocity of his pitches is largely down. He has maintained a first pitch strike percentage of around 63% this season which has allowed King to not get behind in counts and use his off-speed pitches to his advantage.
This is exactly what the Padres were hoping for when they pulled the trigger with the Yankees to send Soto for King and prospects.
Fantasy Baseball Fallers
Ian Happ (OF), Chicago Cubs
If Busch is the hammer this year, Happ has been the….well, whatever the opposite of a hammer is. The primary leadoff man for the Cubs is hitting just .247 (although with a strong .353 OBP) and has just one home run and no steals through 18 games. His .370 slugging percentage through three weeks is 70 points lower than any other point of his career, and looks even worse after a fantasy year with 21 home runs and 12 steals.
The disturbing thing for Happ is this doesn’t look like a lot of bad luck. His .309 BABIP is slightly below his career average (just .315), but it’s not egregiously off. His barrel rate and hard hit rate are almost identical to 2023, and his line drive and fly ball rates are almost the same as last year as well. We could point to his criminally low 5.6% HR/FB rate and hope for regression there. But the truth is Happ is just struggling to hit the ball well.
He’s on your benches until he snaps out of his funk.
Oneil Cruz (SS), Pittsburgh Pirates
Is a 40% strikeout rate bad? I think that’s bad, right? After Cruz had an awful 35% strikeout rate (to go along with a poor 7% walk rate) in his last healthy season in 2022, the signs for improvement were apparent, but those have been drowned in the Three Rivers to start the 2024 campaign. Cruz is striking out 40% of his plate appearances, walking just 5% of the time and is hitting .219/.260/.356 to start the year. The three home runs and a steal are of little consolation when many predicted this would finally be the year Cruz emerged as a superstar.
The strikeouts are an issue, but another problem for Cruz is a correctable one. He is hitting almost 60% ground balls this year as his launch angle has plummeted from 10.5 degrees last year to 7.5 degrees this season. He has to start getting the ball in the air more. I can assure you that 14% line drives and 26% fly balls are not a recipe for fantasy success.
Jesús Luzardo (SP), Miami Marlins
There is a general malaise and black cloud that hangs over the entire Miami Marlins franchise right now and it has caught up Jesús Luzardo inside as it drifts by. Luzardo has a horrific 7.45 ERA through four starts (two losses) mostly thanks to a walk rate of 4.5 men per nine innings and and 2.25 homers per nine innings. After back to back seasons with an ERA below 3.60 and strikeouts per nine over 10, all those gains have been given back as Luzardo has struggled to start the year.
Can he recover and right the ship before it’s too late for fantasy managers? Maybe. His left on base % is a laughably low 58% (average this season is about 71%). His hard hit rate allowed (42%) is just slightly higher than it was in 2023 and his xERA is 5.00. That’s nothing to write home about, but it’s more than two runs less than his current number.
We can’t proceed into the rest of the season thinking Luzardo will get more than 7-8 wins this season considering the state of his team. But the ratios should get back on track as soon as the strikeouts tick up and walks go down.
10 team keeper league would you trade Julio Rodrigues for Corbin Carroll and Jones SP Pitt???
That seems like pretty fair value to me. If you don’t have solid young pitching I would probably make that deal.
I’ll punch myself in the face if Cruz doesnt rt the ship lol. Traded for him about 10 days ago
LOL, it’s coming, but can’t fully be realized until he stops striking out so much. Contact first. Then good contact