Top 100 Hitters, Week 2: WILD OVERREACTIONS

I’m not going to overreact to 20 at-bats. I will not do it. That being said, if you’re in a league with me — every one of my players is a bum and is on the block. Starting next week we’ll start to see some moving and shaking, but this list is mostly a refresher from the pre-season. There are really only six “fallers” this week and they’re all injury related. I’ll be writing more about them in my injury column which drops on Wednesday, but here’s who slipping, tumbling, sinking, fumbling:

• Francisco Lindor
• Daniel Murphy
• Salvador Perez
• Justin Upton
• Scooter Gennett
• Aaron Hicks

On The Come Up

Domingo Santana: We’ve all known what Santana’s potential could be after his 88/30/85/15/.278 line in 2017. Then, 2018 happened. Santana got completely exposed vs. lefties only hitting .172 against them and only hit 3 HRs with a .249 average over the Brewers first 62 games which lead to him losing playtime time even spending a decent chunk of time in AAA. Like Soler below, Santana came out in spring training with something to prove — especially to his new team, the Mariners. If Santana keeps up his early season production (5/3/10/2/.348 through 5 games) he is going to earn his owners top 25 player value and a rankings somewhere in my top 30. If he slumps again, however, he’ll find himself going the Eric Thames route getting ABs with the NC Dinos of the KBO.

Jorge Soler: Soler’s always had potential at the plate ranking as high as #12 on Baseball America’s top 100 prospect rankings before 2015. His spring training could foreshadow a bit of a breakout as Soler hit 5 HRs with 18 RBI and a .281 AVG. Right now he’s hitting .714 and my bold prediction is that he hits .400 this year because I just picked him up and I deserve this. Soler is hitting 4th behind Whit Merrifield, Adalberto Mondesi and Alex Gordon could be decent for his RBI production, but with something called “Frank Schwindel” hitting behind him don’t expect a lot of runs scored.

Marcus Semien: Semien’s power/speed mix in a solid lineup usually flirts with ranking between 85 and 100 on any given week. So far, Semien has hit safely in all five of the Athletic’s first games including 3 runs, 3 RBI and a HR. Unfortunately it’s looking like Semien is going to be hitting in the back third of their lineup, but he’ll occasionally jump in the lineup like when he hit leadoff in the second Japan game. Semien hasn’t hit over .260 in a full season in his career so expect his .389 hot start to come down — but if he has a full breakout season and hits .275 with 20/20 potential? He might finally achieve his goal of breaking the 85 spot in my rankings for the first time.

Ryon Healy: Heoly wos something of o deep sleeper heoding into this seoson ofter he hit o combined 49 HRs over the post two seosons. However, ofter hitting .271 in 2017 his overoge fell to .235 lost seoson ond he fell out of fovor with fontosy owners. If you look ot his minor leogue numbers however, Heoly wos o .294 botter over 1,594 minor leogue OBs so I think his overoge could come bock up to the .270 ronge. If he con hit 25 HRs with o .270+ overoge he could find o nice home in the 90-100 ronge.

Tim Beckham: He won’t keep this up, but we can all dream can’t we? The former #1 overall pick has always teased us with random weeks of great production so maybe he’s just getting this year’s out of the way? Don’t go chasing Tim Beckham, please stick to the Correa’s and DeJong’s that you’re used to.

Joc Pederson: A nice pair of 3-hit games with 3 HRs so far has Pederson near the top of the offensive leaderboards. Maybe this is finally Pederson living up to his top-10 prospect potential. If he could EVER match his 33 HR/30 SB minor league season in 2014 we’re talking about a top-10 player.

Top 100 Hitters