Unofficial Summer Top 100 Outfielders; Pete Crow Armstrong Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

I hope everyone had a great Memorial Day weekend. We’re roughly two months into the season, high time to update our Outfielder rankings!

These are rankings for 15 team re-draft leagues for the rest of the season, since that’s most of what I play. Any stats in the book are just that….in the book. I’m using my crystal ball here to divine how to value everyone going forward. I am not oblivious to the projections out there, or the Yahoo Friends and Family League of podcasters that just drafted this past week. But I’m prioritizing my scientific method of “would I trade Player X for everyone I ranked above him” method.

Injuries are tricky for this exercise. Player injuries I mean, not mine (I have none as far as I know). If I have some sense of when the player will return, I include them. It’s still tricky, though. Byron Buxton lit it up when he played, but as always, he’s on the IL. And unfortunately for him it’s the concussion IL, so we just do not know. Yordan Alvarez is another difficult one to value as he has some sort of hand muscle injury, which will likely eliminate any chance of a lucrative side gig  It sounded like a minimal stay, but he last played on May 2nd, and it looks like his recovery has stalled. Or not, as he took BP the other day, and there is word that he won’t need a minor league rehab stint. He also got off to a .210 start with just 3 homers in 121 PA’s, though his .363 xwOBA suggested he was due for a bit of mean regression from his actual .278 wOBA. Anyway, I left both of them in but dinged them a bit. I tried to include as many IL guys as I could. Apologies to Tyler O’Neill fans, I left him out.

I totally foresaw a young NL Central Outfielder up near the top of the Razzball Player Rater after two months. I just expected we’d all be praising Jackson Chourio. Well, not so much. He’s off to a completely disappointing .250/.275/.420 start. His 7 homers and 9 steals still pay the Fantasy bills, but we hoped for so much more. I certainly did. He has regressed at basically everything. EV down 2.5 MPH, HardHit% down 4.7%, LA Sweet Spot% down 2.2%. Most alarmingly, his O-Swing% is up 9%. His Statcast page looks just plain ugly.

I probably have still ranked Chourio too optimistically here as there’s nothing evident yet to signal a turnaround. He exploded from the end of May on last year, so hopefully we get some sort of rerun.

Pete Crow-Armstrong, of course, is the NL Central OF that has the “Chourio” stats, .283/.313/.580 , with 14 homers, 14 steals, 40 runs and 46 RBI’s. Can you say “league winner”? He’s third in the Razzball Player Rater with $47 of earned auction value, right behind a couple guys named Judge and Ohtani.

Will PCA keep this up? I mean he’s tracking for 35-35-100-100 and then some. Well if we’re looking for warts, he has a serious Chase problem as his 48.5% O-Swing% ranks 2nd worst in MLB among qualified hitters. His power and speed numbers look pretty legit but his contact skills in general suggest his AVG may get dinged. Even a 30-30 season with a .245 AVG and the counting stats in the 80’s is still great if that’s where we’re headed. And that builds in a major dropoff from here.

The Rockies can apparently produce exactly one productive outfielder per season. And that lasts just one campaign only before said outfielder falls off a cliff. So, remind me next spring not to draft Jordan Beck (more on him soon).

Brenton Doyle broke out big time in 2024 with a .260 AVG with 23 homers and 30 steals. K’s were a problem his rookie season, but dropped his K% from 35% to 25.4% and bumped his Zone Contact% from 79% to 86.4% while still nudging up his Barrel% and EV. He’s off to a rough .216 start with just 4 homers, 6 steals, 15 runs and 18 RBI’s, but alas, all is not as bad as it seems. In fact his skills have actually improved modestly. Barrel% is up from 10.5% to 13.2%, EV from 89.1 to 90.1, K% down to 23.7%. He looks like more of a victim of bad luck (just 4 homers on 16 barrels and a .216 AVG vs. .253 xBA) and residing on a horrible, no good, very bad team. The counting stats may never improve, especially the runs as he now bats 5th, down from leadoff. But the homers should come, especially as it heats up in Denver. I dropped him a bit, but this should get better.

Heliot Ramos has gone from mega-prospect to afterthought to super solid major league outfielder all in the span of a few years. He feels like he’s been around forever, but he’s still just 25 years old. He’s hitting .287 with 9 homers, 34 runs, 26 RBI’s and 3 steals in the middle of what looks like a good Giants lineup. It mostly checks out under the hood.

The average will almost certainly drift a bit, but a .270-25-10 season with good counting stats really plays

Kyle Stowers kind of highlights all that has gone wrong in Baltimore. The Orioles, as we all know, had roughly 37 top prospects to shoehorn into their lineup, and Stowers did not rank particularly highly in that group. He saw action in parts of the 2022-24 season in Charm City, and Swing and Miss was (and really still is) a big issue for him. He has a career 17.8% SwStr%, including 17.1% this season, which suggests his 28.1% K% could get worse. The trade to Miami did him incredible wonders as he went to a team willing to just let him work it out at the major league level. 

And lo and behold, no one minds strikeouts when you hit .316 with a 91.8 EV and thrombolic 21% Barrel%. Now, even though he has a .290 xBA, I can’t imagine he maintains anything close to his .309 average, The K issues remain, and his 76.8% Zone Contact% is super low. His Squared-Up% is just 8th percentile. The power looks very real, and the Marlins offense is frankly less awful than I anticipated, but Stowers also looks vulnerable to a major slump at some juncture. 

On April 20th, Andy Pages hit the pine for the Dodgers. He had a .159 Avg, 2 homers, a 30.1% K% and 1 steal in his career (and it was last season), not to mention a thoroughly uninspiring Statcast page. I cut him in a Main for (gasp) Alex Verdugo…hey, leadoff hitter on a good lineup, lets’ go!  I’ve heard that if you haven’t stumbled into a bad cut, you’re not active enough. Well, I made an extremely bad decision here. Pages has slashed .333/.347..573 since then with 7 homers and 5 steals, with just a 17.4% K%. Despite the poor start, he ranks 21st on the Razzball player rater among OF’s with $19.2 earned value. He still does not jump off the Statcast page

While he has cut the K’s, he has a subpar 36.2% HardHit% an ok 89 EV. My sour grapes take is that he’s a pretty good hitter on a travelling All-Star team who will settle somewhere below here. My guess is an ultimately similar line to Heliot but with a lower batting average.

I didn’t love Bryan Reynolds relative to draft cost, but mostly because you could get his stat package later in the draft. Like with Heliot, who I guess I will compare to everyone, as well as others like Taylor Ward and Lars Nootbaar. Now that Ward has heated up, Reynolds just simply ranks as the worst of all of them with just .212 average, 6 homers and 3 steals batting near the top of an awful Pirates lineup.

While his K% has regressed to a career worst 27.3%, nothing else in his profile has changed much. His 90.3 EV is above his career norms, and his 11.8% Barrel% is a career high. He has just 6 homers on 17 barrels, and his xBA of .260 is not down all that much from his .270 last season. I have him a little lower than these other similar guys now, mostly because of the terrible Pirates context, but perhaps he’s a buy low here. 

Jordan Beck made the Rockies out of Spring Training, got sent down quickly when he didn’t hit, and then came back April 19th. He proceeded to mash 3 homers during an April 24th doubleheader, and 2 more the next day. Thanks a lot to that monster 2 day stretch, he’s having a pretty nice season with a .264 average, 8 total homers, 6 steals, and 26 runs in 40 games. And yeah, the numbers count no matter how you get to them. But precious few likely had him active for his midweek explosion. Since then, he’s hit .266 with 3 homers and 2 steals in 116 PA’s. He bats leadoff, plays in Coors, has a decent prospect pedigree, and an interesting power-speed profile. But I’m not sure you’re getting all that much with his career week well in the rearview.

I’ve gone through endless love/hate with Miguel Vargas. I liked him as a cheap shot at a one-time excellent prospect getting every day run at the top of a major league lineup. Ok, borderline major league as he plays for the White Sox. When I cut Pages, I’m pretty sure I decided he was the one to go instead of Vargas. And I guess from that standpoint, I didn’t make the worst decision (having interest in Verdugo to begin with was the big error). Since April 24th, Vargas has hit .299 with 6 homers in 109 PA’s.  His 9.1% BB% to 11.9% K% comp over that stretch is truly elite. He’s not going to provide much speed as he has 8 career steals, and he has a bad lineup around him. I like the trends here and think he’s a solid deep league play, but expect nothing more than that.

The Pavin Smith Boom has likely run its course. He’s a strictly strong-side platoon bat in a loaded lineup. He got off to a fast start, but since April 23rd he’s hit just .208 with 0 homers and 2 RBI’s. He’s a 29 year old on a team that barely plays mega prospect Jordan Lawlar, not to mention Tim Tawa, who’s another younger and more interesting prospect. Smith can cover 1B and corner OF, but plays neither well. He needs to produce at the plate soon to stay in the lineup.

I wrote up Javier Baez a couple weeks ago and noted his heater and suggested rostering him while it lasted, while noting his skills had not really changed much. Well, the clock may have started to tick. Matt Vierling is back, and Parker Meadows is on rehab and might return in early to mid June. Meanwhile, Baez has slowed down as he’s hit just .175 since May 14th, with 1 homer and no walks. He will likely still get some run in a Super Utility role when Meadows returns, but keep an eye on the exits. I’m holding him for now in the two deep leagues where I roster him.