Fantasy baseball hitter add/drops: Time to move on from Yainer Diaz, add Moises Ballesteros?

We’re only three weeks into the MLB season, so it’s not time to panic about a slow start to your fantasy baseball season. However, we also don’t want to wait too long to pick up players who are starting to emerge, so we can’t just sit idly by and do nothing. For me, that means not looking at surface-level stats but looking at stats I believe are indicators of continued production and seeing who is thriving or struggling.

I conducted that exercise for myself and then decided to publish it as an article, so this is not going to be a major deep dive. However, I created a custom leaderboard on FanGraphs that looked at hard-hit rate, chase rate, swinging strike rate, zone contact, and EV90 (a metric measuring a batter’s top-end power by calculating the speed of their batted ball hit better than 90% of their other batted balls). I pulled the league average numbers and then made a list of players who were below league-average in essentially all those criteria and above average in all those criteria. That gets us our rough lists for adds and drops.

Obviously, it’s not as simple as cutting the players on the bad list and adding the players on the good list, but I think this is an interesting starting point for decisions at the bottom of your fantasy rosters, so let’s dive into it.

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Fantasy Baseball Hitters to Drop

Now, we should get it out of the way right from the start that MY RECOMMENDATION IS NOT TO DROP ALL OF THESE PLAYERS. However, they all qualified for this list and are worth mentioning a bit here.

For starters, I would go ahead and cut Willi Castro if you still have him on your team, and I would also cut Jose Caballero if you are going well in stolen bases. The only reason he’s really rostered in 60% of leagues is his speed, but he could lose his job when Anthony Volpe is back in 3-ish weeks. Maybe you grabbed a David Hamilton-type player off waivers, or could, and you can move on from Caballero.

I’d also probably cut Heliot Ramos. He slumped really hard in the second half of last year, and there were some comments he made that suggested the slump was mental and was connected to some defensive issues. However, he has not looked good at all to begin this season, and I don’t believe he’s so good when he’s on that you need to hold him and miss out on a solid hitter on the waiver wire.

I’ve also never been big on Colson Montgomery, so I don’t feel the need to hold him. I know that he had a big power surge when he was called up last year, but his swing decisions are not good, and his contact has always been a major question mark. Plus, he’s on one of the worst offenses in baseball, which will limit his counting stats.

I’m MAYBE still holding Ezequiel Tovar, but it’s close. He has always swung far too much out of the zone and swung-and-missed too often, but he had good zone contact rates and played in Coors Field. Now, pitchers just aren’t throwing him strikes, and he keeps swinging. I don’t see him ever hitting above .250-ish again with this approach, and he doesn’t really steal bases, so that’s tough to take from your middle infielder.

Yainer Diaz is concerning me. He had a pretty mediocre season last year and is off to a really bad start to this year. He makes tons of contact in the zone, but he also expands the zone too much, swings and misses a lot, and also makes weak contact because he swings at so much out of the zone. There are at least three catchers on the list below I’d rather have than Diaz right now.

I’m not yet ready to move on from Salvador Perez, but we do have to acknowledge that he’s 36 and has a lot of mileage on his legs. We could be at the cliff. The hard-hit and barrel rates are still good enough that I’m not going to panic yet, but the exit velocities haven’t been the same as we’ve seen before, and the bat speed is down. Perez has always been somebody who chased, and if he’s now no longer able to handle a lot of the pitches he used to be able to, that could be an issue.

Jarren Duran is not somebody you can just cut, but I think we’re still living in 2024, which looks more and more like an outlier season. Duran has good hard-hit and barrel rates, and he has plenty of speed, so there is potential here still. However, he expands the zone a bit too much and swings and misses far too often for a non-power hitter. Perhaps he’s looking to pull the ball too much this year and is getting out in front, but I think he needs to be on your bench right now, and I would not buy low.

I might also sell low on Rafael Devers. His hard-hit and barrel rates are solid, and likely always will be, but they’re not quite at levels we’re used to seeing from Devers. As was pointed out on Twitter, Devers has fallen from the 68th to the 33rd percentile in bat speed from 2023 to 2026, and his hard-hit rates have decreased as well. I maintain that playing in San Francisco has not been good for him. Devers hit .236/.347/.460 with 20 home runs in 90 games with the Giants last season, striking out 29.4% of the time and pulling the ball 45% of the time, which is 8% higher than his career average. This year, his attack direction is even farther towards the pull side than he’s had in his career, and I think he’s struggling to adjust to not being able to slam line drives off the Green Monster. He’s not going to be this bad, but if you could trade Devers for, say, Sal Stewart and maybe get an intriguing pitcher with some upside added to that as well, I would likely do that deal.

Fantasy Baseball Hitters to Add

Both Wyatt Langford nd Jac Caglianone are rostered in too many leagues to “add,” as in a waiver claim, but they are players I would be targeting in trades. Based on comments I’m getting on Twitter, a lot of people are looking to cut or trade them, and I think that’s too rash. They’re both making hard and consistent contact and showing good swing decisions. I think strong stretches are coming.

On Monday, I tweeted about Trent Grisham right before he had a two-home run game. That feels like a nice bit of validation for this list.

Gary Sanchez, Francisco Alvarez, and Ryan Jeffers are the key adds at catcher right now. Sanchez should be the near every day designated hitter in Milwaukee with Christian Yelich out, so that’s going to give him about a month of playing time. Alvarez was somebody I loved coming into this season based on his success in the second half last year after he changed his swing in Triple-A. Jeffers has been a bit of an underrated hitter in recent years, but he is no longer splitting time as much as he has in the past, and he’s crushing the ball right now.

Moises Ballesteros is a tougher add because he has no real position, which makes his playing time and fantasy roster construction tough. That being said, he is the Cubs’ DH against all right-handed pitchers, and his quality of contact is off the charts. I had thought there might be a chance that Matt Shaw pushes Ballesteros to the bench, but that doesn’t seem likely now. Ivan Herrera is in a similar boat, as he’s catcher-eligible in Yahoo formats but nowhere else yet. Herrera is not off to as hot a start as Ballesteros is, but his underlying quality of contact and swing decisions are good. I think the production is coming.

Carlos Cortes is an interesting name to appear on here because he has stepped into Brent Rooker’s spot in the Athletics’ lineup. We don’t have a huge MLB sample size for Cortes, but he was good in Triple-A last year, and his quality of contact has been great this season. He also seems to have a really good sense of the strike zone and makes a ton of contact in the zone. If you pair that with his great home park, it’s hard not to get a little excited about this.

Both Nick Yorke and Ryan O’Hearn have emerged as near-every-day players for the Pirates. It’s obviously easier to believe in O’Hearn because he has a better track record and better current production, but Yorke has a better-than-league-average hard-hit rate and EV90 numbers while making an elite level of contact. This could turn into something in deeper formats.

Most of you have likely rostered Eduoard Julien or Curtis Mead before. They both now find themselves in new situations and have started the season with intriguing batted ball metrics and good plate discipline. Julien didn’t really qualify for this list based on his EV90, but his hard-hit rates are good, and playing his home games in Coors Field is going to help him. Mead is not yet a full-time player in Washington, so he doesn’t need to be added right now, but I do believe there’s a strong chance it happens in the next few weeks.

Ramon Urias is another player who is not in a full-time job right now, but I wanted to keep his name on this list because it would not be crazy to see him take Nolan Gorman’s job.

I’ve already written up Colt Keith and Jake Bauers a few times this year, so their presence on this list shouldn’t surprise you too much. However, Ryan McMahon being on here shocked me. I’m not even sure if I believe it, and it casts a cloud on this list. That being said, he has a 54% hard-hit rate, an 8% barrel rate, really strong zone contact rates, and league-average chase and swinging strike rates. I’m not saying he’s going to turn things around to such an extent that he carries your fantasy team, but that also doesn’t seem like the profile of a player who is struggling this much.

Padres teammates Xander Bogaerts and Miguel Andujar are often afterthoughts in fantasy these days, but both of them made this list in all criteria and are also off to decent starts. I know the counting stats aren’t ideal, and that may limit them to 15-team leagues, but they deserve a little more love.

Miguel Vargas is another player whose stats don’t suggest a ton of success, but he makes really good swing decisions and has above-average batted ball quality with a 42% hard-hit rate and 9% barrel rate. He hit .267/.354/.436 in 45 games in the second half last year, and maybe he just needs some time to fully heat up.