Hello deep leaguers. We are passing the midway point of the season this week. That means that our fantasy regular season is more than halfway gone. Now is a great time for everyone to take a minute and make sure they know their league playoff format, tie breakers, and trade deadline date. I have seen experienced managers mix up playoff formatting and sell off because they play in multiple leagues and didn’t have the settings straight in their head. If you are in head-to-head category leagues, I strongly recommend checking the roto stats for the season to figure out which categories you may need to address. If you don’t plan ahead, these things can sneak up on you.
Fallers
Spencer Jones, Outfield, New York Yankees
8% Rostered
Dynasty players and prospect enthusiasts undoubtedly know about Jones already. He’s a 6’7″ lefty slugger with big power, great speed and a penchant for strikeouts. Jones has 85 homers and 118 stolen bases across 425 minor league games, but he also has 614 strikeouts over 1649 minor league at-bats. He had a 32% chase rate, a 42% whiff rate and just a 68% zone contact rate at AAA this season. Jones is also 25 years old and is getting a shot at regular playing time against righties thanks to a slew of Yankee injuries.
Early returns have been underwhelming. Jones is slashing .218/.328/.364 with 2 homers and a stolen base through 64 plate appearances. On the bright side, he has a 14% walk rate, a ludicrous 71% hard hit rate, and an average exit velocity of nearly 97 MPH! On the other side, everything else. Strikeouts are the obvious concern here, and Jones has struck out in 40% of his MLB at-bats so far. His chase rate is over 33% and his whiff rate is over 38%. He was striking out 32% of the time at AAA, so this is a big, bright red flag. A friend and league mate recently published a great piece on prospect strikeout rates and fantasy relevance and as you might imagine, it’s hard to strike out 40% of the time and be a helpful fantasy player.
Aaron Judge and Pete Crow Armstrong types don’t come along very often, but Jones does have the power and speed combination required to achieve success despite his huge strikeout numbers. I wish his contact ability chart suggested he was acclimating, but…
So I don’t think Jones is going to be a helpful bat this season. He won’t bat much against lefties and will likely be a batting average black hole. But he’s an incredibly intriguing lottery ticket in keeper and dynasty leagues. He does get to learn from the best 6’7″ hitter around after all.
Josh Jung, Third Base, Texas Rangers
53% Rostered
Jung was our cover guy back in week 5 and he is still having the best season of his career. I’m really just happy to see him healthy and in the lineup every day, considering how many IL trips he’s been forced to take. But he is in the first half of this week’s edition for a good reason. Jung’s performance has declined month to month. He finished April batting .317 with 4 homers, a 19:10 K:BB ratio, and a .925 OPS. In May, he kept the average up at.314, and slugged 3 homers, but his K:BB fell to 15:7 and his OPS to .810.
Three weeks into June, Jung is batting .292 with just one homer, a 15:6 K:BB, and a .705 OPS. That’s still a great batting average, but with consistent 100-point OPS drops, it’s plain to see that Jung’s power output is decreasing while his K rate is climbing.
His process chart still looks pretty good overall, with only his decision value lying under the mean. But we can see a decline in his contact ability which is more evident on the chart. Jung, 28, has a .264 career average and .741 career OPS. I don’t like where he’s trending, and I’m going to suggest trying to sell high here while his season numbers still feature a .300 batting average.
Max Muncy, Second Base, Third Base, and Shortstop, The Athletics
6% Rostered
Muncy appears to have been Wally Pipped. Also, being Wally Pipped is one of my favorite baseball terms. It’s up there with can o’ corn, worm burner, Atom Ball (that’s how I spell it) and defensive indifference. Anyway, Muncy missed several weeks recovering from a broken hand and went 4/18 with a homer and 6 RBI while starting five out of six games upon his return. However, he didn’t start any of the 3 games against Pittsburgh and only two of the 4 games against the Angels.
Muncy has only appeared at third base and designated hitter this season, and Zack Gelof (our week 8 cover guy) has firmly planted his flag at the hot corner during his current 24-game hit streak. Gelof can also play outfield and second base, but the A’s have stuck with Jeff McNeil as their primary second basemen and their outfield is generally Tyler Soderstrom, Carlos Cortes (a week 7 riser), Henry Bolte (riser last week), or Lawrence Butler.
The few starts Muncy has drawn recently have come primarily against left-handed starters. I like Max Muncy the player a lot. He’s still just 23, has excellent bat speed, great exit velocity, a hard hit rate over 50% and a barrel rate over 12%. I just don’t see a clear path to playing time, and that’s with Brent Rooker sidelined. When he returns, the DH spot dries up too. I do however think he could be a good dynasty target for teams that won’t be playing for championships this fall.
Risers
Nasim Nuñez, Second Base and Shortstop, Washington Nationals
23% Rostered
The Nats are still the highest-scoring MLB team and Nunez is the MLB stolen base leader. We know exactly what we want to see here: contact, on base skills and green lights. Well, Nunez is riding an 8-game hitting streak, he has multiple hits in 6 of those contests and has the highest stolen base attempt per at-bat of any hitter in the league with at least 70 at-bats on the season. He also has a 10% walk rate on the year. So that’s a nice big checkmark next to on-base skills and green lights, but Nunez is batting just .241 on the season despite his recent hot streak, can we trust his contact skills?
All of Nunez’s power metrics are in the bottom 3% of hitters, but we don’t really care about that. We really only want him to get to first base anyway, so he can maximize those stolen base attempts. His contact skills grade out better than I would have expected, given his season line. Nunez has above-average whiff (21.6%) and chase (26%) rates and a perfectly mediocre 21.3% K rate.
He suffered through some bad luck with a .264 BABIP in April and a .236 BABIP in May. Typically we see “lucky” BABIPs for speedier hitters, since they tend to beat out more infield hits, so it’s odd to see Nunez look unlucky for two months. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that his .412 June batting average comes with a .538 BABIP, and that his .241 mark on the season is actually above his .229 xBA. His rolling contact chart is trending sharply upward, but he’s barely been above the mean this year.
Nunez has also consistently been batting 9th, and with James Wood leading off, that isn’t likely to change. He won’t score many runs at the bottom of the lineup, and probably won’t help your batting average, but I do think he’ll settle in as more of a .250 – 260ish hitter as his BABIP stabilizes. He’s the league’s preeminent base stealer right now, and if that’s what your team needs, he’s probably not too expensive to acquire. Just don’t expect much else.
Denzer Guzman, Third Base and Shortstop, Los Angeles Angels
5% Rostered
The Angels may have the worst winning percentage in the AL but over the last 30 days they are the 3rd-highest scoring team in the Majors. This is a pretty great combination when it comes to finding young talent breaking out. The Angels have every reason to see what their prospects can do and at least one of their young bats are thriving lately.
Guzman was slashing .336/.403/.571 with 12 dingers and 9 steals in 58 games at AAA before his promotion. He started 0/10 in his first two games, but has hit safely in 9 out of 11 contests since then. Through his first 56 MLB plate appearances, he’s slashing .255/.321/.471 with three dingers, one stolen base and a 10:5 strikeout to walk ratio.
He’s posted an 89 MPH average exit velocity, a 9.8% barrel rate and a very nice 46.3% hard hit rate. He is chasing a lot at 34% and whiffing a bit more than average at 27%, but his K rate is under 18% and he’s walking enough. He’s batting in the middle of a lineup that’s scoring a lot of runs lately and I don’t see and big red flags telling me he can’t keep producing, but it’s worth noting that all three of his homers came in Sacre Verde, over three consecutive games. He has yet to homer in a real Major League stadium this season. Still, I think he’s a solid deep league add right now, especially for managers who were counting on Muncy’s return or are waiting on Bobby Witt.
Donovan Walton, Second Base and Third Base, Los Angeles Angels
2% Rostered
Unlike Guzman, Walton is not a prospect. He’s a 32-year-old journeyman with nearly 800 minor league games under his belt. He made his debut way back in 2019, and has appeared in nearly 100 MLB games split between the Mariners, Giants, Phillies and now the Angels. If he plays in one more game, he’ll set a new personal best for MLB games in a season with 25. He’s also slashing .338/.364/.541 with 3 homers on the year and is batting .500 over the last two weeks.
Digging deeper, we find that Walton has posted week power metrics with a 36% hard hit rate, a 6% barrel rate and an exit velocity just over 87 MPH. He’s also benefitted from a .373 BABIP and his xBA is 50 points below his real batting average. Walton is striking out just 15% of the time, but he’s also walking at less than a 4% clip. I love late career breakouts, but that’s not what this is.
Moreover, I just don’t think the Angels will, or really should continue to give Dalton much playing time. He’s made the majority of his starts at 3B (where Guzman, 22, makes more sense) or DH. He’s played the keystone a couple of times, but the Angels also recently recalled Christian Moore, a 23-year-old second baseman who was their top pick in 2024 and was batting .333 with a 1.053 OPS at AAA. It makes too much sense for Guzman and Moore to be everyday players for the remainder of 2026. So while it’s been a nice run for Dalton (and he took a great team photo) I don’t expect the production or playing time to continue.
That’s it for week 14. Thank you as always for reading and good luck out there deep leaguers!
