We are a few weeks away from the All-Star break, and I’m really curious to see which players mentioned in these articles we are going to see in Philadelphia this year. Of course, the fan-vote results are a bit skewed, but in that race, previously featured players like Kazuma Okamoto, Ben Rice, and Drake Baldwin all right in the middle of the race for starting spots. I suspect that plenty of the players featured in this series will join the reserves, and come on, you already know some of the featured pitchers, like Cam Schlittler and Max Meyer, are going to represent their teams. Perhaps today’s featured are going to make it? Let’s see if they belong.
Jose Siri, OF, LAA
Hey Siri, it may be your year.
We’ve seen Jose Siri be an electric player in the past. In his rookie season of 2021, he was a monster in his first 21 games, sporting a 158 wRC+. After some sophomore struggles, he was traded to the Rays, which is probably the team you best know him from. He was incredibly streaky with the Rays, hitting home runs in bunches some weeks and striking out half the time in other weeks. In the end, though, his first full season in Tampa was a success, hitting 25 home runs. Unfortunately, he could never really come back from that year and bounced around to the Mets before joining the Angels in 2026.
Siri has looked incredible with the Angels, albeit in a small sample size. It’s pretty easy to dismiss this as another Siri hot streak; he’s doing it differently than before. He isn’t striking out. Well, he still is, but not nearly at the rate that he had before. This was previously his biggest weakness, as he was a Javier Baez-esque free-swinger who rarely got on base due to his trigger-happy nature. Interestingly, he’s actually chasing much more than he has in previous seasons. This is the highest chase rate he’s had in a year since his first with Houston, which was his most successful. The chasing isn’t hurting him as much as he is making more contact in general. His zone contact rate is WAY up and is the best mark of his career, which seems to be a major contributor to the lack of strikeouts, which balances out the fact that he’s chasing more.
Verdict: Probably Not Legit. This is definitely a fun little breakout, and I could see Siri finishing as a slightly above-average hitter by metrics like wRC+. His home run rate hasn’t been spectacular with all that raw power, but his batting average has been great, with a .290. I think this will balance out more, especially as while his contact rates are improved, they’re still below-average, and it’s hard to see him maintaining an average like that as a below-average contact hitter, especially when he isn’t selective at all with pitches. His walk rate will probably come down as well. Still, this is a fun stretch for a player and the strikeout and walk rates look stellar by his standards. I’m just not sure if that’s something you can expect to continue over a full season.
Also, credit to @Light_Saberist again for this suggestion in our Discord. Always excited about the chance to discuss Siri!
Drew Rasmussen, TBR
It seems like Drew Rasmussen is the talk of the town on the pitching side of this website, as he was recently crowned with the Aces Gonna Ace tag and was the cover athlete for Nick Pollack’s famous Top 100 Starting Pitchers this past week. He has a 2.62 ERA and 0.88 WHIP across 86 innings this year, a seriously impressive mark that is going to earn him some Cy Young votes if he keeps it up. But is he one of the legit aces of the game? Well, let’s look at his arsenal.
Rasmussen is one of the faces of the new “all the fastballs” trend that we are seeing with some of the game’s great starting pitchers. He’s not the founder of the club, but he certainly feels like one of the pioneers. What makes him so successful is that these fastballs are all elite. In particular, his cutter, which he can manipulate like crazy, creating man differing shapes with it, ranging from more gyro slider-esque to traditional cut fastball. His four-seamer is amazing too, especially considering he gets plenty of whiffs with the pitch when he locates it upstairs. Stuff-wise, his sinker may not be as impressive as the others, but it’s the second-best two-seamer in all of the Major Leagues. Rasmussen’s offspeed stuff is a bit less impressive, partially because he doesn’t locate those offerings as well as his fastball. He’s seen steady improvement with the changeup in particular, though, and the sweeper definitely has potential to become something more.
Verdict: Legit. Since 2021, Rasmussen has the second-best ERA among starters who have thrown 500+ innings, only behind Shohei Ohtani. While there are some caveats to this, as he worked as a reliever in 2024 and was hardly stretched out in the 2021/2025 seasons, he’s shown enough that we know he’s the real deal. This season is also the best version of him, as he’s going deep into games much more consistently than in previous years and has his highest strikeout rate as a starter and lowest walk rate of his career. It’s awesome.
CJ Abrams, SS, WSH
CJ Abrams isn’t just looking like an incredibly valuable fantasy player; he’s looking like a real-life franchise cornerstone, finally.
Abrams has shown flashes of this before, combining quick speed and solid contact abilities to become one of the more sought-after fantasy shortstops for managers who miss out on the top options. This season, he’s outperforming many of those top options. In fact, according to Yahoo, he IS the top shortstop this season, and is the seventh best fantasy player overall. This is an incredible stretch of baseball for the former top prospect, but the seeds have always been there for this to occur.
One of the biggest improvements for Abrams this season has been home run power. He has 17 home runs already, which is close to his career high. His bat speed is up a sliver, and that’s shown with an improvement in exit velocities and barrel rate. He’s also pulling the ball way more than he used to, with a 25.2% pulled flyball rate. This rate has gone up incrementally every single season that he’s played in the Major Leagues, which shows steady signs of improvement for a player who is somehow still only 25 years old. One of the unfortunate aspects of Abrams’ previous seasons was a lack of consistency, as he’s started strong like this in previous years and has cooled off near the end of the season, with some putrid late summer months. With Abrams’s improvements across the board and his start being even stronger than the ones he’s had in those seasons, though, I think you can assume that 2026 may be a bit different.
Verdict: Legit. This is the Abrams breakout that we’ve been hoping for these past few years. It’s not as big an improvement in terms of underlying numbers as some of the other major breakouts this season, but there’s just enough there that I think we can say he’s a star shortstop. Also, in general, it’s been impressive to see how much the Nationals have improved as an offense, which helps bring Abrams’ value up even more.
