With just weeks to go in the fantasy baseball season, it’s do-or-die time. Whether your team is in a win-or-go-home playoff matchup or your squad is scratching and clawing to gain those precious roto standings points before the season wraps up, the right waiver moves can make all the difference. Let’s dive into a couple of the players who have recently enjoyed surprising upticks in performance to identify if their newfound success is here to stay.
Entering his first full season with the MLB squad, Amaya seemed primed to cement himself as the Cubs’ go-to catcher moving forward, but an ugly start to the year clouded those plans. From Opening Day through July 3rd, Amaya slashed a measly .186/.249/.256 with just two home runs and 15 RBI. He produced runs at a rate less than half of the league average hitter posting a 45 wRC+.
The Cubs coaching staff had been devising a plan to help Amaya turn his season around, and in early July, they implemented it. They convinced the 25-year-old catcher to eliminate the leg kick from his swing in favor of a toe tap, hoping the change would help Amaya to more consistently have good timing and get in a better rhythm at the plate. They even enlisted recently retired Nelson Cruz to help with the process since he underwent a similar change during his career.
Two months later, the leg kick is no more and Amaya looks like a totally different hitter. Since the change, Amaya has raised his slash line to .301/.342/.504 with five home runs, 24 RBI, a 136 wRC+, and a .363 wOBA. I think the toe tap is working.
PLV is buying into Amaya’s improvement too. You can see his results start to improve in early July, and they’ve been climbing ever since.
Amaya’s change hasn’t just affected his surface-level stats but is evident digging deeper into his profile. Here are some of his notable areas of improvement:
A nearly ten percentage point bump in strikeout rate is gigantic. Over his 123 plate appearances, that’s about 12 more balls put into play. Where Amaya’s truly shined though is his batted ball quality. He’s putting the ball in the air more often while also barreling it up more frequently. He’s also cut his pull rate, which may raise a red flag that he’s not maximizing his power potential, but I actually like seeing that since even at his best, Amaya isn’t a big bopper with 25+ homer power. He can likely find more success in spraying line drives all over the field than trying to hammer pulled fly balls.
Since eliminating his leg kick, Amaya’s been one of the best-hitting backstops in the game. His 136 wRC+ is the fourth-best over that period while his .301 batting average ranks second.
Verdict: Legit. We don’t often get the inside scoop on what a player is working on, but when we do, it can help us see what’s caused a change in performance. In Amaya’s case, we can pinpoint the exact date that the change was made and see just how massive of an impact it’s had on his numbers. I do think there’s still a bit of “it’s just a hot streak” involved–Amaya has a .315 BABIP since making the swing change compared to a .265 career BABIP–but I’m convinced enough to buy into this new version of the Cubs’ primary catcher. Even if his performance regresses a bit and his 136 wRC+ falls back to the 110 range or so, he’s now a fantasy asset in two catcher formats and even a fringe guy in 12-teamers.
Jacob Young, OF, Washington Nationals
It takes a truly elite skill for a player to become fantasy-relevant when they struggle almost everywhere else, but that’s the story of Young’s career. Or at least it had been until recently. Young is one of the fastest players in baseball. His 29.7 mph sprint speed is 97th percentile, and as you’d imagine, that makes him both a terror on the base paths and an incredible defensive center fielder. His 31 steals are the ninth most in the majors, and his 17 Fielding Run Value is second.
That elite speed had been keeping Young plugged into the Nationals’ lineup regularly because it certainly wasn’t his hitting. From making his season debut on April 4th through the end of July, Young slashed a forgettable .251/.317/.316. That batting line produced just an 82 wRC+, the 11th-lowest mark among qualified hitters over that stretch.
When the calendar flipped to August, Young had a meteoric rise in his production at his plate. Since August 1st, Young’s slashing .278/.319/.407, good for a 21-point bump in wRC+ to 103.
The most notable gain comes from the area where Young has struggled the most: power. He has just three home runs over 584 career plate appearances, so even though he’s still the furthest thing from a masher, his slugging percentage has jumped over 90 points during this recent stretch. Here’s a look at some of Young’s power indicator stats on a rolling basis to give us an idea of whether he’s making meaningful gains in the slugging department:
Welp. That’s exactly what we didn’t want to see.
Young’s hard-hit and fly-ball rates have actually trended down despite his recent power surge. His barrel rate has also fallen, although it’s not represented on the chart above. The lone plus here is that Young is pulling the ball more often, but even so, it’s not at a level we haven’t seen him reach before and still sits in the bottom 5% of hitters.
Verdict: Not Legit. This is an unfortunately easy call to make. Young’s never been a power threat at any point of his professional career, and he’s still not today. There is room for growth here, even if we’re not actually seeing it quite yet. Young is just 25 years old with less than a full season of time with the Nationals. If he can make some tweaks to reduce his 95th-percentile groundball rate, it’ll be a lot easier for him to find sustainable power gains. For now, continue valuing Young as you had before this recent run. He’s a one-category contributor who makes for a desperate stolen base streamer if you’re trailing in the category late in the week. Don’t make him a regular part of your fantasy lineup as the season winds down, unless you’re in the very specific scenario of needing just stolen bases in a roto league.
Featured image by Doug Carlin (@Bdougals on Twitter)