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Scott White gave you a list of eight players Thursday whose fast starts he wasn't buying – they were Fantasy fool's gold. They may be helping your team win games right now, but it will ultimately be a Pyrrhic victory when they turned back into duds.
I want to be more positive than Scott, so I'm going to write about the opposite: Players whose hot starts aren't a mirage. So, I picked 10 players – five pitchers, five hitters – who I'm buying high on. They're off to good starts, and they only have good things in their future. If you have them on your roster, you're going to keep rolling right along. And, if you don't, you may want to check in with their owner and see if he's not buying it.
You should. Here are the hitters to buy:
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Hitters
In case you were wondering, Rhys Hoskins is awesome. He was awesome in Double-A. He was awesome in Triple-A. And, through the first 68 games of his major-league career, he's been awesome. He has a discerning eye at the plate, swinging at just 22.9 percent of pitches outside of the strike zone, while making contact on 80.1 percent of his total swings when he does take the bat off his shoulder. And, of course, when he makes contact, he hits the ball in the air, and he hits the ball hard. Add it all up, and you have the makings of an elite hitter – oh, and he gets to play half his games in a band box. Hoskins won't keep hitting over .300, but his .276/.420/.618 career line sounds about right. Did I really just say that? Yes, I'm all-in.
We knew Matt Chapman could hit for power, and we knew he had the potential to be one of the best defensive third basemen in the league. However, he was overshadowed in Fantasy by the A's other Matt (Matt Olson) coming in the season thanks to a glaring flaw in his game: He struck out too much. His strikeout rate was 28.2 percent in 84 games in the majors last season, and was above 30 percent for his career at Triple-A. So far this season, however, he has dropped that to 18.3 percent, a massive improvement. And, lest you point out the relatively tiny 82 plate appearance sample size, the underlying numbers are just as impressive: he has increased his contact rate on swings from 73.2 to 79.3 percent. And he has followed Hoskins' lead, dropping his swing rate on pitches out of the strike zone to 17.8 percent. Good things happen when Chapman makes contact with the ball, and now he's doing that more than ever. We may have been excited about the wrong Matt in the Bay Area.
This might be this year's Daniel Murphy, actually. Tommy Pham was a stud in 2017, hitting .306/.411/.520, a line that was entirely out of step with his previous production. However, Pham is a tireless worker and a tremendous athlete, and he seemed to solve lingering vision issues last season. Despite a troubling spring when Pham admitted those vision issues may have been cropping back up, he has been nearly as good as last season, lowering his strikeout rate and improving his walk rate, while running even more than he did a year ago. A groin injury is a concern in the short term, but Pham is doing everything he can to convince us his 2017 was no fluke. I'm buying.
Can Tim Anderson hit? I have no idea. What I do know is that he can run. Really fast. And, lately, he's running just about every chance he gets; he's attempted a steal on 8 of 13 opportunities with an open base in front of him. Last season, he ran on just 7.8 percent of total opportunities, but stole nine bases in 40 times on base. He has swiped 17 bases in his last 42 games, a near-70 steal pace. To be honest, I don't much care if he can hit if he keeps this up. The fact that his .270 BABIP can only go up from here is just icing on the cake.
Is it as simple as, "When Hanley Ramirez is healthy, he's good?" It might be, because he's hitting like it's 2016 all over again after a disastrous 2017 campaign. Ramirez is spraying line drives all over the field, ranking 34th in the majors in average exit velocity and in the top-50 in barreled-ball rate – MLB's way of defining a well-struck ball. If you need even more proof that he's healthy, Ramirez has three steals, already tripling up last year's total. He's healthy and happy, and mashing in the middle of arguably the best lineup in baseball.
