A week ago, I wrote about five early standouts that I think could be fakeouts. They gave me reason for skepticism, in other words, and I thought it only right to warn you about them.
In doing so, I presumed I was tacitly endorsing the other early standouts. They could be fakeouts, too, of course — any player doing something he doesn’t normally do should raise suspicions — but I didn’t have any clear evidence for it and was at least willing to see them through.
Some have called for me to make the tacit explicit, though, and actually highlight some of the early-season standouts that I think could have staying power. Narrowing down such a list is more difficult, for reasons already stated, and after struggling to develop some criteria that would make the list the perfect size, I’ve ultimately had to resign myself to highlighting these eight simply because they’re the eight I most want to highlight.
In part, it’s because I can justify their breakthroughs easier, which gives me more confidence in them. In part, it’s because I think the average Fantasy Baseballer isn’t totally sold on them yet and may be tempted to drop them after a bad week or two. These eight need me to speak up for them a little more than, say, Tyler Soderstrom and Spencer Torkelson do.
I should also note that, for this exercise, I didn’t give a second thought to players who were universally drafted. I’m more interested in the surprise cases, and I suspect you are, too.
If you take a reliever with a starter’s arsenal and a 2.67 ERA, 1.02 WHIP, and 11.6 K/9 and put him in the starting rotation, this is what you get. I think that’s generally true. There was already proof of concept in Bubic’s case because he had been exclusively a starter prior to 2024 and made a leap just prior to Tommy John surgery in 2023 with a new slider, a harder changeup, and a couple more inches of induced vertical break on his fastball. He went from having no swing-and-miss offerings to three, in other words, and has further broadened his arsenal with another variation of the slider this year.
Those 2023 improvements happened over just a three-start sample, so you could understand people wanting to see more before buying into Bubic fully, but now there are eight additional starts. We could quibble over whether his 8.8 K/9 and 2.6 BB/9, when taken together, are really ace-caliber, but I’d argue he deserves better in both respects, ranking 11th among qualifiers with a 13.7 percent swinging-strike rate and sixth with a 68 percent strike rate.
I suppose it won’t do me much good now to say that I’ve always thought Ben Rice was underrated. He slashed .298/.416/.590 over his final two minor-league seasons, collecting 44 homers and 21 steals over what was basically a full-season sample of 152 games. He never got much attention from prospect evaluators, though, and my mistake was conceding too much to their expertise in that arena.
Granted, Rice wasn’t looking so hot when he hit .171 and slugged .349 as a rookie last year, but the Statcast data said he deserved much better, giving him a .235 xBA and .459 xSLG. Then came the big spring and now the triumph that is his 2025. His 93.6 mph average exit velocity is in the 93rd percentile. His 113.2 mph max is in the 91st percentile. Both are up about 3 mph from his rookie season, not that those were considered bad. His pull air rate is also in the 85th percentile, which is particularly valuable for a left-handed hitter at Yankee stadium.
Rice has become so integral to the Yankees lineup that he’s batting first, second, or third more days than not, stealing at-bats against lefties from time to time, and even making brief appearances at catcher. He might threaten for the top spot at that position once he gains eligibility there.
Nootbaar was one of my breakout picks for this year, so you might say I’m predisposed to see the glass half full with him. But it’s more the process that has me so excited than the top-line results. He always hit the ball hard enough to be an impact power bat but needed to hit it in the right spots, namely up and to his pull side. Last year was supposed to be the year he made good on it, having spent that offseason working with Nolan Arenado, a master at elevating to his pull side, but a fractured rib followed by an oblique strain threw Nootbaar off his regimen, causing him to revert to his old approach.
“I felt like I was in a good place heading into spring and then the ribs happened,” Nootbaar said in late September. “I think I forgot some of the things that I was working on because I couldn’t do those movements. I tried to play catch-up a little bit, but it was my fault for not being a great self-evaluator. I needed to not forget certain things we worked on in the offseason.”
That was some big talk, the kind that you may have conditioned yourself to ignore since saying and doing so rarely align, but it should be clear by now that Nootbaar has indeed redoubled his efforts to improve his launch angle. It’s nearly three times what it was a year ago, according to Statcast, going from 6 degrees to 18 degrees. He’s hitting fly balls at a 47 percent rate now, according to FanGraphs. His previous high was 39 percent. And the exit velocities are still there, nearly identical to what they were a year ago.
Nootbaar has long been a darling for Fantasy evaluators, but I can confidently say that this is the most functional version we’ve ever seen, making him a top-12 outfield in points leagues at present. And seeing as he currently has more walks than strikeouts, he’s a good bet to remain at the top of the Cardinals lineup as well.
Garcia might be the most telling of these eight because unlike the other seven, I had no favoritism for him coming into the year. I was open to him being worthwhile last year — the exit velocity readings were respectable, and he clearly had an aptitude for stealing bases — but the season went so poorly that I wasn’t sure he’d even see regular at-bats in 2025, the acquisition of Jonathan India having rendered him superfluous.
Turns out I was wrong. The many small changes Garcia has made have had a major impact on his production. At 25, he’s hitting the ball even harder, registering an 87th percentile average exit velocity and 68th percentile max. He’s been more willing to work the count, which has led to career bests in strikeout (14.8 percent) and walk (9.9 percent) rate. He’s putting the ball on the ground less than ever and pulling the ball more when he elevates it. His 14.8 percent pull air rate, while not amazing, is four points better than last year, giving him better results on his hard contact — so much better, in fact, that he has a .309 expected batting average. Only 18 qualifying batters have higher. Add his usual stolen-base contributions, and Garcia is looking like a five-category threat and a must-start at any of the three positions where he’s eligible.
Only now are we finding out just how much Jorge Polanco’s left knee was bothering him from 2022 through 2024. You’d hear rumblings about a patellar tendon issue during that time, but since he’d play through it, it didn’t seem like anything to fixate on. Turns out it was everything to fixate on. How so? Well, he finally had surgery to repair it this offseason, and now … wow. You know what it’s reminding me of? The Polanco we saw in 2021 who hit .269 with 33 homers and an .826 OPS. He wasn’t some one-year wonder either. Skipping over 2020, as we normally do, he also hit .295 with 22 homers and an .841 OPS. At the time, Polanco was regarded as an up-and-coming second baseman with the power to turn heads at the position.
And then came the patellar injury.
Players decline all the time for a variety of reasons, and for whatever reason, Polanco’s didn’t attract much attention. A three-year trend seemed to solidify it, and so at 31, he was reduced to being an also-ran in Fantasy. Now that the knee is repaired, he seems to be reborn. Perhaps the clearest indicator is the strikeout rate, which exceeded 20 percent for the first time in 2022 and continued to climb in the two years that followed. It’s just 10.8 percent now, which helps account for a .350 xBA that’s second only to Aaron Judge. And maybe those specific numbers are too good to be true, but rest assured, the improvements here are wholesale, giving every reason to believe that 2022 through 2024 was just a lost stretch in Polanco’s career.
The knock on Reese Olson has always been that his fastball isn’t very good, and since a good fastball is the best weapon a pitcher can have, yeah, I’d rather him have one. But there have always been good pitchers with bad fastballs. The key is to have a variety of quality secondary offerings and to emphasize them over the fastball. For Olson, those would be the changeup and slider, both of which he throws about a quarter of the time. And their whiff rates are through the roof: 50 percent on the changeup and 44 percent on the slider. Most pitchers are fortunate to have even one pitch with a whiff rate so high.
It’s led to Olson having an overall swinging-strike rate of 13.4 percent, good for 14th among qualifiers, which places him directly between Spencer Schwellenbach and Garrett Crochet. It also marks the second straight year that Olson’s swinging-strike rate has gone up, and his ERA has been trending the right direction, too, bolstered by a near-50 percent ground-ball rate. The control has been a little shaky to this point, but since he has the other two legs of the FIP triangle covered (bat missability and home run prevention), I’ll give him a little grace there and trust his walk rate to fall within its usual range. I’m predicting he’ll have an ERA in the low threes, then, and with the Tigers looking like legitimate contenders this year, he might win upward of a dozen games as well.
I couldn’t let this article end without taking what may be my final opportunity to hype up Jonathan Aranda, who I’ve obsessed over since he broke through with a .339/.449/.613 slash line in 104 minor-league games two years ago. Now where have you seen numbers like those before? Yes, he’s doing much the same in the majors now, and it’s not all surface-level either. A big reason why I was so captivated by him in 2023 is that he had an average exit velocity of 92.2 mph and a max of 113.0 mph, giving him readings that were in line with Gunnar Henderson. The production was a true reflection of his talent, in other words, and not just BABIP inflation due to shaky Triple-A defenses. And how do those readings look in the majors? I’ll just clip the percentile rankings graphic from his Baseball Savant page because it makes the case better than my words could.
It’s … it’s beautiful.
There remains the obvious drawback of Aranda sitting against left-handers more often than not, and during stretches when the Rays are facing more of those than usual, as was the case for the past couple weeks, it can reflect poorly on Aranda. But the player actually platooning with Aranda, Curtis Mead, has been an utter disaster, which means the arrangement may not continue for much longer. Attrition always has its say over the course of the year, too. Bottom line is that if Aranda continues to hit like this, which I think is plausible, the Rays will likely have to relent and play him every day, for one reason or another.
I should start by pointing out that Friedl was the 19th-ranked outfielder in 5×5 scoring and the 23rd-ranked outfielder in points scoring two years ago — must-start, in other words. That year, he slashed .279/.352/.467 with 18 homers and 27 steals. The home runs were the most dubious part of the stat line given that his average exit velocity was scraping the bottom of the barrel, ranking in only the 11th percentile.
So surely, his power production collapsed in 2024, which is why I keep citing 2023, right? Wrong! During an injury-plagued season in which he was sidelined at various points by a fractured wrist, a fractured thumb, and a jacked-up hamstring, Friedl’s stat line indeed suffered, but the one facet that carried over from his breakout 2023 was the home runs. He socked 13 in just 85 games, again in spite of bottom-of-the-barrel exit velocity readings, which confirmed that the most dubious part of his 2023 stat line wasn’t a fluke.
And now? Everything looks like it did in 2023. He’s batting leadoff, reaching base at a nice clip, and swiping bags with gusto. The home runs have been a bit lacking so far, with two of his three coming in the same game just last week, but I’m not doubting that part of his game at this point, which for me makes Friedl must-start in Fantasy.