Fantasy Baseball: Week 6 Trade values for Rotisserie and H2H show Julio Rodriguez’s improving skill set

The past few years have been a struggle for some of the more high profile prospects out there. Jarred Kelenic, who is hitting .131/.221/.294 with a 37% strikeout rate to open this season after a disappointing rookie campaign, is the poster child for the struggling top prospects, but he is by no means alone – Jo Adell and Joshua Lowe were recently sent down after entering the season with some hype. 

Julio Rodriguez looks like he fits in with that group, with a pretty paltry .255/.317/.345 line and 32.5% strikeout rate through the first 30 games of his career. However, as you can see in this week’s trade values chart, I’m actually viewing Rodriguez as a pretty strong buy right now.

To a certain extent, his 10 stolen bases are carrying a lot of weight for that argument. As they say, speed doesn’t slump, and Rodriguez has plenty to spare, ranking in the 99th percentile in sprint speed despite standing 6-foot-3, 228 pounds as a 21-year-old. He may not remain a big-time stolen base threat for his entire career, but Rodriguez seemingly has a green light to run and is taking advantage of it. 

If nothing else, Rodriguez’s speed makes him a must-start option in category-based formats, but there are reasons to buy into him beyond that. The overall strikeout rate remains pretty ugly, but part of that was clearly just a result of him adjusting to his first taste of the majors. Culminating with a four-strikeout game on April 21, Rodriguez had struck out in 22 of his first 48 plate appearances, a ghastly 46% rate. 

In 18 games since, Rodriguez has struck out 24% of the time, a much more manageable rate. Rodriguez was victimized early on by some pretty bad umpiring, with eight of those first 22 strikeouts coming on called third strikes that were out of the strike zone, something FanGraphs.com’s Justin Choi cataloged here. Rodriguez had the third-lowest swing rate on two-strike pitches in the league, which helps explain why he found himself in those situations, but that many called third strikes on borderline pitches was never going to be sustainable.

Rodriguez has been a bit more aggressive since, but we’re not talking about a huge change – his overall swing rate has gone up from 49.5% in those first 12 games to 51.5% since. The bigger change is that he’s just making a lot more contact in that time, with a 75% contact rate compared to a 65% rate in that first time period. That’s like going from one of the worst contact rates in baseball to a regular old bad one – Jose Abreu‘s contact rate last season was 74.8%, good for 87th out of 132 qualifiers, while Miguel Sano ranked 130th with a 65% mark.

Rodriguez is making the adjustments we want to see, and he’s not getting squeezed by the umps as much, which certainly helps. And his quality of contact numbers are pretty great, which isn’t surprising, given his skill set – he ranks in the 71st percentile in average exit velocity and 86th percentile in hard-hit rate. His barrel rate of 7% isn’t as good as you’d want to see, but he’s making progress there too, dropping his groundball rate from 59% in those first 12 games to 47% since. 

There are going to continue to be rough patches and growing pains for Rodriguez, because that’s just how things go. But he’s showing a very valuable skill set for Fantasy, just as we hoped he would, and he seems to be getting better as he goes on. The Mariners had him batting third for a few games recently when J.P. Crawford was out, a sign of their growing confidence in him.

Rodriguez’s value is rising, and I’m viewing him as a buy-high candidate. Given the state of the outfield position outside of the top 30 or so these days, it wouldn’t take much for him to leap into that range in the rankings either. Get in before it’s too late. 

Here are the trade values for H2H points and Roto leagues as of Week 6:

Week 6 Rotisserie Trade Values

Week 6 H2H Trade Values