🔴2024 Fantasy Baseball: Potential draft busts from every National League MLB team🔴
02024 Fantasy Baseball: Potential draft busts from every National League MLB team
Gallen is a very good pitcher who’s being drafted as an elite one thanks in part to his 2023 volume. He threw the most pitches in a season last year since 2019 — and 200+ more than any other pitcher. Fantasy managers may want to proceed with caution, but he’s being drafted as a top-10 starter. For what it’s worth, Gallen had a 4.03 ERA with a 1.21 WHIP after the All-Star break and finished with an average exit velocity in the bottom 3% of the league last season.
Morton could prove to be a nice source of wins anyway, but a closer look at 2023 reveals a decline in the 40-year-old. His 3.64 ERA was accompanied by a 4.44 SIERA that ranked bottom-10 among all qualified starters. Morton’s CSW (30.7) was the third highest, but his K-BB% plummeted to 10.7 in the second half, which is Jordan Lyles and Miles Mikolas territory.
Atlanta has multiple pitching prospects ready and waiting for an opportunity should age continue to catch up with Morton.
Bellinger’s Hard-Hit% ranked in the bottom 10% of the league last season when his average fly ball exit velocity dropped for the third straight year. He had 26 homers on just 26 barrels and the same hard-hit rate as Jon Berti. Bellinger has also missed an average of 39 games over the last three seasons. He ranked dead-last by a significant margin in wRC+ (61) among 151 hitters with 900 plate appearances from 2021-2022 before 2023’s contract year.
Fantasy managers are counting on Bellinger’s new approach being sustainable while drafting him as a top-55 player, mistakenly ahead of Christian Yelich, Royce Lewis and Oneil Cruz among others.
Díaz posted a 2.03 ERA and a 1.03 WHIP before the All-Star break last season but a 4.61 ERA and a 1.43 WHIP afterward. His dramatic drop in skills was far more worrisome than the ERA crash, as Díaz’s K-BB% fell from 25.8% down to a scary 6.5% in the second half. It’s possible this was all a matter of workload, and Díaz enters 2024 fresh and with recovered velocity, but this is still a risky profile. Díaz ranked bottom-15 in BB% among relievers last season, and his HR/FB% (6.8) was well below league average despite a low GB% and pitching in MLB’s most homer-friendly park by a mile.
Díaz enters 2024 locked in as Cincinnati’s closer with no clear alternative, but there are red flags suggesting he’s a poor fantasy pick while being drafted as a top-10 RP.
TJ Freidl is another Reds player to fade, as his 18 homers last season came with just 13 barrels and an expected slugging percentage in the bottom 2% of the league.
Jones was a fantasy revelation last year, going 20/20 in fewer than 425 ABs after destroying Triple-A pitching (183 wRC+). He’s slated to hit in the middle of the Rockies’ lineup and in MLB’s best hitter’s park. But it should be cautioned that Jones' .401 BABIP was one of the 10 highest seasons since 1945! While Coors Field boosts batting average on balls in play thanks to its spacious outfield dimensions, Jones remarkably owned a .434 BABIP on the road.
To say this is unsustainable (with a near 30% K rate) would be an understatement.While most Colorado hitters perform abnormally worse away from home (given the differences in elevation), Jones recorded a 148 wRC+ on the road compared to 122 in Coors Field. He was hitting .276 with 13 homers and eight steals before batting .349 with seven HRs and 12 SBs in September (when pitching often gets softer as rosters expand). THE BAT X projects a 105 wRC+ and modest counting stats (71 RBI) thanks in part to the Rockies’ poor lineup, yet Jones is being drafted as a top-60 pick in Yahoo drafts. That’s a big bet on a player with a short track record coming off a historical outlier performance.