Bo Bichette, Nick Lodolo among ideal trade targets in fantasy baseball right now

We all have fringe players in our leagues who are on our roster bubbles. The Statcast data I cite is a good check on our Captain Hook impulses. The expected data perfectly describes how hitters and pitchers should be faring based on Ks, walks, contact quality and batted-ball trajectory. The data is all team and ballpark-neutral.

Let’s look at the hitters you should not worry about in shallow formats, despite actual stats that may have you itching to make a move. I am not necessarily predicting that these hitters will be good. I’m simply saying they have hit much better so far than their actual stats indicate. So that makes them more likely to hit well going forward. If you don’t have these players on your team, you should explore trading for them.

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Hitters

Jeremy Peña, HOU, SS: Pena should be hitting .321 with a slugging average of .515. With three homers and four steals, he’s rostered in 74% of leagues, but it should be 100%. His walk rate is up to nearly average, too.

Bo Bichette, TOR, SS: While he’s tied for first in the AL in hits (through Monday), he has zero homers and zero steals. But his expected average is 50 points higher at .356, and his expected ISO is over .200, which suggests the 20-homer power we expected. He’s 95% rostered but was so bad last year that people in shallow formats may want to move on soon if he doesn’t turn around his power.

Brent Rooker, ATH, OF: He’s hitting .188 with a ton of Ks, and this seems to have been the nightmare scenario — homers only. However, even with the Ks, his expected average is .260, which is above many projections. And that’s with a near .300 expected ISO, which doesn’t even account for a park we all expect will boost homers.

Jordan Westburg, BAL, 2B/3B: He’s hitting .231 with just three extra-base hits (all homers). However, Statcast says he’s earned a .282 average and a solid .536 slugging. So he’s been a top-50 expected hitter vs. about No. 100 in actual stats. Bottom line: Westburg has been precisely what he was drafted to be.

Brandon Nimmo, NYM, OF: He’s 85% rostered but is always viewed as a marginal fantasy mixed-league hitter in non-OBP formats. He’s generally underachieved his expected data, but he had been a 140 OPS+ hitter in actual stats before his recent slide. His four homers are keeping him rostered, but he’s earned a .275 average, not .213. Ironically, it’s his isolated power that’s outperformed his expected stats. Nimmo should be unavailable in 100% of leagues.

Here’s a list of fringe mixed-league hitters you should cut, meaning they’ve hit poorly in actual and expected stats (we’re only citing expected ones here):

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Pitchers

I don’t have much to say that’s actionable regarding pitchers. But since we’re past K-rate stabilization for all these starters (60 PAs against), we can more confidently talk about their rates. Most simply stated, stabilization means that the performance can now be viewed as at least half skill. So a good rule of thumb for predicting these Ks going forward is to focus on the mid-point between being average in the stat and the player’s actual performance, whether good or bad.

I only have two pitchers (through Monday) who should be rostered everywhere but are available in most leagues (83% and 62%, respectively).

Landen Roupp, SF: He has an ERA of 4.80 but an xERA of 2.57, and his K% is right at 30% (29.9% is top 20 in MLB). His walk rate is high, and that’s troubling, but it’s not radically high. I’d expect it to be marginally inflated relative to average for the rest of the year, maybe one percentage point higher than the league average.

Hayden Wesneski, HOU: His expected ERA is actually about half a run higher than his actual. But he’s only rostered in 38% of Yahoo leagues, which means there is too much skepticism, given he has 30.9% Ks and just 4.4% walks. He should use his sinker and its 80% put-away rate more than 8.7% of the time.

Here are other pitchers with K rates much higher than expected:

Shane Baz, TB (38% expected, ~30% going forward): He’s the pitching find of the year after a pretty bad spring. But the spring is for practice. His walk rate, which requires a few more starts before being stable, is just 5.6%.

Clay Holmes, NYM (31.5%, ~27%): His 12.4% walk rate is 50% higher than I would like. But I would bet twice as much on K rates than walk rates at this point. There’s the view that he’s been lucky, but his expected and actual stats line up perfectly. The contact quality he allows is a problem, and he is an extreme fly-ball pitcher.

Taj Bradley, TB (30.9%, 27%): His K rate this year matches his elite velocity. Oddly, he lacks a dominating pitch but has four offerings near the 30% whiff rate we seek from at least two pitches.

Here are pitchers with much lower Ks than expected who are likely to continue to be a drag in the category. I don’t want to make too much of it, but it’s a real problem.

Roki Sasaki, LAD: At just 18.7% Ks, he’s about 12 points under average. The fastball is pretty straight (horrible 11.8% whiff rate). His splitter and slider are as advertised, but Sasaki can’t get ahead of hitters (20.3% walks) often enough to use them.

Shota Imanaga, CHC: He’s been effective overall and is a good pitcher, but I can’t tolerate 15.7% Ks. The data says he’s played enough that he’s unlikely to get above 20% going forward. But when you get under the hood, you see his whiff rate is good-to-great on all his pitches, including his fastball. I will use that as the basis for saying his Ks will be close to last year’s rate of 25% going forward. The odds are against this, though; I want to be clear.

Nick Lodolo, CIN: With 11.3% Ks and just 1.4% walks, he’s had one of the strangest starts to the season. It’s working for Lodolo. But unlike Imanaga, he’s only getting whiffs on his curve, which is still under 30% and down from over 40% last year. So, his strikeouts are likely to continue to be a major problem. I’d be aggressively trying to trade Lodolo.

(Top photo of Bo Bichette: Mark Blinch / Getty Images)