Summer is heating up, and the best way to beat the heat is to ride the wave. In this series, we’ll look at streaking hitters who are worth adding right now in hopes of enjoying the ride before the wave crests and crashes into shore.
In my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes we make as fantasy baseball players is to consistently think about rest of season value. Sure, it’s great to find a hitter on waivers in late April who winds up enjoying a full-on breakout campaign and being a fixture in your lineup for months, but those instances are much rarer than we want to accept.
Instead, it’s often far more useful to have a spot or two on your roster for hitters who are in the midst of a strong stretch of production. Perhaps they’re getting playing time due to injury or they’re facing weak competition, or they’re just seeing the ball well. Rather than ignore them because you don’t think it will last for months, it can often be beneficial to scoop that hot hitter up, accumulate stats during their good week or two of production and then swap them out for another hot hitter when they inevitably cool down.
In order to make that strategy work, we need to be OK having missed a few good games of stats if we think more are coming. We also need to not build a strong connection to that player, even if they helped your team for three or more weeks. When the wave crashes, you don’t want to tumble with it.
With that said, here are four hitters who are riding high in July who I think are worth an add right now.
Edouard Julien - 2B, Minnesota Twins
6% rostered in Yahoo Leagues
You may have lost track of Julien since he has been shuttled up-and-down from Triple-A to the Majors multiple times this season, but the Canadian-born second baseman is scorching hot in July. Over the first 10 games of the month, he’s hitting .480/.519/.960 with three home runs, six runs scored, five RBI, and a stolen base.
In fact, since he re-entered the starting lineup back on May 24th, Julien is batting .333/.410/.581 in 34 games with five home runs, two stolen bases, and a 17.4% barrel rate. Since he usually leads off or hits second, it gives him a prime opportunity to put together solid run and RBI totals to go along with the chip-in power and speed. That makes him a bit of a bargain bin five-category player who has been seemingly forgotten about by fantasy managers.
Edouard Julien has been on a tear over the last 15 games 🔥
— Twins Talk (@LetsTalk_Twins) July 18, 2023
.447/.500/.789, 3 HR, 6 RBI, 5 BB, 11 K
Everyday player. #MNTwins
pic.twitter.com/Mjy4V4bauO
Now, there are a few concerns with Julien moving forward.
His strikeout rate over that same span is 31.1% and his groundball rate is 49.3%. In fact, despite his power surge in July, he’s hitting just 26.3% fly balls, which doesn’t feel sustainable. Rocco Baldelli also tends to remove Julien from games whenever a left-handed reliever comes in and the young second baseman will get more competition in the coming weeks with Jorge Polanco starting a rehab assignment after missing over a month with a hamstring injury.
With all of that said, Julien has hit well enough to warrant remaining in the lineup when Polanco returns, but unless the Twins want to let Byron Buxton play the field, that’s simply unlikely to happen as Julien has played every single inning in Triple-A and the Majors at 2B. Still, Polanco should require at least two weeks to get his timing back at the plate and the Twins have series’ against the White Sox and Royals coming up that could allow Julien to continue producing solid numbers over the next couple of weeks.
Triston Casas, 1B, and Jarren Duran, OF Boston Red Sox
Casas 22% rostered in Yahoo Leagues
Duran 66% rostered in Yahoo Leagues
I’m including both players here, but we’re really only going to focus on Casas since Duran is rostered in the majority of leagues at this point. However, I felt it warranted pointing out that Duran is hitting .472/.513/.889 in July with a home run, 12 RBI, and two steals. He has the fifth most plate appearances on the team over that span, hits leadoff most games, and is striking out just 7.7% of the time. He needs to be scooped up in essentially all formats while he’s hitting like this.
So does his teammate, Triston Casas.
Casas came into the season with a lot of hype due to his impressive feel for the strike zone and plus raw power. Yet, he came out of the gate hitting .133 in March/April and, much like with Julien, everybody seemingly forgot about him.
Since May 1st, Casas is hitting .276/.363/.492 with nine home runs and a 24% strikeout rate. That’s a useful player in deeper formats. However, despite having a 15.6% barrel rate over that span, he wasn’t really making enough loud contact to impact fantasy lineups. Part of that had to do with his 40% fly ball rate, but you also noticed when watching Casas hit that he was fouling off far too many pitches that were over the middle of the plate. His timing just seemed off by the slightest bit.
So far in July, he has a 52.2% fly ball rate and he has been punishing pitchers’ mistakes, hitting home runs in three straight games coming out of the All-Star break. His .677 slugging percentage and 1.066 OPS is third on the team in July behind just Duran and Rafael Devers, and with the work he’s been putting in on defense, the Red Sox no longer feel inclined to remove Casas late in games.
Also working in his favor is the fact that the Red Sox have the 9th-easiest schedule the rest of the way according to Tankathon, so Casas could actually be a long-term add. However, he continues to pull the ball just 26.1% of the time, which will limit some of his power upside, and the Red Sox often sit him against left-handed starters, which can make him a tricky play in weekly leagues if you’re planning to hold him for months. Still, given his power upside, this feels like the right time to add Casas and if any of those warts show up again, you can move on.
Kerry Carpenter - OF, Detroit Tigers
12% rostered in Yahoo Leagues
Carpenter announced himself to most fantasy baseball players last year when he hit 30 home runs between two minor league levels and got the call to Detroit at the tail end of the season. While he only hit .252, he popped six home runs in 31 games and barreled the ball 11.1% of the time, which should have solidified that his power was real.
However, his playing time situation in Detroit early in the season was murky and the 28.3% strikeout rate last year raised some red flags, so the 25-year-old remained under the radar.
After coming off of the IL on June 9th, Carpenter has been Detroit’s best hitter, slashing .320/.374/.588 with seven home runs, 20 RBI, and just a 22.4% strikeout rate. In July, Carpenter has flashed more power while cutting his strikeout rate down to 20%.
Some of that success is due to approach. In June, Carpenter had a 40.4% fly ball rate and just a 29.8% pull rate, which led to a 6.4% barrel rate and capped his power upside. So far this month, he’s pulling the ball 44.4% of the time, while raising his fly ball rate to an identical 44.4%, which has led to a 14.8% barrel rate and 1.114 OPS.
Carpenter is playing every day and hitting fourth in the Tigers’ lineup and while there isn’t enough collective punch around him to give him huge runs and RBI totals, I believe the increased focus on pulling the ball in the air will allow Carpenter to continue to get to his power more often and support what has been a solid six weeks of production.
Chas McCormick - OF, Houston Astros
25% rostered in Yahoo Leagues
McCormick has seemed to operate on the periphery of fantasy baseball relevance for the last couple of seasons. He produced solid enough stats to get him added onto teams numerous times throughout the year, but he never played quite enough and the production was not consistent enough to keep him on rosters.
Yet, the 28 year old has taken advantage of numerous injuries to the Astros and is putting up his best season yet while also being in the midst of the best stretch of that season.
In July, McCormick is hitting .400/.488/.857 in 10 games with four home runs nine runs, 11 RBI, and a stolen base. That’s electric production.
It took McCormick a few months to figure it out. In April, he was pulling the ball just 31% of the time, and hitting 47% groundballs, so while he had a .275 average and nine RBIs, he wasn’t driving the ball. It would be logical to assume he noticed that as well since, in May, he pulled the ball 50% of the time and dropped his groundball rate to 37.5%, hitting 47% fly balls. It was his worst month of the season.
Since the start of June, McCormick has found the happy middle ground, keeping his pull rate elevated but opting for a more line drive focused swing, with just a 37.6% fly ball rate over that span. This is a better approach for McCormick since he has just 24th-percentile average exit velocity and a 22% hard-hit rate. By not hitting the ball in the air as much, McCormick is able to get the most out what power he does have, kind of like Isaac Paredes does in Tampa Bay or like McCormick’s teammate Alex Bregman does.
Bregman and McCormick have nearly identical average exit velocities on fly balls and line drives, with Bregman registering a 91.8 mph average and McCormick just below at 91.6 mph. Bregman has established himself as a consistent 20+ home run hitter because he makes solid contact and has an approach that maximizes his modest pop. McCormick has started to take that same approach and his 20% barrel rate in July actually leads the team, as do his four home runs.
I don’t expect McCormick to continue to lead the team in power production, and his .857 slugging percentage is sure to come down, but it makes sense to ride the hot bat while you can, especially since Houston should welcome Jose Altuve and Yordan Alvarez back soon and will get four games against Oakland to finish out this week.
