114 days until Opening Day …
We’re back from the Thanksgiving holiday, and the Hot Stove is heating up. Well, kind of – Frankie Montas and Matthew Boyd signed over the weekend, and while they are nobody’s idea of a main course item, they can be perfectly cromulent plate fillers, assuming you have an especially big plate and want to be a good house guest and get a bit of at least everything. They are the dry but flavorful stuffing in the Thanksgiving metaphor I will shortly discard, and while either could be useful for Fantasy, neither seems all that likely to be a difference-maker for our purposes — though if I had to bet on one, it would be with Montas, who could rediscover his elite splitter with an arm slot adjustment in a similar way to how Sean Manaea emerged as a must-start pitcher for Fantasy in the second-half last season with the Mets.
Scott White and I have been keeping track of all the moves so far this offseason here in our Offseason Tracker, and that includes thoughts on Blake Snell, Yusei Kikuchi, Jonathan India, Nick Martinez, and more. Again, not exactly the biggest names off the board so far – Snell is the only thing approaching a main course item among them. Frank Stampfl and I also broke down those moves on the most recent episode of Fantasy Baseball Today.
And, I do want to point out one thing before we move on here: I’m going to be lower on Snell than Scott, and possibly the industry consensus, for 2025. I get it, when he’s right, he’s one of the best pitchers in Fantasy, and we’re hoping that his early signing this time around will preclude the early struggles he dealt with last season. But, as I pointed out last week, it would be foolish to act like last year’s struggles can be solely blamed on his delayed signing – Snell has had an ERA as high as 5.40 as late as May 19 in each of his past four seasons. Add in a usually high-ish WHIP (at least for an ace) and a long injury history, and I just can’t get on board with Snell as a top-10 pitcher. I’ll just trade for him in May, when whoever did draft him is fed up.
The looming posting of Japanese star Munetaka Murakami
Murakami announced Monday that 2025 will be his final season playing in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball League. He will be posted next offseason and figures to be the next Japanese star to garner a mega contract – Roki Sasaki’s deal, I will remind you, will be shockingly cheap, due to MLB’s international free agency rules and Sasaki’s age.
Murakami is a two-time Central League MVP, winning in 2021 and 2022, with best-in-league power – he won the Triple Crown in 2022 with 56 homers and has 241 in seven seasons. There are also some significant strikeout issues here, as Murakami struck out 180 times in just 143 games last season, and his numbers over the past two seasons especially have taken a big step back. Though that comes in the midst of a dead-ball era in Japanese Baseball, so his .851 OPS in 2024 still vastly outpaces the league average of just .645 last season, so he’s still clearly a plus hitter even with the flaws that have emerged over the past few seasons.
Murakami should be one of the biggest names in free agency next year, and will surely be at or near the top of any list of players to target in First-Year Player Drafts for the 2026 season. He’ll be a 26-year-old who has thrived in a tough environment in the second-toughest professional league in the world, and could be a difference-making power bat at third base for Fantasy. That’s a player worth getting excited about.
Five bounce-backs to buy …
Austin Riley, 3B, Braves
This is actually one of the easiest calls in Fantasy for 2025 for me. I’m ranking him a bit lower than I did a year ago, but not much – Riley is (currently, in my work-in-progress, asterisk-here rankings) my No. 27 overall player right now. Riley got off to a miserable start to last season, sporting an OPS as low as .618 on June 13, but there are a few things to keep in mind there. First and foremost, there’s the fact that Riley dealt with an oblique injury in May, and while it never landed him on the IL, it did cause him to miss over two weeks of action and almost certainly hampered him when he did play. And then there’s the fact that, despite his struggles, Riley always pretty much looked like himself – his strikeout rate on June 13 was 24.5%, right in line with his 2023 mark, and while he was hitting a few more groundballs than was ideal, his average exit velocity in May was 92.3 mph, identical to what he posted in 2023.
Which is to say, I think Riley was just a bit off early in the season, but not in a way that ever felt particularly alarming. He homered in three straight games beginning June 14 and hit .292/.354/.588 with a 45-homer pace from that point until his season ended in mid-August with a fractured right hand. Despite the slow start, Riley’s xwOBA for the season ended up at .361, just four points shy of where he ended up in 2023 and five points short of 2021. Expect a return to 35–ish homers, a useful batting average, and huge run production in what will be a resurgent Braves lineup.
Michael Harris, OF, Braves
Michael Harris, OF, Braves – To be honest, I considered six different names in the Braves lineup for this exercise before settling on Harris and Riley – Ronald Acuña, Matt Olson, Ozzie Albies, and Sean Murphy all seem like good candidates to perform better in a lineup that went from first in the majors in runs in 2023 to just 15th in 2024.
So, why single out Harris along with Riley? Well, like Riley, there was really very little that’s different about Harris’ skill set on the field in 2024 compared to 2023. He was still an extremely aggressive swinger with strong contact skills and excellent quality of contact metrics across the board, spraying line drives all over the field, leading to a .344 xwOBA – right in line with his career average of .346. His sprint speed took a bit of a dip, which could be a cause for concern, except I think it’s almost certainly a result of the hamstring injury that cost Harris two months from June through August – just two of his 10 steals came over his final 43 games after coming back from the injury.
But the biggest thing is this: Harris will be just 24 on Opening Day. He has a strong all-around skill set and has seen his max exit velocity and 90th percentile exit velocity numbers climb from 2023 to 2024, a sign that he is growing into something more like plus raw power as he matures. This is just the kind of profile you should want to bet on to bounce back.
Adley Rutschman, C, Orioles
This one is just extremely straightforward: On June 27, Rutschman was hitting .300/.351/.479 and generally putting up exactly the season he was supposed to have. From that point on, he hit .189/.279/.280 and was, frankly, actively harmful to your chances of winning a Fantasy championship. And this was no arbitrary endpoint, as Rutschman got hit on the hand by a foul ball on that very day and saw his quality of contact and plate discipline metrics completely collapse pretty much across the board from that point on. I’m not saying you should draft Rutschman as the No. 1 catcher off the board like we were last season – William Contreras is just a stronger all-around hitter for Fantasy until Rutschman figures out how to tap into more over-the-fence pop – but he’s the clear No. 2 option at the position and one of the best bets to bounce back at any position.
And, if you want a dark horse MVP candidate, he’s about as good a choice as any on a team that should be one of the best in baseball again.
Bo Bichette, SS, Blue Jays
Surprisingly, it sounds like the Jays aren’t going to trade Bichette – at least not until giving him a chance to rebuild his value. That’s the right call coming off a season where nothing went right for Bichette. Like Riley, he got off to an absolutely miserable start, but in Bichette’s case, a calf injury in June never really went away and seemingly wrecked his chances of ever righting the ship. Bichette didn’t underperform his underlying skills or anything in 2024, so this is just a bet that the guy who hit .299/.340/.487 over a five-year span didn’t just suddenly lose it in his mid-20s. Bichette will be just four weeks past his 27th birthday on Opening Day, and I’m betting he still has a lot left in the tank heading into a contract year.
Evan Carter, OF, Rangers
A year ago, Carter was one of the top prospects in baseball, coming off a star-making tear through the tensest moments of the season, culminating in a World Series win where he was a key part of the Rangers offense. Now? He’s the No. 68 outfielder in early ADP, going off the board at 286.1 in 88 way-too-early drafts on the NFBC platform. What happened in between was a lost rookie season in which he struggled on the field and played just 44 games due to a stress reaction in his back, and now he’s basically being left for dead in Fantasy. Carter struggled as a rookie, showing little power or contact skills, but I still think it’s an extreme overreaction for his ADP to drop nearly 170 spots because of a bad 45 games as a 21-year-old. I’ll buy the dip on a guy with five-category potential in what should be a good offense.
And two bouncebacks to sell
Adolis Garcia, OF, Rangers
The key thing that separates Garcia from the guys I’m betting on the bounceback from is pretty simple: He turns 32 three days before Bichette turns 27 and five days before Harris turns 24. It’s just a lot easier to buy into a player in his physical prime getting back to their previous level compared to someone like Garcia, who is probably on the back nine of his career at this point. Garcia’s quality of contact fell off, as he put up a .393 expected wOBA on contact, the worst mark of his career; he also ranked in just the 36th percentile in sprint speed, another sign that he just isn’t the same guy, physically. I expect much of the Rangers lineup to bounce back, but I think Garcia might just be an all-or-nothing slugger who contributes the occasional steal moving forward.
J.T. Realmuto, C, Phillies
Realmuto is also on the wrong side of 30 – he’ll be 34 on Opening Day, which is like 40 in catcher years. But, at least in his case, some of the most glaring red flags in the profile might have some extenuating circumstances, as he injured his knee in early May and ultimately had surgery on it. He ended up stealing just one base in 70 games after the initial injury, so that could explain the dramatic drop in steals, his most valuable contribution in Roto leagues.
On the other hand, Realmuto had just one steal on three attempts in 29 games before that, so a return to 2023’s 16 steals on 21 attempts might have been a long shot even before the injury. Realmuto’s athleticism has always elevated his skill set for Fantasy, but if he’s not going to be an outlier for the position in that category, it puts even more pressure on what looks like an otherwise declining bat. I still think he’s a must-start catcher in 2025, but that says a lot more about the C next to his name than anything else at this point.
