There wasn't much happening around MLB on Thursday, which is fine. Sometimes we need a break to catch our breath. To collect ourselves. To try to figure out what the heck we're doing with our rankings.
We update our rankings on a weekly basis at Fantasy Baseball Today HQ. For me, I updated mine Wednesday to go along with the release of my Trade Values Chart, while Scott White updated his early in the week. On Thursday night's episode of Fantasy Baseball Today, Scott and I talked through 10 of the players we've had the toughest time finding a spot for in our rankings so far this season, with each of us picking five to try to talk through.
In today's newsletter, I'm giving you my thoughts on my five toughest players to rank right now, starting with a pitcher who had yet another excellent start Thursday, after a season where he didn't have many excellent starts.
Five players I'm struggling to rank
Davis Martin, SP, White Sox
Martin has really only had one bad start so far this season in 11 tries, and he sits with a 2.00 ERA for the season with the peripherals to back it up after another strong start Thursday. Whether it's the 2.30 FIP or the 3.50 xERA, Martin either looks like an elite pitcher or a merely very good one, a far cry from the definitively mediocre (at best) guy he was before this season. Add in that he's a 29-year-old with little prospect pedigree, and it's more than fair to say nobody should have seen this coming.
But I don't quite know where it's coming from, either. His fastball has average traits (velocity is actually below average), and while he has made changes to his slider, I'm not sure that's enough to explain a 54% whiff rate, the second-highest mark among all pitchers' sliders. The various stuff models don't really rate any of his pitches as anything more than average, though his command has improved significantly. Is that enough to keep Martin as a must-start pitcher moving forward? I have my doubts, though not enough that I feel like I should keep him outside of the top-50 at SP.
Munetaka Murakami, 1B, White Sox
He keeps doing it, and if he's a 50-homer guy, the contact skills probably don't matter … but there is basically one comp for a player succeeding with the amount of swing and miss Murakami brings to the table – and that was Joey Gallo, whose success was pretty short-lived and circumstantial. He was an incredible power hitter, but often ran the kind of batting averages that were hard to stomach.
Murakami's 60.8% overall contact rate is the fourth-worst of any qualifier in the past 15 seasons, and that's only because two players in the shortened 2020 season were worse. He makes great swing decisions and has incredible power, but this is just a genuinely hard skill set to figure out how to value. If he's a 50-homer hitter, he might be a top-12 first baseman regardless, but it's not hard to see a path to him slipping out of the top-20 at the position.
Jose Soriano, SP, Angels
I don't think the first month of the season was a total fluke. He earned his production by combining his usually excellent groundball rate with improved control and a massive increase in strikeout rate. But I'm certainly worried that it wasn't sustainable, as I wrote in Thursday's newsletter. Much of his improvement came from commanding his new four-seamer up in the zone, which helped his splitter and sinker play up even more, and command improvements always feel especially tough to get a grasp on. I don't think Soriano is back to being just a streamer, but I think the good and bad stretches are both within the range of possible outcomes for him moving forward.
Austin Riley, 3B, Braves
So, part of my question with Riley is: How real do we think the whole idea of a "slow starter" is? In his three great seasons, he was significantly better in the second half than the first in two of three, but it's not like he was ever bad in the first half; his worst start was an OPS right around .780 by the end of May of 2023, much better than what we've gotten from Riley the past two seasons. Can we really just chalk this up to Riley being a slow starter?
I kind of think there might be another explanation: What if we've just already seen the best of Riley? He's 29 years old and going on a third year of declining quality and quantity of contact, and it's possible we're just in the decline phase for Riley. He was always a fairly one-dimensional slugger, and those types of players don't tend to age well, especially ones with plate discipline issues. I've spent the past couple of years giving Riley the benefit of the doubt that he is still deserving of a top-12 ranking among third basemen, and I'm just not sure that's justified anymore.
Jarren Duran, OF, Red Sox
Here's another guy who has me asking, "What if we've just already seen the peak?" Duran is also 29 – older than you might think – and we might just already be seeing the decline phase for him. He's lost a little bit of foot speed from his 2024 peak, though his bat speed is actually up since that season, so the signs of a physical decline are mixed here. But Duran has looked genuinely unplayable against lefties over the past year (.606 OPS this season with his average exit velocity down to 86.4 mph), and his plate discipline just keeps getting worse. On the other hand, he's still on pace for something like 20-plus homers and 30 steals, so it remains a Fantasy-friendly skill set. He's been better of late, too, which makes it tougher to justify burying him. But I do think we should be done expecting anything like a return to 2024 levels.
Now, here's what else you need to know about from Thursday's action around MLB:
Tuesday's standouts
Spencer Arrighetti, Astros @TEX: 6 IP, 3 H, 1 ER, 1 BB, 3 K – I was pretty excited about Arrighetti, especially after he struck out 10 and eight in two of his first three. However, despite a 1.34 ERA through his first eight starts, I don't actually see much to be excited about here. His strikeout rate for the season is down to 21.8%, roughly league average, and his walk rate is up to 13.1%, a lot higher than league average. And we're not talking about some kind of elite groundball pitcher who avoids damage on contact – he actually gives up a lot of fly balls and had a 1.30 HR/9 even in his relatively successful 2024 season. That curveball would still seem to give Arrighetti some strikeout upside, but he had just three swinging strikes in this start, and doesn't actually look like a significantly better pitcher than he was last season, despite the ERA. If anyone is buying, I'd be looking to sell Arrighetti before the bottom falls out.
Nathan Eovaldi, Rangers vs. HOU: 7 IP, 4 H, 5 ER, 2 BB, 6 K – You might be disappointed by this result from Eovaldi, but probably not if you were watching the start, because it looked like it was going to be an outright disaster early on. Eovaldi gave up two homers to the first three batters he faced, putting himself in an immediate 3-0 hole without recording an out. So, yeah, five runs in seven innings isn't great, but Eovaldi really settled in after that start and actually salvaged his day well. That's what the good pitchers do; they make something useful out of something bad.
Payton Tolle, Red Sox vs. ATL: 4.2 IP, 5 H, 2 ER, 2 BB, 7 K – Through the first couple of innings, it looked like this was going to be a dynamite start for Tolle, but then he ran into some command issues and didn't even end up close to a quality start. Still, on the whole, there seems to be a ton to be excited about with Tolle, who has a 2.61 ERA and an even better xERA since getting the call. He's gone at least six innings in four of seven starts and has more than four strikeouts for every walk. The entire arsenal is still very fastball dependent, but he's missing enough bats with his secondaries (including three with his cutter today, to go along with 15 between his four-seamer and sinker) to make it all work. He probably won't sustain a sub-3.00 ERA, but Tolle looks like a must-start pitcher right now.
Grayson Rodriguez, Angels @DET: 5 IP, 2 H, 1 ER, 2 BB, 5 K – I would love to believe Rodriguez is on the verge of figuring something out. He was definitely better in this one than he's been so far, but as his 7.53 ERA for the season suggests, this was a, "There's nowhere to go but up" kind of situation. I think there's a pitch design issue at play here, as Rodriguez has a solid fastball he throws with above-average velocity, and then three secondary pitches that all feature below-average velocity. Velocity separation isn't an inherently bad thing, but it's hard to miss bats with below-average velocity, even on your bendy pitches. Rodriguez is still tinkering with his pitch shapes, and maybe he'll eventually figure it out, but right now, I don't think Rodriguez looks anywhere close to being a must-roster pitcher.
Jack Flaherty, Tigers vs. LAA: 5.2 IP, 6 H, 3 ER, 1 BB, 9 K – Hey, the missed bats are nice, and Flaherty finished May with 36 strikeouts to just eight walks in 27.1 innings, which is pretty great. He also finished May with a 6.26 ERA, so it's pretty hard to get excited about him. He just gets hit too hard, so while there might be some bad luck in his 5.81 ERA, his 5.04 xERA suggests he's mostly earned it.
Ronald Acuña, OF, Braves – Acuña went off for a homer and a couple of steals Thursday, and while the speed has mostly been there, the homer was much needed – he has just three homers in 43 games and only 28 in 187 games since the start of 2024. A lot has happened in that span, including a second torn ACL, but I was convinced we were going to get a bounce-back season from Acuña, and it just hasn't happened here. And the underlying numbers suggest it's not totally a fluke, as his 89.5 mph average exit velocity is his lowest ever. That being said, I still think he's one of the more obvious buy-low candidates in the game right now. Acuña still has plenty of bat speed and athleticism, so I think his poor quality of contact metrics right now are more about some minor mechanical tweaks he needs to make than anything that has fundamentally broken in his game. His underlying numbers still suggest much better production is coming in the future, and I'll take the over on 20 homers the rest of the way.
