Anthony Santander, Baltimore Orioles - Anthony Santander went 4-for-5 at the plate on Saturday with his sixth homer of the season and he also tripled in the game. This gives Santander homers in back to back games for the Orioles and he's posting a 120 wRC+ over 152 plate appearances this season. Santander has a very interesting batted ball profile as he's barreling balls at a smaller percentage than last season, has seen a four degree drop in his launch angle, has a 6% jump in his ground ball rate from last year, yet is running x-stats higher in batting average, slugging, and wOBA compared to last season. His hard hit rate has taken a small jump in July compared to the rest of his season, but it's still not the most intriguing profile with him hitting over 50% of his batted balls on the ground.
Ramon Laureano, Oakland A's - Ramon Laureano hit his 20th homer of the season on Saturday while going 3-for-5 at the plate, pushing his average up to .287. Laureano is enjoying a breakout season for the A's because even though he isn't barreling balls at quite the rate he did last season(down 2%), he's made a small tweak to help him generate more loft (five degree up-tick in launch angle) and he's also hitting more flyballs in the air in general with an 8% up-tick in that department as well. More, higher fly balls with the same exit velocity and hard-hit frequency is an outstanding combo to boost a batting profile.
Adam Plutko, Cleveland Indians - Adam Plutko threw a gem on Saturday with 7.0 innings of one run ball but still took the loss. He allowed just two hits and a walk in the outing and struck out four batters. Even with the outing Plutko still has shown a lack of ability in the majors to strike batters out with a 5.73 K/9 over 48.2 innings, and that makes him tough to roster while he's running a 2.5 HR/9. He's only had one outing where he didn't allow a homerun, a 4.2 inning relief appearance on June 28th, and he has three games this year of allowing more than one homer. The lack of put away makes it tough to trust him when all those balls in play lead to baserunners, which means more runs when he inevitably gets taken deep at some point.
Jackie Bradley Jr, Boston Red Sox - Jackie Bradley Jr hit a pair of homers for the Red Sox. Bradley has certainly gotten more usable in fantasy since the middle of June, but we still hadn't seen more homerun power from him despite running a solid .444 slugging and .160 ISO since June 21st. Bradley for the season has just an 8.7 degree launch angle which isn't great for generating homerun power, but he's hit around .280 for the last month so we may just have to live without the power and be happy that he's fantasy usable at all.
Blake Snell against the White Sox just makes the most sense on Sunday for DFS. Snell is having a terrific season once again for the Rays, but it just isn't being reflected overall fairly in his traditional stats. He's striking out more batters than last season, walking fewer batters than last season, is running an extremely high .340 BABIP (though he benefited last seasons from a 2.41 BABIP) but is allowing 0.5 more HR/9 than last season (but so is everyone). His FIP is a full run lower than his ERA, as the skills he is showing (3.57 SIERA) are just unluckily not translating to traditional success.
This is just a small sample of our daily analysis, join our member area for over 80 daily player updates sent to your inbox every morning and track your team online. Follow for details: https://www.insiderbaseball.com/baseballsample.htm Follow to register: http://www.fantistics.com/salesbaseball.php3
