2022 Fantasy Baseball Insertion Ranking - Milwaukee Brewers
Creating my 2022 fantasy baseball rankings one team at a time
Explanation & Other Team Links Here
Hitters to Rank
Christian Yelich
Willy Adames
Luis Urias
Kolten Wong
Omar Narvaez
Rowdy Tellez
Keston Hiura
Christian Yelich
In 2019, Yelich went .329/.429/.671 with a 13.2 PA/HR and 30 steals to post one of the more ridiculous fantasy seasons we have seen. The last two seasons:
2020: 247 PA, .205/.356/.430, 20.6 PA/HR, 4 SB
2021: 475 PA, .248/.362/.373, 52.8 PA/HR, 9 SB
There have been a lot of injuries for Yelich in the last two years, most notably a seemingly lingering back issue that would go a long way to explain much of these bad two seasons. He was in and out of the lineup last year and did everything okay besides the power numbers. He did have a lot of bat speed, at least for most of the year as his 90th percentile exit velocity was at 104.5, well above the league average of 101.8 - and his max velo came in at 114.9:
So he was swinging the bat pretty hard. The primary cause of the power outage might be that he just hasn’t gotten the ball into the air the last two seasons (30% FB% and 24% after a 36% mark in 2019). What you see is that his fly balls rates have always been low EXCEPT in 2019.
So isn’t it more likely to expect another number in the twenties rather than the thirties? Seems reasonable. It’s not out of the question that the high ground balls rates have to do with the back injuries, I’m not going to rule anything out.
What we seem to have with Yelich is a guy with an extremely wide range of outcomes. He is just 30 years old, and I don’t think anybody would be stunned if he comes out as a top-ten hitter in fantasy again, but it’s also possible that he just duped us in 2019 and/or just won’t get healthy enough to be an impact fantasy bat again.
So now I have to rank the guy, I guess. The consolation here is that he continues to post huge walk rates and steal some bases, so there is some floor here. He has even fallen out of the top 100 picks, and I think the ceiling is more than worth the pick there. This is a guy that will see his rank shoot up in a hurry with a hot spring, so he could be quite a good get in drafts in January and February (or he could be a quite bad get too… such is the nature of predicting the future).
Willy Adames
For the year he hit .262 and slugged .481 with a strong 22.2 PA/HR. If we take away the games in Tropicana those numbers go to a .277 AVG, a .503 SLG, and a 22 PA/HR. With the Brewers he went for a .285 average, a .521 SLG, and a 20.6 PA/HR with a much reduced K% of 25.5% (it was 35.9% with the Rays!). There was some talk about Adames not being able to see well in Tropicana, and the numbers do seem to support that.
It’s risky to make decisions based on smaller data sets, but in this case I think it’s better to take what he did with Milwaukee more seriously than the full season line. That makes him look like a guy who can hit 30 homers with a good batting average and some steals to boot. That’s a pretty good player.
Luis Urias
Urias did a lot of stuff well, but nothing great last year. His 20.5% K% and 80% contact rate were good, but let to just a .249 batting average (lots of fly balls kept that down, 38% FB%, but the BABIP doesn’t stand out at .280). He walked a lot (11%), and homered at a better-than-average rate (24.8 PA/HR). His 9.3% Brl% and 111.5 max exit velocity support a league-average power source (remember though that league average should not be fantasy league average). He stole only five bases, meaning he didn’t really help your fantasy team very much.
This guy is just 24 years old and has at times shown both strong contact ability as well as strong power ability (11% barrel rate from August onward). To me that means there’s a strong ceiling here as a guy who could reasonably hit 30 homers while putting up a decent batting average. He is really cheap and has 2B/3B/SS eligibility, which is going to make him one of my favorite targets in drafts - I think.
Kolten Wong
This guy is going inside the top 200 in a lot of drafts and I can’t say I understand. He went .272/.335/.447 with 14 homers and 12 steals last year in 492 PA’s, which are fine numbers. It was the best season of his career, and playing in American Family Whatever The F field does help, but are we really going to buy-high on Kolten Wong? His 5.5% Brl% was bad and his max velo of 107.1 is really bad. He doesn’t walk (6.1%), so he seems just like someone who can hit for a decent batting average (17% K%) and still a moderate number of bases. I’m not interested.
Omar Narvaez
.266/.342/.402 with a 40.5 PA/HR, a 19% K% in 445 PA’s. He should continue to be one of the better sources of batting average at the position with his low strikeout rate, but there’s nothing really else to get excited about.
Rowdy Tellez
The big guy didn’t even homer at a high rate in his limited playing time (325 PA). That was surprising after he went 18.3, 19.5, and 15.9 the previous three years with his PA/HR. He posted only a decent 10.2% Brl%, but his 114.8 max velo was strong and his 80% contact rate was actually surprisingly high. He’s not necessarily an every-day player for the Brewers next year, so he can probably be left alone for now. At best he plays every day and hits 30 homers or so while giving you pretty much nothing else.
Keston Hiura
Confidence isn’t high in his playing time right now as Steamer has him down for just 138 PA. We have to rank him though right because he’s been such a good punchline for fantasy.
He struck out at a 39% clip last year with a 7% walk rate which resulted in a .168 batting average. That didn’t even come with any homers as he hit just four in his 197 PAs. He will need to raise his 54% contact rate up about 15 points to be fantasy relevant again, and that wouldn’t seem likely at this point. I’ll put him ahead of some of the names we’ve already ranked just because of the alleged upside - but maybe we shouldn’t even believe in that upside anymore.
Pitchers to Rank
Corbin Burnes
Brandon Woodruff
Freddy Peralta
Josh Hader
Aaron Ashby
Corbin Burnes
I wrote extensively about Burnes here, so I’ll leave it to that and just go ahead and rank this guy as my #1 pitcher.
Brandon Woodruff
The last three seasons:
2019 - 29% K%, 6.1% BB%, 44.6% GB%
2020 - 31.1% K%, 6.1% BB%, 49.4% GB%
2021 - 29.8% K%, 6.1% BB%, 41.5% GB%
That’s enough for me to take this guy as a top-five pitcher. Here is the arsenal:
His four-seamer continues to be one of the best in the game (a 14.7% SwStr% on a four-seamer is sick), his sinker gets tons of ground-balls, and his changeup was also elite in 2021. The knock on Woodruff in the past was that he was overly dependent on his four-seamer, but he’s been upping the usage on his secondary stuff recently and it’s been working great. I see Woodruff as the safest ace to draft this year, he’s a very strong SP1 for your team and you can get him in the late second or early third round quite often.
Freddy Peralta
A 2.81 ERA, a 0.97 WHIP, a 33.6% K%, and a 9.7% BB% last year made Peralta one of the most valuable fantasy players in the league last year after he went extremely late in drafts. He wasn’t even sure to make the rotation in spring, but he did so and got to 144 elite innings in the Brewers rotation.
The 31.4% CSW% and 14.6% SwStr% are elite numbers (7th and 8th best in the league respectively among qualified pitchers).
He is quite dependent on his fastball:
But that works out with the 12.9% SwStr% and 32.2% CSW%. The slider backs it up very well with an elite 20.3% SwStr%, and the threat of the curveball and changeup are there as well although thrown somewhat rarely.
Can he replicate that season again? I mean it’s never likely for anybody to repeat a 0.97 WHIP and a 2.81 ERA, but I don’t see why he can’t be a top 15 fantasy pitcher again. Maybe the innings will hold him down a bit, and he could always get into trouble with the walks and homers (he didn’t give up many homers last year but that could change with his low ground ball rates), so there’s less safety here than we’d like, but the arsenal is great and so are the strikeouts - and that can be depended on.
Josh Hader
It was actually his best season in the league so far with a 1.23 ERA, a 0.84 WHIP, and a 0.46 HR/9. He’s the closer and the team should be competitive - what’s not to like (besides the premium price tag for a freaking closer…)
Aaron Ashby
He threw 31.2 innings last year with a 29% K%, a 9% BB%, and a 61% GB%. I like those numbers a lot! Only four of his appearances were in a starte’s role, and his max inning count was five (and he only did that once). The numbers were great as he had a 36% K% but an 11.6% BB% in AAA (63.1 innings), so maybe we shouldn’t be fully confident in a decent walk rate.
He was the rare type to not throw a fastball as his most common pitch, throwing a slider 205 times. He put up a really nice 18% SwStr% and 56% GB% with the pitch on a low 6.3% Brl%. The sinker also was better than the average sinker with a 6.6% SwStr% and an elite 70% GB%. His changeup also performed well on 114 offerings with a 32.5% CSW% and a 16% SwStr%.
Steamer isn’t convinced he’ll be in the rotation, projecting him for a bullpen/starter hybrid role. Roster resource has Houser & Lauer in the rotation and Ashby in the bullpen, but if this guy does enter the rotation he could be pretty interesting - and that explains his top 300 ADP right now.