2022 Fantasy Baseball Insertion Ranking - Toronto Blue Jays
Creating my 2022 fantasy baseball rankings one team at a time
Explanation & Other Team Links Here
Hitters to Rank
Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
Bo Bichette
Teoscar Hernandez
George Springer
Lourdes Gurriel
Alejandro Kirk
Cavan Biggio
Danny Jansen
Randal Gruchuk
Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
48 bombs with a .311/.401/.601 line made Vladdy the runner-up for MVP. There’s no reason to think he won’t be elite again at the plate this year and in years to come. He posted a middling contact rate (74%), but that’s perfectly fine because when contact was made it was insanely loud. His max velo was 117.5, and his barrel rate was elite at 15%. He struck out at just a 15.8% clip, showing that he can make a lot of contact when he really needs to. He hit fewer ground-balls, but still had a somewhat high 46% GB% (according to the savant dataset). This actually gives him some homer upside, if that’s possible. I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect 50+ bombs this year, but I’m not sure it’s super unreasonable either… so I guess that is to say that is reasonable?
The only problem is that he won’t steal bags, but you can live with that just fine as he leads the league in homers, RBI, and on-base percentage.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Juan Soto
Bo Bichette
Well, that escalated quickly. Bichette was Trea Turner light in 2021, and really it wasn’t all that “light”. He went for 121 runs, 29 homers, 102 RBI, 25 steals, and a .298 batting average. That’s a second-round guy at worst.
The power is not enormous (9.9% barrel rate), and it may have been helped by playing a lot of games in minor league stadiums last year while Canada was being dumb. Bichette’s exit velocities check out though (max - 115.5, 90th percentile - 103.8). The contact rate was also great at 79.8% (20% K%). He swings a lot (57%), so he doesn’t walk (5.8%), but this is a five-category guy and he should be drafted as such.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Ronald Acuna Jr., Luis Robert
Teoscar Hernandez
As if the Blue Jays needed any help, Teoscar made a big step forward in 2021, lowering his strikeout rate to 25% which resulted in a career-best .296 batting average and a .346 OBP. He hit 32 homers and drove in 116 (four different Blue Jays drove in 100+) while swiping 12 bases.
We’ve known for awhile that Teoscar can be a big source of homers and steals but it was assumed that it would come with a low batting average and massive slumps due to his free-swinging. He really nailed it down and stayed consistent last year:
He did swing more last year (from around 46-47% in previous years to 52% last year). It does sometimes make sense that more swings would mean fewer strikeouts (less called strikes…), but his contact rate only came up slightly to 70% (from 69% in 2019 and 66% in 2020). I think he might stand to strike out more in the future, but the homers and steals should be nice, and it would be tough for him not to drive in 90+ runs again next year if he stays healthy. I like Teoscar a lot.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Starling Marte, Cedric Mullins
George Springer
Racked up just 342 plate appearances but hit 22 homers (15.5 PA/HR) while scoring 59 runs and driving in 50. Those equate to about 110 runs and 90 RBI to go with 40+ homers. Extrapolation is a dangerous game, of course, but Springer has been putting up numbers at a ridiculous rate for a few years now - he just hasn’t been able to stay on the field.
We’ll continue the extrapolation game:
I’m not the doom-and-gloom injury guy who says that Springer doesn’t have a real shot at 650 PA’s this year, and if he gets anywhere close he seems like he’ll be a 100-35-100 guy at the top of the Blue Jays lineup.
Everything under the hood looked normal for him last year, which is impressive given how much time he missed. I was high on him last year, and I’ll continue to be this year.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Jesse Winker, Alex Bregman
Lourdes Gurriel
Pretty average bat all-around. .276/.319/.466 is fine but not really helping your fantasy team, the home run rate was 25.8 PA/HR, better-than-average but not exactly great. He doesn’t hit the ball especially hard (9.6% Br%, 110.7 max velo, 102.3 90th percentile), and he doesn’t steal any bases.
He will likely fall towards the bottom of the lineup given how deep the Blue Jays still are. He’s worth a draft pick at some point given that he’s not terrible in anything and the RBI opportunities should be aplenty - but the upside isn’t very big with limited pop and no steals.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Yoan Moncada, Dansby Swanson
Alejandro Kirk
Didn’t get much playing time (189 PA), but showed some good pop with a 23.6 PA/HR and an 11.0% Brl%. Add on to that the elite strikeout rate of 11.6% and nice walk rate at 10.1% and we’ve got something here. The ball doesn’t explode off the bat (max velo 109.4 yikes), so this is more looking like a batting average guy with average-ish pop. He’s also unlikely to be near the top of the league in PA’s for catchers as he’s splitting with Jansen, but he’s certainly one of the better offensive catchers in the league, at least in terms of perceived upside here.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Tyler Stephenson, Adley Rutschman
Cavan Biggio
He may have been the biggest bust of the 2021 season. That wasn’t super hard to see coming if you looked under the hood at his 2020 season, but .224/.322/.356 was worse than anybody thought. His walk rate stayed high (12.6%), and his strikeout rate stayed fine (26.5%). He swung a little more than prior (41.3%), but was still one of the lowest swing rates in the league.
The power numbers in 2019 were clearly just fake (he went for a solid 26.7 PA/HR). Since then he’s gone 33.1 and 42 PA/HR and last year he had just a 5.6% barrel rate and a max velo of 109.6.
He’s probably like an 8 or 9 hitter, which hurts his steals - and at this point steals is the only reason you’d want him. With some injuries he could end up leading off, posting a decent OBP and steals count, but that’s a best-case scenario it seems.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Adam Frazier, Jeimer Candelario
Danny Jansen
Bad hitter overall but he can really go on weird hot streaks. Only reason to draft him would be if you thought he’d be near the top of the board in PA’s for a catcher, and that doesn’t seem likely with Kirk present.
Randal Grichuk
Grichuk is going really late this year after a somewhat decent season. He hit 22 homers in 545 plate appearances with the Blue Jays, driving in 81 runs. His strikeout rate came down to a career-best 20.9%, but somehow that resulted in a career-worst batting average at .241. He hit just .245 on ground balls and .243 on fly-balls (both pretty low numbers), but some of the ground-ball stuff there can be explained by him being quite slow. His barrel rate was lower than expect at 8.5% when you see his max exit velo of 114 being quite strong.
Overall you get excited for a guy with a combination of a 24.8 PA/HR and a 21% K%, but the playing time, lack of steals, and questions about batting average and OBP (he doesn’t walk much at all) make you really bring him down a bit. If the Jays’ roster remains the same, he should be a starter on opening day in the outfield - but he’ll be one of the first guys out of the lineup if someone else comes along or if he struggles a bit.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Mark Canha, Anthony Santander
Pitchers to Rank
Kevin Gausman
Joe Berrios
Alek Manoah
Jordan Romano
Hyun-Jin Ryu
Kevin Gausman
Came out super hot with a 1.68 ERA and a 0.81 WHIP in his first 102 innings between April, May, and June. Was worse after that with a 4.09 ERA and a 1.31 WHIP over his final 90 innings. His strikeout rate stayed about the same all year (30% vs. 28% in the two samples mentioned above), and his walk rate was right around 6% all year.
Seemed like he just was a bit lucky with balls in play in the first three months and then a bit unlucky in the final three.
The big thing that has changed recently with Gausman is the strikeout rate. For his first five seasons in the bigs, his strikeout rates were 22%, 23%, 22%, 19%, and 25%. Then in 2020 he flashed a 32% rate which was kind of hard to believe, but he backed it up with the 29% mark last season.
The reason for his success was the splitter, which he threw at a rate unmatched by anybody else who throws a splitter. It’s really rare to see this pitch thrown so often, but Gausman pulled it off. The thing that might make you blink is the called strike rate. That can be derived by subtracting SwStr% from 31.5% - that gives you a 6.7% called strike rate. Only one-third of his splitters were thrown in the strike zone, a very low number. It would be interesting to see how much his performance would change if hitters just stopped swinging at the splitter.
Of course, the reason it works so well, I assume, is that it looks a lot like a four-seamer out of the hand which is why it gets so many swings. Either way, this would seem to me to a pretty volatile pitch arsenal. If he would start tipping the pitch or stop tunneling it so perfectly, hitters would just be able to watch it drop out of the strikezone which could really derail Gausman.
I’m definitely getting way more speculative than I should be here, he’s just such a different case throwing these two pitches for 90% of his pitches.
We don’t have to speculate to know that moving from the NL West to the AL East is quite bad for him. He should definitely not be viewed as an ace, and I think I’ll be lower than the field on Gaus-daddy.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Dylan Cease, Sonny Gray
Jose Berrios
Berios had the best season of his career with his new team. He threw 192 innings with a 3.52 ERA and a 1.06 WHIP. His strikeout rate came up a point from his career norm (26.1%), and his walk rate improved a bit as well (5.8%). He was an ace in April, and then bounced around a bit throughout the year:
Month: ERA, WHIP
April: 3.04, 0.97
May: 3.58, 1.17
June: 3.55, 1.07
July: 3.66, 0.94
Aug: 3.73, 1.47
Sep: 3.46, 0.79
He led his arsenal with a curveball and still posted a strong 33.9% CSW% with it on a nice 14.1% SwStr%. He didn’t get many ground-balls and the barrel rate suffered (10.9%) because of it. He also had a nice split between the sinker and four-seam, which is good to see - and both pitches were fine.
The reason to draft Berrios is the perceived safety. He has pitched five straight full seasons, which by itself gets him a long way to fantasy relevance before even looking at the rest of the numbers. His ERA’s and WHIP’s have never been great, but again - they keep you in the game while racking up wins and quality starts just from the sheer volume. His ERA was about average for a fantasy pitcher, but his WHIP was really strong last year.
I probably don’t believe another sub-1.10 WHIP will come, so this is just once again a volume guy.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Max Fried, Kevin Gausman
Alek Manoah
The good: A 28% strikeout rate, a 5.8% Brl%, four starts with 10+ strikeouts, an elite four-seam fastball (15.3% SwStr%!!), and a young age
The bad: Quite inconsistent, had at least four really bad starts (out of 20). Major innings questions (has been in the pros only since 2019 and has maxed out at 111 innings in a single season).
The stuff:
Pretty limited arsenal with the four-seamer plus sinker combo making up 60% of his arsenal and then most of the rest going to the slider. The 15.3% SwStr% on the four-seamer was so good that I don’t really believe he can do that ever again, it was the best mark on a four-seamer by a starter in the whole league. It must play very well with the sinker, which also had an above-average SwStr% at 8.5%. He used the four-seamer more than the slider even in 0-2 and 1-2 counts (139 vs. 106 pitches), so he does really have faith in that pitch as a put-away pitch. He threw the four-seamer 55 times in a 0-2 counts compared to the slider at 51.
Anyways, for someone this young it was a very encouraging season, and the ceiling seems quite high with Manoah. We probably see about 150 innings max from him, and there’s always the chance that hitters really adjust to him and pick up that four-seamer better in 2022 as they see more and more of him. Again, I don’t see the four-seamer doing this well again, but he’s so young that maybe the rest of his pitches will improve or maybe he’ll add another one - who knows! The future is tough to predict, man!
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Josiah Gray, Logan Gilbert
Jordan Romano
A very good pitcher, and should be near the league leaders in saves if healthy.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Emmanuel Clase
Hyun-Jin Ryu
The strikeout rate bottomed out to 20.4%, walk rate stayed great at 5.3%. He went for 169 innings, a 4.37 ERA, and a 1.22 WHIP. There’s definitely upside with the WHIP if the ground-ball rate stays high (although it came down to 47% last year). You’re just not going to do that well pitching in this division without swing-and-miss stuff, which Ryu just doesn’t have.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Jose Urquidy