2022 Fantasy Baseball Insertion Ranking - Cleveland Guardians
Creating my 2022 fantasy baseball rankings one team at a time
Explanation & Other Team Links Here
Hitters to Rank
Jose Ramirez
Franmil Reyes
Myles Straw
Amed Rosario
Andres Gimenez
Jose Ramirez
I mean my goodness this guy has been elite for the last two seasons now. 53 homers and 37 steals in 890 plate appearances. Last season he slashed .266/.355/.538 with 36 homers and 27 steals. Only Acuna, Tatis, and Ohtani can really match that HR/SB production and this guy doesn’t have the same injury or workload questions… oh, and he doesn’t ever strike out (13.7% last season).
He is 29 now, so he’s no young pup anymore but that’s well below the age where we should even talk about it. This is the final year of his Cleveland contract as well so there’s the chance he ends up with an elite offense for the final 2+ months of the season - you really can’t go wrong here. There’s not much reason to write more on a guy everybody agrees is right up near the top of the board.
Franmil Reyes
Only got to 466 PAs but kept mashing the ball with a 16.9% Brl% and a 15.5 PA/HR. That came with the expected 32% K% which led to a bad batting average of .254. Walks were fine (9.2%) but not enough to give him a competitive on-base percentage (.324). So we’re looking at your classic HR/RBI guy that offers nothing else. Cleveland does not figure to be a competitive offense either, which will likely keep Reyes away from some RBI opportunities.
We do know that this guy will hit his home runs when on the field. He put up a 15.5 PA/HR with a 45% ground-ball rate last year which is pretty wild. We’re talking about a guy who could clear 40 homers with ease if he stays healthy and gets the ball into the air at a higher clip. But you won’t get steals, average, or OBP with it - so that hurts his fantasy profile substantially.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: C.J. Cron, Josh Bell, Mitch Haniger
Myles Straw
.271/.349/.348 between time with Houston and Cleveland, racking up 638 PA. That is actually much better than I would have guessed (I paid no attention to this dude last year). Breaking it down by team:
Houston: 370 PA, 44 R, 2 HR, 34 RBI, 17 SB, .262/.332/.326, 19% K%, 10% BB%
Cleveland: 268 PA, 42 R, 2 HR, 14 RBI, 13 SB, .285/.362/.377, 19 K%, 11% BB%
He was better with Cleveland. With Houston he was a #8 hitter (70 of his 93 starts there), with Cleveland he led off (55 of 56 starts as the lead-off man).
So what we have here is a lead-off man with great contact ability (88% contact rate, 19% K% overall) that can and will steal a whole bunch of bases. Don’t forget that Straw stole 70 bases in the minors in 2018 (131 games).
There’s no power (1.3% Brl%, 159 PA/HR, max velo of 109.8), so the ceiling is quite low. He’s not a player you should be drafting if your team is already strong in steals, but it does seem like this can be a guy to keep you competitive in that category by himself while not at all hurting your team’s batting average and run counts. That makes for a pretty darn interesting fantasy player.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Adam Duvall, Trent Grisham, Rougned Odor
Amed Rosario
He continues to just be a strong batting average guy with some steals upside. He stole 13 bags and hit 11 homers in 588 PA last year to go with the .282 batting average. So he’s not a zero in anything and did hit mainly in the #2 hole for Cleveland last year which gives him some runs upside as well. There’s nothing to really hate here, but also not much upside to go with. He’s draftable as a middle-infielder in deep leagues, but you can get more for less.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Mark Canha, Yuli Gurriel
Andres Gimenez
Surprisingly hit homers at a not-pitiful rate (42 PA/HR), but that came with just a 3.6% Brl%. He doesn’t hit the ball hard, and the 51% GB% last year didn’t really let him do much.
11 steals in 210 PA is legit, and that’s a 30+ steal pace. The 26% K% is not great but not horid either, but his 71% contact% is pretty bad. There’s the outside chance he could be a 20/20 guy if he plays every day and improves a bit (he’s just 23 years old), so we shouldn’t write this guy off, but it’s probably a better guy to wait and see on. He hit mostly in the bottom three of the order which hurts, but I think with some good early production he would get moved up since it’s just Straw/Rosario he’d be competing with up there.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Amed Rosario, Anthony Santander
Bobby Bradley
Bradley was pretty exciting for a while in 2021. His season started on June 5th, and from there through July he posted a great 14.4 PA/HR (11 homers with a .485 slugging in 158 PA). He was still hurting your fantasy team majorly in AVG/OBP (.201 average with a 11% BB%), but he was a great source of homers that you could’ve picked up off of waivers.
From there on, the homer pace slowed. He hit just five homers over his final 120 PAs with the same bad batting average (.216, 37% K%, 5% BB%). All-in-all the 62% contact rate and 36% K% for the year make him quite tough to draft, especially given there’s no reason for Cleveland to stick with him in the lineup every day.
He is just 25 years old, so improvements and a 35 homer season is certainly not out of the question, but you don’t often see guys turn around a 62% contact rate, and these types of guys are just murder on a fantasy team’s batting average.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Anthony Santander, Mike Moustakas
Pitchers to Rank
Shane Bieber
Emmanuel Clase
Triston McKenzie
Cal Quantrill
Aaron Civale
Zach Pleasc
Shane Bieber
It was very disappointing to see Bieber only manage 96.2 innings last year after the short-season Cy Young award. He missed half of June, all of July and August, and then most of September. He made just two starts after the injury in late September throwing six innings.
Before the injury, he was still getting tons and tons of strikeouts (34% K%) and posting great metrics like his 16.5% SwStr% and 33.8% CSW%. However, the walk rate came up a bit to 9% and he was getting barreled a bit more often (9% Brl%).
That made for a pretty bad WHIP (1.25) and a non-elite ERA (3.28). He wasn’t pitching like the first-round ace he was drafted as, but there wasn’t much reason to be concerned given how many strikeouts he was piling up.
Cleveland took it very slow with getting him back, and I’m not sure he was even really going full effort in those two outings late in the year, but the numbers weren’t great in those six innings (18% K%, 27.4% CSW%, 9.5% SwStr%). Let’s not concern ourselves with six meaningless innings there. Here’s how the arsenal broke down:
The fastball velocity was definitely down (averaged 93.1 in 2019, 94.1 in 2020, and then 92.8 in 2021). That will be something to keep an eye on in spring. The curve and slider were elite, and he threw a pretty good changeup a little bit as well.
Bottom line is that this guy wasn’t at his best and was still getting huge strikeout totals, and his arsenal was still deep as ever. He just has so many weapons to work with, and as long as he can locate the fastball in 2022 he should be in the Cy Young discussion again. You can probably take advantage of a bit of a discount on him in early drafts as well.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Brandon Woodruff, Walker Buehler, Max Scherzer
Emmanuel Clase
One of the few young closers with job security. The team probably won’t win a ton of games, however. His cutter is insane, and that’s probably enough words said:
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Blake Treinen, Will Smith
Triston McKenzie
For the year: 27% CSW%, 12.6% SwStr%, 27.5% K%, 11.7% BB%, 4.95 ERA, 1.18 WHIP
Not great numbers but you can see the upside there with the high strikeout rate. He also went on a stretch of absolute dominance in the middle of the year.
From 8/10 to 9/14 he threw 39 innings with a 1.38 ERA and a 0.51 WHIP along with a 32% K% and a great 4% BB%. Not sure where that came from but it ended abruptly as he gave up 14 earned runs in his last three outings (10.2 innings) while striking out just 9 and walking 8.
He’s been a tough guy to figure out, going through stretches of dominance followed by really bad stretches a few times. The “stuff” is goofy too:
The fastball isn’t fast, but the 9% SwStr% is solid enough. The slider and curve were both quite good as well (again anything over 30% CSW% is really good). He seems to be a fly-ball pitcher (it might be too early to say this given that he’s only made 30 career starts), with a 40% GB% in 2020 and then a 30% mark in 2021. That along with pedestrian SwStr% on the fastball has led to him giving up a bunch of longballs (1.62 HR/9 in 2020, 1.58 last season).
He’s young (24), but it’s just really tough for pitchers to be really good without a good fastball, and at this point, it doesn’t seem like he has one. Now you can certainly have a good fastball that comes in under 93 mph, but you have to locate it well and he hasn’t been able to do that to this point in his career. The 24.3% CSW% on the four-seamer is pretty tragic, it was the 5th worst mark for four-seamers thrown more than 1,000 times last year (John Means, Dylan Cease, German Marquez, Mike Minor were worst). I’m not willing to spend much draft capital on a guy with that bad of a fastball, so I’ll probably be passing.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Jordan Montgomery, Luis Patino
Cal Quantrill
A 2.89 ERA with a 1.18 WHIP, but that wasn’t backed up much with a 19.6% K%, a 7.6% BB%, and a 43.2% GB%. The walk rate is fine but really not that great when you see the tiny strikeout rate, and he doesn’t get enough ground-balls to support that much contact.
Here’s the stuff:
Nothing
Aaron Civale
It was going quite well for Civale before the injury. From Opening Day to June 22nd, he posted a 3.32 ERA with a 1.06 WHIP. He was not striking many batters out (22%), but also wasn’t walking anybody (5.6%). That helped him stay out of huge trouble even while giving up a good amount of longballs (21.9 PA/HR).
The best thing about Civale was how deep into games he’d get. He only fell short of six innings twice in his first 13 starts, which is very tough to find these days.
Then he missed more than two months and came back and sputtered to the finish line with a 5.74 ERA, a 1.31 WHIP, and a crazy high 3.04 HR/9. He did post a 30% K% over those final six outings, so that was interesting.
He has no velocity and not great CSW% on anything but the curveball. The way he has success is with pinpoint command and a deep arsenal. Having six pitches to throw at batters really helps when you don’t have over-powering stuff. It was nice to see him get back and finish the year healthy, so I don’t think we should take injury concerns into 2022. Cleveland is one of the few remaining teams letting their starters push over 100 pitches per outing (although maybe that will change since they went so long without Bieber & Civale last year…). Either way, there are many pitchers worse than Civale, and gives you the rare late-round guy that can pile up the quality starts while probably helping your team in WHIP at the expense of strikeouts and some ERA.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: John Means, Jordan Montgomery
Zach Plesac
He was a somewhat trendy pick in 2021 after a 2.28 ERA, a 0.80 WHIP, a 27% K%, and a 3% BB% in 2010 over 55.1 innings. Those numbers all blew up in a bad way in 2021. He went for a 4.67 ERA, a 1.20 WHIP, a 16.7% K%, and a 5.7% BB% in 2022.
We kinda knew he wouldn’t keep up a high strikeout rate given that none of his pitches, save the slider, have good SwStr%. ALl of his pitches were bad in their own way last year. There’s some upside since this guy doesn’t walk people and he’s very young (27), and hey he’s very cheap now - so you could take a stab, but the upside is very low, as is the floor.