2024 Team Previews: Arizona Diamondbacks
Going through all 30 teams, looking back at 2023 and ahead to the 2024 season through a fantasy baseball lens.
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Diamondbacks Intro
The 2023 Arizona Diamondbacks showed the world what expanded playoffs can turn into. They limped into the playoffs with 84 wins, earning the six seed. For pretty much the rest of MLB history, they would have been on the outside looking in. But they sneaked in and then “got hot”, running it the whole way to the World Series where the run came to an end.
The expanded playoffs thing is very clearly just a money grab, and it brings in a lot more randomness to the picture. It’s bad for the really good teams, but great for the rest of the league and a bunch more money is generated along the way, which pretty much everybody benefits from. As a Pirates fan, I am not going to shed for anybody here. It does seem a little ridiculous that the Dodgers and Braves can outplay everybody by a mile for six months and then have their season come down to a five-game series, but whatever - this is sports, not a fight to the death.
The fourth best team in both leagues last year won 90 games, and in 2022 it took 93 wins to be the fourth-best team in the NL and 90 for the AL. Can a team like the 2024 Pirates win 90 game? Probably not. Can they win 84 games and get that 6th seed? That’s much more likely. I’m in favor of the expanded playoffs, but I do think this is the absolute max they can do. Things will get pretty stupid if 16 teams are making the playoffs like happens in basketball and hockey - but we just might be on our way there.
About the snakes now! They have a decent young core with an MVP threat in the outfield and a Cy Young contender in the rotation. There are some other young names we’ll get to know here, but overall it’s not an overly impressive roster. They have gotten better this off-season with a trio of free agent signings, but they haven’t exactly gone all-in to try to pull off the NL title repeat. Like we said with the Padres write-up, it just really sucks to have to play in the same division as the Dodgers. And I do wonder if that changes their roster decisions. I don’t think there’s a path to a team like Arizona to win the 103 games it will probably take to win the division, so shooting for a 90-win Wild Card team again might actually make the most sense. In these days of the expanded playoffs, it does seem to make the most sense from a managerial standpoint to manage your payroll and just try to be an 85-90 win team instead of spending a bunch of money in the short-term hoping for a 100-105 win season.
But what do I know, let’s get to the player previews.
Hitters
Corbin Carroll
Age: 23
Pos: OF
Carroll was one of the few rookies in 2023 that did not disappoint. Man was he good in his first full go at it:
645 PA, 116 R, 25 HR, 75 RBI, 54 SB, .287/.360/.510, .870 OPS, 19% K%
Runs: Elite
Homers: Very Good
RBI: Good
Steals: Elite
Average: Very Good
I don’t think much needs said about Carroll, he’s a clear top-five pick in drafts this year. He most commonly goes at pick #4:
Acuna Jr.
Witt Jr.
Rodriguez
Carroll
Betts
The question is, is there any reason whatsoever for concern?
If I’m playing devil’s advocate, I guess I would say that his power ceiling is lacking when compared to the rest of the top five guys there. He’s a smaller guy, so he doesn’t hit the ball all that hard and that lowers the barrel rate a bit.
He really doesn’t show out much on this plot:
But his bat skills are so good that he makes it count when he gets a pitch to hit. His fly ball exit velo’s were good with a 105.9 90th percentile EV, that’s in the 80th percentile in the league. He seems to just be one of these Jose Ramirez type hitters that really takes what the pitcher gives him, but I don’t really have any basis for saying that.
He will lead-off, meaning a bunch of PAs, and he does not strike out much, meaning a bunch of balls in play, and that alone should turn into a decent supply of homers, but I would balk at the idea that this guy is going to be a perennial 30-homer guy.
The ceiling is certainly not capped in steals. He was third in the league with 54 steals and his 36% attempt rate was fifth-highest.
The runs are going to keep coming. He is going to rack up extra base hits, and when he walks or singles he’ll quite often steal second - and that gives the good hitters behind him all kinds of RBI opportunities. He is 6th in my projections with 109 runs and his overall projection as an $18.17 outfielder ranks him sixth overall.
I also have discovered as I’ve done draft prep that there are a good supply of mid-round power hitters. It’s easier to catch up in homers than it is in steals, so that would bias me a bit more toward getting a guy like Carroll in the first round who I think can steal 50 bags and really set my team up well there. I can make up for the 10-15 missing homers later.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Julio Rodriguez, Kyle Tucker
JA Projection: 650 PA, 107 R, 24 HR, 78 RBI, 40 SB, .270/.348/.475, .823 OPS
Christian Walker
Age: 33
Pos: 1B
You don’t get too many guys breaking out and staying broken out after the age of 30, but that is what we’ve seen with Christian Walker. He burst onto the fantasy scene at the beginning of the 2022 scene and has kept his foot on the gas ever since.
2022: 667 PA, .242/.327/.477, 804 OPS, 19.6% K%, 10.3% BB%, 36 HR
2023: 660 PA, .258/.333/.497, .830 OPS, 19.2% K%, 9.4% BB%, 33 HR
That’s 69 homers over the last two years, only outdone by these names:
Judge, Schwarber, Olson, Alonso, Ohtani, Riley, Betts
There aren’t going to be many steals coming, but it’s not zero either.
The most encouraging thing we’ve seen with him is his ability to avoid the strikeout.
His contact rate is middling, but it’s strong for a guy with a double-digit barrel rate, and his swing decisions are above-average (73% vs. league average of 71.5%, read about that stat here).
Walker doesn’t do anything poorly, and we’ve seen him do this for two full years now so I’m willing to buy in that this is who he is and who he can be for at least a couple more years (although the age should be a bit of a concern).
You shouldn’t break the bank for a guy of this age with not much steals ability, but he’s a perfectly fine first base starter for your teams this year.
He’s going as the #8 1B off the board, so that’s a testament to the depth of the position. This seems like a good position to wait on, if you have to pick one to wait on. You can get past pick 80 and still end up Walker or Casas or Torkelson, and that’s probably where I’ll gravitate in my average draft - but that does require getting steals early on.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Paul Goldschmidt, Triston Casas
JA Projection: 634 PA, 82 R, 27 HR, 96 RBI, 10 SB, .250/.331/.458, .789 OPS
Ketel Marte
Age: 30
Pos: 2B
We have to look at the last five years for Marte, it’s been a pretty wild ride.
2018: 580 PA, .260/.332/.437, 68 R, 14 HR, 59 RBI, 6 SB
2019: 628 PA, .329/.389/.592, 97 R, 32 HR, 92 RBI, 10 SB
2021: 374 PA, .318/.377/.532, 52 R, 14 HR, 50 RBI, 2 SB
2022: 558 PA, .240/.321/.407, 68 R, 12 HR, 52 RBI, 5 SB
2023: 650 PA, .276/.358/.485, 94 R, 25 HR, 82 RBI, 8 SB
Health has been an issue. Even in that 2022 season with 558 PA, he was playing with a bad hamstring for a lot of the year. So maybe that’s all it takes for this guy to be a very, very good hitter - but you can’t ignore the .437 and .407 SLGs he’s posted in these last five years. There are also not many steals here, as you can see as he failed to get to 10 in a full season where everybody and their mother was stealing bags.
He still had some trouble lifting the ball, although maybe we shouldn’t call it “trouble” because maybe he just didn’t try to lift the ball - it’s not like every hitter wants to lift the ball all the time. Anyways, he still hits the ball hard and the strikeouts have never been a problem.
The percentiles:
He’s 30 now, and that takes away a little bit of the shine. I think we’ve seen Marte’s ceiling, and 2023 was probably much closer to the ceiling than we like to think.
Marte will need to stay healthy and the D’Backs to be a good offense again to get him there in roto. I say that just because he doesn’t project for anything near 30 homers or 20 steals, so we really need to depend on the runs and RBI. I think he’s probably a little bit over-valued due to all of this. My $8.68 projection has him around Nico Hoerner and Zack Gelof at second base, but he gets there in a much different way than those two. A better comp for him may be Jeremy Pena, who has the same $8.68 projected value.
But anyways, his ADP is higher than most of the people projected around him, which probably makes him a fade for me.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Jorge Polanco, Thairo Estrada
JA Projection: 637 PA, 92 R, 19 HR, 75 RBI, 8 SB, .261/.346/.438, .784 OPS
Gabriel Moreno
Age: 24
Pos: C
Moreno had some big moments in the postseason which left a good taste in our mouths, but we can’t ignore the pretty mediocre regular season he had as a hitter.
380 PA, .284/.339/.408, 7 HR, 6 SB, 19.7% K%
Good batting average and not a bad RBI pace (50 RBI in 380 PA). He’s young enough to add power, but the result there didn’t help your roto fantasy baseball team very much.
The good news is that he makes a bunch of contact, so you don’t have to worry about him tanking your team’s batting average and he should stay near the middle of that lineup. I imagine that Moreno’s 2024 fantasy result will be a career-best, but what’s the real ceiling here? Like 15-10? Not sure I want to go there.
Right now his ADP makes him the #11 catcher, and my projection makes him the #13 guy. That’s not far off, and maybe he deserves a little bump upward because of the age. So I’m fine with Moreno, I suppose, but he’s not a top 12 catcher for me, and 12 catchers is often the cutline in smaller leagues.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Keibert Ruiz
JA Projection: 487 PA, 58 R, 10 HR, 62 HR, 7 SB, .273/.336/.406, .742 OPS
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