Reviews, Previews, and Ranks: Colorado Rockies
Introduction & Glossary Post Here
Pitchers
I’m going to give myself some respite here and just not even bother with German Marquez and company. Don’t draft any Rockies pitchers in any league - you will be fine, I promise.
Hitters
For the same reason that the Rockies pitchers are easy to scratch off, the hitters are certainly not easy to scratch off. I feel compelled to talk about a bunch of these guys, but I’m going to try to be a bit brief to get through it in a reasonable amount of time.
Kris Bryant
Bryant missed most of his first season as a Rockie, but he has like 83 left on the contract so we’ll be seeing a lot of him, and hopefully, we’ll see a full season of him next year. He will be 31 years old, so he’s past the prime years, you could say, but he’s got plenty left in the tank if he can just stay healthy.
Here’s what he did in limited time
181 PA, .306/.376/.475, 5 HR, 28 R, 14 RBI, 14.9% K%, 9.4% BB%
Bryant hit the ball well in 2022, the .339 xwOBA is encouraging to see and he barely struck out at all.
We can’t take a whole lot from 2022, but we know Bryant pretty well here, so here’s how I view him
An injury risk
Not a ton of power (I’d project 24-28 homers over a full season)
Really good to great batting average as a Rockie
Very few steals
It’s all about the price, of course, but I don’t think Bryant has “league-winner” in his range of outcomes. His career barrel rate is 9.5%, which is fine but nothing amazing, and he’s stolen double-digit bases just twice (2015 and 2021, and he stole only 10 in 2021).
Bryant is fine and won’t hurt your team if he stays healthy - but he’s not a priority pick for me even with the Coors Field situation going on.
Comps/RankArounds: Nathaniel Lowe
C.J. Cron
He will be 33 next year and is coming off yet another nice power year, as he hit 29 homers and drove in 102 runs in 2022 over his 631 plate appearances. We have a CONTRACT YEAR ALERT here too, as he’ll be a free agent after the season.
With the Rockies, Cron has mashed 57 homers in two seasons, for a great 20.7 PA/HR. He hit .281 in 2021, but couldn’t replicate that in 2022 as he hit just .257. More stats from 2022:
.257/.315/.468, 26% K%, 6.8% BB%, 10.8% Brl%, .319 xwOBA, .247 xBA
He’s getting older, and doesn’t do much besides hit dingers - but there’s plenty to like about a guy that can hit a bunch of dingers and keep the batting average above .250.
What you may or may not know is that he did most of his damage early in the year.
Cron’s second-half numbers:
.197/.251/.341, 8 HR, 30.9 PA/HR, 7.8% Brl%, 25.9% K%, .293 xwOBA
Pretty alarming stuff, and he was almost just as bad at home in the second half with a .193/.245/.443 line there (6 of those homers came at home).
This presents us with an interesting question. When we see these first-half vs. second-half splits, which way should we go? I think the view you get from most fantasy bro’s is that you should buy players that had big second halves, because that may be indicative of some change they made that carry into the next year. I think that’s a bootyhole take, but I’m not like so sure of myself here that I’m going to call those guys booty holes on Twitter, I’ll just do it quietly right here.
I don’t really care about the second half. Cron has been hitting homers at a great rate for like five years now so I’m not going to think that stops just because he had a couple of bad months to end one season. There is concern that he will be 33, but overall I think he’s going to be priced just fine, if not too cheap. He’s a good corner infield option for a fantasy team build that starts without a ton of pop.
Comps/RankArounds: Salvador Perez
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