Kyle Soppe profiles Nelson Cruz and his rest of season outlook.
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We’ve seen a lot of baseball through the years and it is pretty rare that an aging outfielder improves his power numbers in his mid 30’s after a steroid suspension. Nelson Cruz challenged that logic last season by recording career highs in runs/RBI/HR and is on pace to do so again this season. So what are fantasy owners supposed to do just two weeks into the 2015 season: sell high or refuse to repeat the mistake you made in 2014 and hang onto the slugger?
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Just 13 days into his Mariners career, Cruz clobbered eight homers and has been as locked in as any hitter in the big leagues. It’s an impressive run, but let’s not overreact because of the timing of this streak. Sure, his “year totals” are cartoonish and can be extrapolated forward for the greatest fantasy season of all time, but a mind-boggling run of production is nothing new for Cruz. Just last season, he had a stretch where he hit 19 bombs in 44 days. Unfortunately, streaks go in both directions, as was evident last season as Cruz followed that strong two months by hitting “just” eight homers over the next 65 days. In addition to the natural regression that you’d expect, it is important to note that Cruz already is half way to his 2014 home run total against left-handed pitchers in just 8.76 percent of the at-bats. He has always been able to hit for considerable power against southpaws, but this rate is far above anything statistically reasonable.
But enough of opinions, fantasy baseball is a numbers game. You don’t have to look far to see why Cruz is off to a historic start: his HR/FB percentage (32.0 percent) and FB/GB rate (2.27) are far ahead of his career norms (17.6 and 1.06 respectively). In terms of sample size, I’ll take his statistics from the previous decade over a 12 game stretch, so let’s have some fun with projections. He has averaged 110 games played over the last six seasons, making that a reasonable game total to forecast for a right fielder who will turn 35 years old this summer. For his career, he is averaging 1.46 fly balls and 1.39 ground balls per game, or 161 and 153 per 110 games. Heading into April 20, Cruz had hit 25 fly balls and 11 ground balls, meaning he is mathematically likely to hit 136 fly balls and 142 ground balls the rest of the way. Using his career averages again, we could estimate that 17.6 percent of those fly balls clear the outfield fence. That may seem a bit low, but his HR/FB percentage has remained stable from his first five seasons to his last five seasons.
Using that math, Cruz projects to hit 24 more home runs this season. If he can stay healthy and play 135 games, we are looking at another 30 home runs from this point forward. Any responsible projection has to include the potential for missed games and when you consider that Cruz has never played in a pitcher-friendly ballpark, expecting another 30 bombs seems a bit on the optimistic side. I’m OK with taking the average of those projections, leaving Cruz with 35 total home runs in 2015.
That is obviously a strong season, but aren’t you probably getting more value by trading him at his current value than you would by holding onto him?
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Kyle is a staff writer for RotoExperts. You can follow him on Twitter @unSOPable23.
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