Fantasy Impact: Royals Acquire Jorge Soler

Will Jorge Soler flourish with a full-time opportunity in KC?

As the Winter Meetings close in Baltimore, the Cubs and Royals have made a significant trade with a pair of players in need of a change of scenery, swapping OF Jorge Soler for RP Wade Davis. While Davis will head to the Cubs to compete for a high-leverage role in the bullpen, Soler will finally have a legitimate shot at an everyday gig as a big-league outfielder.

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Soler defected from Cuba to Haiti in 2011, eventually signing with the Chicago Cubs for a nine-year pact of $30 million. Soler, still only 24-years old, made his stateside debut in 2012 and started his career just fine, hitting five homers and batting .299 over two levels (Rookie League and Arizona Fall League) that season. It took a while for his power to develop, but in 2014 Soler starting hitting the ball with more authority – with 15 HR and 57 RBI across three more levels, finally making his MLB debut that season.

Soler has yet to impress at the big league level, but much of that is due to some injuries and intense competition for the outfield roles on a very crowded Cubs’ roster. His injurious past is a bit more of a concern, with plenty of leg injuries to be aware of, with both his hamstring and ankle sidelining him in recent seasons.

That being said, Soler has plenty of baseball in front of him, and beating out the likes of Terrance Gore and Paulo Orlando shouldn’t be too difficult. If he does, we should get in the area of 110-140 games from Soler this year in Kansas City. If you look at his MLB career, which spans 211 games (or, a full season and a couple of months) Soler has banged out 27 HR and 98 RBI while slashing .258/.328/.434 for a .762 OPS. While nothing to write home about, these numbers are solid. If you extrapolate a 162-game season out of them, you have a legitimate third OF role and potentially a breakout role for the new Royals OF.

For his peripheral statistics, his K-rate of 25% has remained steady over his short career, as has his 9.7% BB-rate. Neither are terribly impressive, but both are tolerable in basic 5×5 leagues, though he’ll produce minimal speed, as evidenced by his three career stolen bases. However, he will be playing with an incredibly aggressive team on the base paths, which may lead to a slight uptick in those stolen base totals.

Jorge Soler will be well worth a mid-range pick in drafts in the late winter of 2017, and fantasy owners might be rewarded with a breakout season. However, it remains possible that we have seen Soler’s ceiling already, which at this point, is solidly within a third-OF role – and that’s still not so bad.