As the Tampa Bay Rays and New York Yankees commenced the 2017 season with afternoon baseball, my long-running fantasy league crawled its way through a last-minute, in-person draft. Drafting during Opening Day isn’t ideal, but a slice of the first of 2,430 games surely wouldn’t offer any significant insight into a marathon season. Right?

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After 30 rounds spanning multiple hours, most drafters desperately eyed the end, itching to escape the bowling alley’s rented-out room and enjoy baseball’s return. Trying to stay sane, one owner joked that someone should grab Logan Morrison because he homered in the third inning. Adhering to this advice based on the smallest sample size imaginable would be lunacy in a sport driven by the largest data points, which thus requires the most patience and foresight.

But someone did it. He drafted Logan Morrison solely because the meddling Rays first baseman hit a home run on Opening Day. I immediately knew he would have a monster season.

OK, fine, I didn’t know this. If I had, I would have grabbed him with my penultimate pick. This is just hindsight bias speaking, but of course, an illogical pick would pan out perfectly while my meticulously researched late-round targets—thanks for nothing, Travis Jankowski—flopped.

Of course, Morrison, who hit .239/.314/.398 with a 98 wRC+ from 2012 to 2016, is now batting .245/.337/.529 with a 130 wRC+ through 47 games. Of course Morrison, who hasn’t belted more than 17 homers in a season since submitting 23 in 2011, already has a dozen dingers. Of course, a competitor might have blindly stumbled upon a 30-homer hitter.

That’s assuming he sustains this torrid pace. Although the 29-year-old’s post-post-hype breakout was far from expected, he has made tangible changes at the plate by joining the fly-ball revolution.

As of Friday, his 44.7 fly-ball rate ranks fifth among first basemen with at least 120 plate appearances on a list led by a similar success story, Yonder Alonso. Morrison has elevated significantly more balls than in recent seasons.

 
Per MLB’s Statcast data, he has hit batted balls an average distance of 218.42 feet—well above the 186.4 league average—with a 17.45-degree launch angle greater than the median 13-degree mark. According to ESPN’s Home Run Tracker, he has cleared the fences with an average true home run distance of 404.4 feet. It classified just two of his base-clearers as “just enough” blasts.

Tropicana Field’s dimensions have not stifled his breakthrough. Although he holds a seismic .956 OPS on the road, he has hit half of his long balls at home.

These alterations are no accident. As Morrison told FanGraphs’ David Laurila in April, Josh Donaldson, Justin Turner, and teammates Evan Longoria and Brad Miller inspired him to change his floundering approach.

“I was always taught to hit the ball on the ground and run. And I’m not even fast. When you’re struggling, what are you told to go to? You go back to basics and try to hit a ground ball up the middle. I get shifted, so that would mean I’m out. So now, my ‘back to basics’ is to try to hit a fly ball up the middle. Valuing that side of it — launch angle and all that stuff — has helped me out a lot.”

Maybe we should have seen it coming. He teased some of these gains last September by batting .375/.483/.917 with line-drive and hard-hit percentages of 46.7. More important for his new tendencies, he generated a 40.0% fly-ball rate.

But that was only 10 games. Tampa Bay showed great—one could have argued too much—patience by keeping him around that long, as he went 6-for-60 with 25 strikeouts during a disastrous April. In the ensuing 134 games, including all of 2017, he’s batting .259 with 26 homers and 75 RBIs.

There’s no use wondering if he’s a sell-high candidate, as he’s still widely available for free. Despite his power breakout, Morrison is owned in just 28 percent of Yahoo Sports leagues. Gamers have reacted more urgently to hot starts from Alonso (50) and Justin Smoak (47). In all but the shallowest mixed league with tiny benches and no corner-infield slot, Morrison also deserves a spot.

He probably won’t keep giving fans souvenirs with such regularity; a whopping 23.5 percent of his fly balls won’t escape the field of play over the final four months. He probably won’t unwind another 24 home runs, but 14 is doable. That makes him more of a solid corner infielder or utility man in meatier leagues.

Think along the lines of Justin Bour, Mitch Moreland, and Lucas Duda. None of those left-handed mashers will win a league, but they’re underrated depth options, especially for managers willing to play the matchups and save them for right-handed opponents. For all his success, Morrison still hasn’t harnessed any power against fellow lefties.

 
That makes Morrison an especially alluring DFS option as long as his cost remains manageable. The major daily sites, however, have adapted faster than most seasonal players.
In danger of playing himself out of the majors early last year, he’s now poised to smack 25 long balls with a double-digit walk rate, adding to his appeal in OBP and OPS formats. Not bad for someone who was essentially drafted as a gag.

Note: All advanced stats courtesy of FanGraphs unless otherwise noted.

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Andrew Gould is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Andrew, check out his archive and follow him @andrewgould4.