With only have five regular season Friday’s left on the calendar, that means we only have six risers and fallers columns left for the 2024 season. With trade deadlines behind us and the playoffs in front of us, we’re going to start to take a more dynasty focused look at players that are performing well or performing poorly. For re-draft leagues, these will still be impactful, just, like, five months from now, instead of five weeks from now (as soon as the MLB regular season is over, for example, in my dynasty league, we can begin to wheel and deal again).

So I want to prepare dynasty managers (and even keeper managers) early, so as soon as they can begin to make moves for the 2025 season, they’ll already have a list of guys they are looking to make a move for or move on from.

RISERS

Call me crazy, but the run from the beginning of July to now that Spencer Arrighetti is on reminds a lot of the run that Cole Ragans went on after he was traded to the Royals last year. Arrighetti has had more trouble with home runs than Ragans did (9 home runs allowed in 59.1 innings for Arrighetti, 3 home runs allowed in 71.1 innings for Ragans, from July 15th until the end of the season). Arrighetti is striking out more than 11 hitters per nine innings pitched, just like Ragans did; he’s walking 3.34 hitters per nine innings pitched, Ragans walked 3.39; Arrighetti has had BABIP and strand rate luck, just like Ragans; but Arrighetti has worse barrel (9.9%% vs 6.5%) and hard-hit (42.3% vs 33.7%) rates than Ragans. Walks have always been a problem for Arrighetti, but he had big strikeout rates and low home run rates in the minors, so I do think he can bring down the home run rate some while maintaining a 10+ strikeouts per nine innings pitched. Arrighetti has gone from off the pitching radar to pitching himself into the top 40 to 50 starters in both dynasty and re-draft for 2025. Between Arrighetti, Framber Valdez, Hunter Brown, Ronel Blanco and Yusei Kikuchi, the Astros have one of the best performing rotations in all of baseball and I don’t see Arrighetti, or the others, slowing down anytime soon. He will be a target of mine in my dynasty leagues (at least, the ones where I don’t already roster him) this offseason and someone who I will be keeping an eye on for re-draft.

The only part of the Tyler Fitzgerald experience that I don’t buy is the high batting average. With his bat-to-ball skills and approach at the plate, he is probably more of a 0.250 hitter than he is a 0.280 plus, but that is completely fine if it is accompanied by 20 or more home runs and 25 or more stolen bases. I know he’s really only be productive since the All-Star break, but he was never really given the opportunity to run away with an everyday job until then. And runaway he has. From July 20th through August 8th, Fitzgerald has 157 plate appearances and has hit 12 home runs, stolen nine bases and has a 0.306 batting average. His barrel rate in this time frame is 11.8%, but his hard-hit rate is only 35.3% and his average exit velocity is only 88.4 miles per hour, two numbers you want and expect to be higher for someone who has 30 home run upside. Combine it all and he has the sixth highest WAR, amongst batters, since the All-Star break. The strikeout rate will probably always be near 30% and his walk rate may never approach 10%, but Fitzgerald can still be a very good fantasy asset. I don’t know if he has crept into the back-end of the top ten shortstops for dynasty or re-draft, but I know he is a lot closer than he was before the season started. It will be interesting to see where he is drafted in early leagues, to see if he leap frogs anyone and moves up closer to the top 10 (in the only early, early draft I’ve seen so far, he was drafted in the 11th round of a 15 team league, as the 15th shortstop off the board).

The Nationals offense recently got a boost when they decided to call up Dylan Crews from Triple-A, but he joined a young, promising group of players already in the bigs, led by the 24-year-old “veteran”, Luis Garcia Jr. Garcia is in the midst of his best big league season and it is coinciding with a youth outbreak in the nation’s capital. James Wood, Crews, Keibert Ruiz, CJ Abrams, Juan Yepez, Jose Tena, Jacob Young….they make up one of, if not the, youngest lineups in the majors. And Garcia gets to hit in the middle of this promising young unit, behind Abrams and Woods, in front of Ruiz, Yepez, Tena and Crews. Though he may never be a big walks guy, he also doesn’t strike out much, has a vey low swinging strike rate (under 10%), a decent hit tool and a solid amount of power and speed, building out a very solid fantasy package. He’s on pace to end the season with 60 runs, 19 home runs, 75 RBI, 25 stolen bases and around a 0.287 batting average, making him one of the four or five best fantasy second baseman and one of the better dynasty bets (I’d probably only have Jackson Holliday, Matt McClain, Jose Altuve and Ketel Marte ranked ahead of him, right now, for dynasty leagues). I can definitely see those runs and RBI numbers improving in 2025, with full seasons out of Yepez, Wood, Crews and Tena. I tried extremely hard to grab him in my dynasty leagues this year and he is someone I will be targeting in re-draft leagues next year.

FALLERS

I wanted to mention Fernando Tatis, Julio Rodriguez and Freddie Freeman, just because I think we need to discuss what kind of drop, if any, these three will see after a down season due to injuries. In the aforementioned super early draft, all three of these guys were drafted after the 10th pick (Freeman was drafted in the second round), after all three were drafted inside the top 10 picks pretty comfortably to begin the 2024 season. Rodriguez was already not living up to his billing as a can’t miss top four pick, prior to missing a few weeks with an injury at the tail end of July and into the beginning of August, as he had just a 45-11-36-18-0.263 line at the end of the day on July 21st. In the two and a half weeks since he’s been back, he hasn’t looked good at all, as he has struggled to catch up to pitches, make quality contact and drive the ball. In dynasty leagues, I would be reaching out to the manager who rosters Rodriguez just to get his temperature, especially if he ends the season on such a poor stretch run. Though super early, before the season is over drafts are not accurate foretellers of future value, just the fact that all of the experts in the draft did not want anything to do with him until pick 13 tells me he will probably not be considered a top 5 pick come February. Tatis supposedly played through his thigh injury from the beginning of the season, before being placed on the injured list on June 24th with a right femoral stress reaction. He hasn’t made an appearance since then, but he did take full batting practice recently and the Padres are optimistic they will get him back on the field in September. Missing half the season would have an impact on any player’s future value, but I have a feeling if Tatis does get a few weeks of the regular and (hopefully) a playoff run to prove he is healthy and will still be active on the base paths, he will move back into the top 10 in drafts to kick off the 2025 season. He, like Rodriguez, is someone I would be checking in on and gauging the level of concern his manager has. Freeman’s drop has less to do with any injury and more to do with the fact he a) will be 35 years old when the season starts and b) is 30 or so games away from putting up his worst season since 2015 (yet his worst season would still be an amazing season for so many players). He should continue his run of 20 or more home run seasons, though just barely, which would be his eight consecutive non-covid season with 20 or more home runs (and he paced to like 32 or 33 home runs during the covid shortened 2020 season), but the stolen bases might be kind of done. After 13 in 2022 and 23 last year, he only has six on the year and will most likely end up with less than 10. I’ve never been one to take a first baseman in any of the like first three rounds of a draft, but Freeman had been steady and reliable enough that he pretty much always had a solid return on the draft investment. If he is on the roster of a team who missed the playoffs or does poorly in the playoffs, in any of your dynasty or keeper leagues, I would be having discussions with that manager sooner, rather than later, to add him to my roster for 2025.

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