Sometimes patience pays off.

As enticing as it is to jump at the shiny new toy that’s threatening a breakout and calling your name from the waiver wire, it’s easy to forget that a tough start is… well, easily forgotten by the time we reach the All Star break – or sometimes even earlier. While I stand by my suggestion to pick up someone such as Kyren Paris just a few short weeks back (in no small part because it feels like the problem is the Angels organization rather than Paris himself), he’s gone from a guy who might have garnered FAAB bids of $50+ to landing back atop the free agent heap once more.

However, others have done the reverse and are now seeing their fortunes in a much brighter light – such as our first name below.

Andy Pages – OF – LAD – 40% Yahoo, 47% CBS

Let me mention right off the hop – the level to which Pages is currently performing is most certainly unsustainable. That said, I’m willing to bet that when his hot streak does eventually come to a halt, it won’t cause him to immediately crash through the floor directly into Waiver Wire Land again so he’s still a player worth targeting off waivers even if trading for him might prove too costly for the asking price.

Pages started his year absolutely ice cold with just four hits across his first 41 at-bats while striking out at a 34.1 percent clip, good for a .118 average and a .415 OPS with nary a home run or stolen base. Combine that with some atrocious defensive miscues in center field that threatened to put him on the bench for a reason other than his bat and you had an easy drop candidate for an early season hype piece. Those who did likely regret their decision now though.

The tides started to shift for Pages after a series in Washington where he hit two home runs in two games and since then, he’s hit four more while slashing .387/.433/.726 with a 220 wRC+ over 17 games. What a turnaround!

Of course the question remains – what changed? And what level of production can we actually expect going forward?

Well, there are certainly some positives from this stretch. Most importantly, he’s managed to shave his strikeout rate down considerably, sitting at 24.1 percent while also walking 8.3 percent of the time. That gives him a much better baseline to work with, though his overall contact rate has only shifted up 1.3 percent during this hot stretch. He’s also making slightly better swing decisions, upping his swing rate for pitches in the zone from 66.5 percent to 70.3 percent.

Unfortunately, he’s not really making particularly hard contact on these pitches. Likely coinciding with his increased zone swing rate, he’s seen a bit of a rise in Barrel% from 8.6 percent to 12.0 percent but he’s carried an identical 30.0 percent Hard-Hit metric during both windows. It might honestly be as simple as looking at his homerun per flyball rate, as he’s managed a 26.1 percent rate during the hot streak. For context, Aaron Judge is running a 28.6 percent rate of his own and Pages has nowhere near the same power stroke to support such an elevated number.

So what do we know at this point? We know Pages’ true talent level lies somewhere between a .415 OPS and a 1.159 OPS but that’s as wide a window as you could have, so any prognosticator could throw that out there. Let’s try and narrow things down a bit.

Based off Pages’ prospect pedigree and the strong development team with the Dodgers, my expectation is that Pages will continue on at this level of strikeout rate – after all, he carried a 24.4 percent rate in his rookie season, so the sudden jump above 30 percent was likely just the effects of early season rust. Assuming playing time is steadily available – an understandable concern for pretty much any player on the Dodgers not named Shohei, Freddie or Mookie – I expect Pages to get enough at-bats to easily pass his home run total of 13 in 116 games from last season. He strikes me as someone who can definitely push for 20 home runs for the year, though he might not get too far past that. Let’s say he ends up at 22 home runs and a slash line somewhere around .250/.330/.450 – that’s a very playable outfielder in all but the shallowest formats.

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