Fantasy Baseball: Max Meyer, Kristian Campbell highlight five early-season breakouts to buy into

We’re still not at the point in the season where your opinion about most players should dramatically change. Twenty-five games is still a pretty small sample size – it’s barely 11 plate appearances for most hitters, five starts for starters, and maybe 10 innings for relievers. Baseball is a game where you need hundreds of games to really be sure of who a player is, and we aren’t anywhere close to that.

But you can start shifting your opinions. Maybe. Players do change, and sometimes an early-season breakout turns into something real and sustainable. Not always, of course – Alec Bohm and Ryan Jeffers were both top-15 in wOBA last April and neither ended up sustaining anything like that production long-term – but Gunnar Henderson‘s big April did end up leading to a step forward for the young star.

Figuring out which early-season breakouts are real can be a fool’s errand, but sometimes, it pays to be a fool. Here are five early-season breakouts I actually am buying into right now. 

Meyer is throwing a little bit harder than he did before having Tommy John surgery, and that’s part of why I’m buying it. His fastball was a bad pitch last season, and it left him as basically a one-pitch pitcher, relying on his slider to do almost all of the heavy lifting for him, and it just wasn’t up to it. But the four-seamer has actually been his worst pitch so far, sporting a .500 expected wOBA and 16% whiff rate – the latter is better than last year’s rate, but it’s still pretty bad.

So why isn’t this hot start a fluke? Because of the work Meyer did on the rest of his arsenal to make sure he wasn’t just a one-pitch pitcher. His changeup has looked a lot better, coming in 2 mph harder than it did last season, and generating a bunch of weak contact. He’s also added a sinker for the first time, giving him an option for weak contact against right-handed batters, who are just 4 for 14 with a .286 expected wOBA against that pitch. Meyer also has a new sweeper that hasn’t been particularly effective for him, but at least gives him another option with a different movement profile than everything else – his slider is more of a gyro option that breaks sharply down, with little lateral movement, so he didn’t really have any options with significant glove-side movement last season. 

The slider is, of course, still the star here. How could it not be? It’s a hard, 90 mph breaker that he commands exceptionally well and can throw to hitters of both-handedness – he’s actually thrown it slightly more often to lefties than righties so far. And it’s been an even better pitch than ever before this season, generating a massive 53.5% whiff rate and .196 xwOBA, making it one of the most effective pitches for any starter this season. He’s executing at a really high level with that pitch, but I also think having a more diverse pitch selection probably isn’t hurting. He’s throwing the slider about as often as he did last season, but the rest of his arsenal has gone from primarily four-seamers to a fairly even split between four different pitches, and that unpredictability is surely helping.

Is Meyer an ace all of a sudden? No, he’s still getting hit really hard when hitters do make contact, and I suspect his 33.9% strikeout rate is going to come down. His 3.22 xERA suggests he’s had a bit of luck to get to his 2.10 actual mark, and he’s mostly run into pretty good matchups in the early going. 

But he looks a lot better than we’ve ever seen before at the MLB level, and he’s looking like the top prospect we were once promised. He won’t get much help from his supporting cast, but I’m not expecting the bottom to fall out here. 

Kristian Campbell, 2B, Red Sox

I still think the way the Fantasy Baseball community approached Campbell this spring was weird. Usually, when a top prospect earns a spot on the team, we inflate that player’s price to a point where it’s hard for them to actually live up to the hype – see: Langford, Wyatt, 2024. But in Campbell’s case, even after it was reported he would make the Opening Day roster on March 23, his ADP through the start of the season was just 225.0, 22nd among second basemen, behind luminaries like Jonthan India and Willi Castro. Primarily, I think, because Campbell 

As it turns out, Spring Training just doesn’t matter very much. The Red Sox never wavered in their faith in Campbell, but hype never really built around him in Fantasy, at least in part because of the lack of spring production. Campbell was also a newcomer to the prospect scene, making the leap from fourth-round pick to one of the game’s top prospects in just a year’s time, which surely contributed to some skepticism – if I was skeptical of anything with Campbell, the lack of track record was it.

But he hasn’t looked overwhelmed at all in his MLB debut. He’s been a patient hitter with a great approach at the plate, making a ton of contact on pitches in the strike zone and otherwise largely spitting on pitches out of the zone. That’s allowed him to overcome middling quality of contact metrics to put up a 77th percentile expected average and 67th percentile expected slugging percentage – and he’s just one appearance from adding outfield eligibility, as the Red Sox have trusted him to handle multiple positions. 

There are a few red flags in his profile, most notably against offspeed pitches, where he has a 44% whiff rate and .224 xwOBA. Maybe that will be exploited as the scouting report gets out on him, but given how well Campbell has handled himself otherwise, that’s no guarantee – he might just improve with more exposure! This is a top prospect who has hit the ground running, with very little in his underlying data to suggest it’s a fluke. There will come tougher times, but Campbell looks well-equipped to handle them. 

I went deep-ish on Soderstrom’s fast start last week, noting that the underlying data mostly backed his breakout up, but also noting that I wasn’t just ready to call him a top-12 first baseman or move him ahead of similarly-talented-but-cold options with a longer track record. All of that still applies here. We’ve seen a few more strikeouts of late, but his overall rate remains very solid, with good enough plate discipline metrics underlying it. 

There is one added complication that is hard to account for: Soderstrom is going to be playing new positions moving forward to accommodate Nick Kurtz‘s promotion. That could include both left field and third base, according to reports, two positions the converted catcher(!) has never played before in a professional game. We have no idea how that will affect him, and it’s entirely possible it may not. But that’s an added burden for a guy already trying to sustain a breakout, so hopefully, it doesn’t gum up the works for him. I don’t think it will. 

Lee has slowed down a bit since his red-hot start and is currently in a nine-game homerless drought. Of course, since I don’t actually expect Lee to be a huge source of power, that’s not really a concern here. He’ll get to 15-20 homers because he makes a ton of contact and hits a ton of line drives, but he probably maxes out at average raw power. Which is okay. You’re buying in on a plus approach and excellent bat control that should come together to let him remain a very good hitter, and if you set your expectations in the right place – about 100 points shy of his current .947 OPS would be my hope – you’ll be happy with Lee. A .290 hitter with 15 homers, 15 steals, and good counting stats has a ton of value, even if he isn’t necessarily the superstar he appears to be right now. 

Sometimes, losing your best pitch can be the best thing to happen to a pitcher. In the past, Webb dominated on the strength of his sinker and changeup, but his feel for the changeup has waxed and waned since his breakout 2023 campaign, forcing him to find other ways to get hitters out. Last season, that came in the form of a new cutter he started working in during the second half. And that has left him with a legit five-pitch mix and multiple ways to attack hitters every game. 

Oh, and now the changeup is back! He’s sporting a 49% whiff rate with that pitch, more than double where it was last season. That won’t last, but it’s exactly what we want to see, especially with the cutter working well as both a strike-stealer and source of weak contact and even his rarely used four-seamer generating plenty of whiffs in the early going. He could, of course, lose the feel for the changeup again, but what’s exciting about how Webb is pitching right now is that he has answers if that does happen. And it could be making him the best version of himself we’ve ever seen.