2025 Fantasy Baseball: Week 2 trade values chart highlights a buy-low opportunity for Rafael Devers

Everyone knows they shouldn’t overreact to the first week of the MLB season, but even experienced Fantasy Baseball players struggle with it. It’s easy to say not to react, but when you’re staring at your team sitting in last place, it’s hard to actually keep a cool head. 

But if you’re the type of player seeking out help right now, you’re probably the type of player who knows to keep their cool. And if not, well, we’ve spent the whole week trying to remind you. So this might be one of your best opportunities to take advantage of those players who just can’t help but overreact. So, with that in mind, before we get to the latest trade values for Week 2 of the Fantasy season, here are three players I’m looking to buy low on in my leagues, along with one I’d be trying to move after a fast start: 

Three names to buy low

Rafael Devers, 3B, Red Sox

Devers might just be finished. I’m open to the idea, even if I don’t think it’s the likeliest path forward. But I think too many are convinced he’s irreparably broken – or at least so broken that he’ll need something drastic to repair him, something involving sterile gauze, scalpels, and a team of doctors – and I think that probably represents a nice buying opportunity with Devers, who is showing signs that reports of his demise have been overstated. 

The most obvious sign of Devers’ struggles comes in the form of BaseballSavant.com’s bat speed metrics that show Devers’ swing speed collapsed in the second half of last season and hasn’t recovered in the early going. This could be a sign that he just isn’t healthy after missing the end of last season with a shoulder injury that led to the bat speed collapse. Except we’re already starting to see a turnaround here, as Devers’ average swing speed in the first four days of the season was down to 70.8 mph, while it has been up to 73.4 mph over the past two games. That’s a trend you’d like to see continue.

We’re dealing with tiny sample sizes overall, of course, and cutting that up into an even smaller sample is tricky to do. But here’s the thing: Devers’ actual, career-long track record is incredibly strong, and that should be our baseline assumption for what he’ll do moving forward as long as he’s healthy. And if four days of a lower swing speed is enough to serve as evidence that he isn’t healthy, even a couple of days of him looking more like himself isn’t nothing. And if a bunch of people are convinced Devers’ small-sample struggles this spring and in the first week of the season overrides the longer, much more successful track record, I’m willing to buy the discount.

He might not be fine, after all, but the upside is so high that I’m willing to buck what seems to be the conventional wisdom to chase the upside. 

Sonny Gray, SP, Cardinals

Like Devers, the concerns about Gray go back to the spring, as he got consistently crushed while pitching with diminished velocity and then revealed he had a pain-killing injection in his right forearm last September. An ominous portent, no doubt, though the diminished velocity might have had more to do with an illness Gray fought through during the spring, too.

That might look like cope with Gray sporting a 5.73 ERA through his first two starts, but I actually think Wednesday’s start suggests he is more or less fine, despite the five earned runs he allowed. His velocity was back to 2024 levels in this one, and he actually cruised through the first six innings, allowing one run with nine strikeouts before he ran out of gas in the seventh. Without that one inning, where he allowed a grand slam without recording an out, Gray would be sitting on a 2.45 ERA and sub-1.00 WHIP with 15 strikeouts to just two walks in his first 11 innings this season. 

That seventh inning yesterday still counts, but I don’t think it tells us much about where Gray is right now. He looks more or less like himself these days, even if the results don’t show it yet. Take advantage of any panicky managers here. 

Dylan Crews, OF, Nationals

Now with Crews, we have the terrible production without the backstop of several years of MVP-level production to go on. This might mean, whoever has him in your league is even more panicked about him, but it also means I’m much less confident that he’ll figure it out.

But it’s also only five games. 10 strikeouts in five games is concerning, but it’s also hardly a death sentence – among others, Teoscar Hernandez, Oneil Cruz, Elly De La Cruz, and Brent Rooker all had at least 10 strikeouts in the first five games last season before going on to be must-start Fantasy options. That list also includes names like Luis Robert, Jackson Holliday, and Nolan Gorman, whose early struggles did portend disaster for the rest of their seasons, so I don’t want to totally dismiss concerns about Crews, especially because he did struggle last season as well. 

Ultimately, this is still more or less a blind-faith bet on a talented young player who hasn’t even come close to putting it together at the major league level yet. But if that bet costs less than it did a week ago, all the more reason to make it. 

One to sell high

Anthony Volpe, SS, Yankees

Torpedo bats! Volpe is at the vanguard of this revolution that is sweeping the majors and changing the fundamental nature of baseball forever, or so say the most hysterical voices in sports media. And it’s true that Volpe is doing some things really well, with three barrels to date in just five games, after having just 19 in 160 games all of last season. 

I don’t buy it. 

This is small-sample-size theater all the way, with Volpe already hitting at least two homers that would have been lazy fly balls in most parks but were hit to the right part of Yankee Stadium. He’s not hitting the ball any harder than he has in the past overall, and that makes me extremely skeptical that there’s going to be some kind of consistent power breakthrough here. We’ve seen a version of Volpe that tried to swing for the fences as a rookie, and it came with a .209 batting average, as he had to sacrifice any semblance of batting average skill to make it work.

I’m not saying he’s definitely on the same path here, but his .191 expected batting average in the early going suggests the approach is largely similar. Volpe has some skills, and he’s young enough to take a step forward, still. But in the early going, he’s still looking like the same guy he has always been, without enough raw power to make up for a middling approach at the plate and mediocre bat control. 

But he’s a Yankee, which has afforded him plenty of goodwill from the Fantasy community dating back to his prospect days, and now he’s in the center of what might just be a bit of media-induced mass hysteria event around the likely marginal impacts of a new bat design. It all lines up to make Volpe a perfect target to try to move before the bottom falls out. It’s what I expect to happen. 

H2H Trade Values Chart

Roto Trade Values Chart