Fantasy Baseball: Looking for signs of life from Michael Toglia, Triston Casas, other slow-starting sluggers

Michael Toglia looks completely lost right now. He isn’t doing anything well – his strikeout rate is a wholly untenable 46%, and when he does make contact, it has tended to be on the ground to the pull side, where there is little damage to be found. If you’re looking for reasons to be optimistic about Toglia – if you’re hoping for some silver lining or sign that he’s just been unlucky so far – there’s almost nothing to point to in his statistical profile.

Now, that doesn’t mean Toglia is hopeless. It probably just means that he’s cold. Not locked in. In a slump. Whatever term you want to use for it, that’s probably what’s happening with Toglia, who is otherwise healthy as far as we know. 

But it does mean that, if you want to be optimistic about Toglia right now, it requires a little bit of blind faith. Faith in who he was last season, but also faith in the player last season hinted that he could be – a power-hitting, base-stealing star who doesn’t kill you in batting average thanks to Coors Field’s BABIP-inflating properties. If you don’t share that faith, I can’t blame you, but I’m still willing to give Toglia some benefit of the doubt. 

But my faith is starting to wear, and he’s gotta do something to justify it soon. 

Toglia isn’t showing any concrete signs that he’s pulling out of it anytime soon, and he’s not alone. Let’s look at eight other hitters off to slow starts and see if we can identify anything to be optimistic about as we near the three-week point in the season. 

Signs of life? 

Alec Bohm, 1B, Phillies – Bohm has never been fully optimized. Blessed plus raw power and strong contact skills, he has never quite figured out how to get the most out of his skills, which is how he has a .335 expected wOBA and a .318 actual wOBA for his career despite spending the entirety of it in a good home park for hitting. He’s hitting the ball harder than ever this season, but with even fewer batted balls in the ideal locations – in the air to the pull side, specifically. There’s absolutely zero sign of skills slippage here, so I’m not worried about Bohm at all. He’s a clear buy low, even if the ceiling is never quite as high as you think it could be. 

Yainer Diaz, C, Astros – Is it okay if I say Diaz was being overdrafted as the No. 2 catcher off the board in many leagues and say I’m not particularly concerned about his slow start? His strikeout rate is up, but there really isn’t much in his underlying profile that is all that concerning – his astronomical 41% chase rate is actually down from his previous two seasons, and he’s actually making even more contact on pitches in the strike zone than before, too. He isn’t doing much damage on them yet, but with two seasons of above-average quality of contact, my concern level is extremely low here. This is probably just a fairly normal slump, from a guy who doesn’t have a ton of ways to contribute if he isn’t getting great results on balls in play. He just needs to get hot. 

Jake Burger, 1B, Rangers – Like Diaz, Burger’s microscopic walk rates and limited athleticism mean his slumps are going to be harder to ignore – he just doesn’t have any way to contribute if he isn’t hitting homers, basically. But Burger’s bat speed is just as high as it was last season, and his plate discipline arguably looks even better this season – he’s swinging at pitches in the strike zone more, chasing less, and making more contact when he does swing. The entire Rangers lineup is pretty much slumping right now, and it’s just extra-apparent for Burger, given how one-dimensional he is. That was a big part of why I was out on him as his price approached the top 100 later in draft season, but if you drafted Burger thinking there would be no stretches like this, you haven’t been paying attention – remember, he had a .635 OPS at the All-Star break last season. This is just life with Jake Burger sometimes! 

Willson Contreras, C, Cardinals – Contreras might just be pressing. Maybe it’s the pressure of playing a more offensive-minded position and believing he has more of a duty to carry the offense, but he’s making a lot of bad swing decisions right now – his zone swing rate is down to 64.1%, the lowest mark of his career, while his 35.8% chase rate is the highest of his career. That’s not what you want to see, certainly. Everything else looks pretty normal. His swing speed is up a little bit from 2024, but in line with 2023, and when he makes contact, he’s putting up a .372 xwOBA – down from most of his career, but still an above-average mark. Contreras‘ price got pushed way up toward the end of spring, but I still think there’s plenty of room for him to live up to it. 

Mark Vientos, 3B, Mets – One problem with this exercise is that it inherently requires us to look at a few weeks of games and try to draw conclusions not just about how a player is performing but why. Vientos’ plate discipline looks significantly improved so far, with his chase rate dropping from 32.3% to 27.3%, while his zone contact rate is up to 81.4%. At the same time, he’s gone from producing significantly above-average quality of contact to below-average, and with his swing speed dropping from 71.8 to 70.2 mph, it’s easy to come up with a story where Vientos is making a trade-off of improved plate discipline at the expense of quality of contact. Maybe he is – he’s made a few other changes to his batting stance, closing off a bit more and standing a few inches closer to the pitcher – but we can’t say for sure. What I can say is, I think it’s a bad trade-off if that’s what he’s going for. I’d much rather see a version of Vientos who is crushing the ball with a higher strikeout rate than the one we’re seeing now that just looks mediocre at everything. 

Luis Robert, OF, White Sox – Blah. Pretty much everything looks bad for Robert right now. His plate discipline was always bad, but he made up for it in 2023, especially with standout quality of contact and athleticism. The athleticism is still there – 95th percentile sprint speed, 92nd percentile bat speed – but now it isn’t even leading to good results when he makes contact, as his xwOBA on contact is down from .475 in 2023 to .378 so far this season, just above league-average. 2023 was an outlier for Robert, obviously, but he’s also had worse quality-of-contact metrics in both 2024 and now 2025 than in any prior seasons. I still think it makes sense to bet on Robert’s still-prodigious physical tools, but it’s getting harder to have any faith in that the longer his subpar play carries on. I’d have to get a pretty decent discount to trade for him at this point, especially because the longer he struggles, the less likely it is he ends up getting traded away from the miserable White Sox lineup. 

Triston Casas, 1B, Red Sox – Outside of the second half of the 2023 season, the hype has usually outstripped the production from Casas, and the most concerning thing so far this season is that the plate discipline struggles from last year have carried over. Casas struck out just 25% of the time in 2023, and he even shaved a couple of points off that in the second half as it looked like he was becoming the star we all thought he could be. But that strikeout rate jumped to 32% in 2023, and it was an issue even before the rib injury that derailed his season. He’s been more aggressive so far this season, but with a similar whiffs-per-swing rate and worse quality of contact, that hasn’t been a tradeoff worth making yet. The silver lining, if you’re inclined to look for one, is that Casas has actually handled lefties well in a very small sample, going 5 for 7 with three of his four total extra-base hits to date. The problem is, because the Red Sox have plenty of depth, both on their MLB squad and in the high-minors, it wouldn’t be tough for them to just bury Casas if they think that gives them the best chance to win. I don’t think we’re close to that point, but it’s a real downside risk for a guy who hasn’t been quite worth the hype just yet. I’m still ranking Casas as a top-12 first baseman because that’s where he was entering the season. But Casas has to show something soon, for both our sake and the Red Sox’s sake. 

Cody Bellinger, 1B, Yankees – I’m gonna be honest: I never really believed in Bellinger, either. And now that he’s been dealing with a recurring back injury to open the season, my expectations are even lower. The injury sort of renders any attempt to analyze him moot, because the key question first is a relatively unanswerable one: Can he get past this back injury? Until we have an answer there, nothing else really matters, because many seasons have been derailed by nagging back injuries. With Bellinger, I think the ceiling is only so high when healthy anyway, which makes it tough to buy in. You probably just have to hold him, but if Bellinger shows signs of life anytime soon, I might be looking to trade him if I have him.