Fantasy Baseball: Buy or sell surprising starts from Pete Crow-Armstrong, Paul Skenes, and more

We’re through the first month of the season, and that feels like a good opportunity to look back on what has happened in Fantasy Baseball and try to figure out what it means for the rest of the season. You might be inclined to believe that what has happened so far will have a lot of bearing on what is to come, but history suggests that’s probably a mistake. 

On this date last season, for example, the Royals‘ surprise breakout was already happening – they were 21-15 and tied for first place in the AL Central. But there were plenty of flukes, too – most notably, the 12-22 Astros, who would still manage to recover and win the AL West again. 

On the player side, Shohei Ohtani was already leading the majors in wOBA at .491, a precursor to his historic season finish. On the other hand, eventual AL MVP Aaron Judge was 50th in wOBA, behind, among others, Abraham Toro, Daulton Varsho, and Blake Perkins. The first month matters, but anchoring your perception of a player or team too strongly to the first month can really lead you down the wrong path. 

Let’s take a look at four big storylines from the first month of the season and see if we can figure out which ones are real and which ones are likely to be a mirage: 

Pete Crow-Armstrong‘s star turn

All those criticisms I had of Crow-Armstrong’s approach at the plate before the season? They’re mostly still there. He’s one of the most aggressive hitters in baseball, swinging at 61.6% of pitches seen (league average is just 47.2%), including 44% of pitches out of the strike zone (league average is 28.4%). In fact, on that last measure, Crow-Armstrong’s decision-making has somehow gotten even worse – he was at a 41.4% chase rate in 2024! So, how is he a top-10 player in Fantasy?

Well, here’s one thing we might have missed in the focus on his chase rate: He also swings at good pitches much more often than most hitters. His zone swing rate was 79.7% last season, and it is 80.6% this season, compared to league average of 67%. Chasing as often as Crow-Armstrong does isn’t a great sign, but he also does a great job of swinging at pitches he can do something with, and he does that at a much higher rate. 

He’s also just doing a much better job of making contact when he swings at hittable pitches this season, and this might be the key. His zone contact rate of 73.2% last season was a huge problem when combined with his chase rate. That in-zone contact rate was the fifth-worst in baseball among 207 hitters with at least 400 PA, and unlike someone like Rafael Devers (who was actually slightly worse), Crow-Armstrong didn’t have elite quality of contact metrics to make up for it (Devers also chased out of the zone far less often). 

So far this season, however, Crow-Armstrong is making contact on 85% of his swings at pitches in the strike zone, which is 73rd out of 186 hitters with at least 100 PA to date. If you’re going to swing as often as he does, you need to be able to make contact, and that’s what he’s doing. He’s also making significantly better contact, with his expected wOBA on contact jumping from a below-average 34.3% mark to 43.3% – a significantly above-average mark. Add in his true plus-plus athleticism, and you’ve got a guy who looks a lot like the good version of Luis Robert. 

So, is it sustainable? Well, Crow-Armstrong is standing a bit deeper in the batter’s box than he did last season, and he’s swinging the bat a bit harder, so there are underlying changes here that could explain his success – he has a fraction of a second more time to make his swing decisions, which could make all the difference. That kind of small change could pay off in a huge way.

Or, maybe he’s just hot. We have all these fancy new statistics that let us get closer to identifying what a player’s true talent level is, but it’s easy to forget that talent fluctuates too. And Crow-Armstrong’s great season is really more like a really great three weeks – he had a .522 OPS entering play on April 13 and has hit all nine of his homers in his past 19 games. 

Of course, it’s also worth remembering that Crow-Armstrong doesn’t have to be a great hitter to be a great Fantasy option. If he’s an average hitter – if he hits .250 the rest of the way with an 18-homer pace – he’s going to be a must-start player for Fantasy because of his speed. I don’t buy that this hot streak is indicative of who Crow-Armstrong is, but I’ll also grant that my worst fears about the bottom falling out seem pretty unlikely to come to fruition. 

So, I guess I’ll hesitantly … Buy it(?)

Paul Skenes‘ lack of strikeouts 

This is the most dominant pitcher in baseball? The guy we pushed into the first round of Fantasy drafts this spring is getting strikeouts at a lower rate than Chris Bassitt? Is this your king? 

Skenes might just be pitching to contact a bit more with the goal of pitching more efficiently, which wouldn’t be a bad goal in and of itself – since the start of last season, only three pitchers have a lower expected wOBA on contact than Skenes’ .329 mark, and he has carried that over into this season. He also has the 18th-lowest walk rate among 73 starters in that span, so even if he isn’t an elite strikeout pitcher, he’s probably still going to be very, very good. 

But I also don’t want to downplay the strikeout potential he’s still showing. On the surface level, obviously, we can point to his nine-strikeout masterpiece against the Dodgers just two starts ago. But we can also dig down deeper and see that he’s still generating healthy whiff rates on all seven of his pitches – the lowest being on his four-seamer, which sits at 24.8%, right in line with last season’s mark. His overall swinging strike rate is down a tad from last season, but dropping from 13.1% to 12.6% doesn’t seem to explain an 8.3% drop in strikeout rate. He’s just having a bit of trouble putting hitters away, with his strikeout rate with two strikes dropping from 54% to 43%. That explains most of the drop in Skenes’ strikeout rate.

And since Skenes’ stuff is still intact, his command remains pristine, and his quality of contact metrics are in line with last season’s, I’m inclined to view the drop in strikeout rate as a fluke. Maybe he won’t be the best strikeout pitcher in baseball, but I’m pretty confident that Skenes’ strikeout will be a lot closer to 30% than 20% before long. 

Sell it. 

Rangers lineup struggles

The Rangers have already fired their hitting coach, and they enter play Tuesday ranked 27th in team wOBA at just .286 – for some context, Jake Meyers ranked 121st among all players in the majors with a .285 wOBA in 2024. They’ve taken a step back from last year’s No. 23 ranking in wOBA, which was already a huge step back from their 2023 No. 3 finish.

And there isn’t just one player we can pin this on. The entire lineup has been pretty much awful, with the notable exception of Wyatt Langford, who seems to be breaking out exactly like we hoped when he’s been on the field. Otherwise, Josh Smith, Corey Seager, and Jonah Heim are the only players with a wRC+ better than 105, and at least two of them almost certainly won’t keep it up – the exception is Seager, whose .415 xwOBA suggests much better days are coming for him.

What about the rest of the lineup? Well, there seems to be a lot of bad luck going around, as we can see in comparing players’ actual wOBA to their expected marks: 

But you can still see the problem here. Yes, Garcia, Jung, Burger, Semien, and Pederson have all underperformed, some by significant margins. But none of them have been particularly good even if they were playing up to their underlying metrics. League average wOBA is .314 in 2025, and Garcia is the only one who is significantly ahead of that by the underlying numbers. 

Collectively, the Rangers rank 26th in xwOBA with a .310 mark. That’s better than their actual production so far, and suggests there should be better days ahead. But it also looks like their success in 2023 is the outlier. Even when things turn around, this might still be a below-average lineup, especially since this is an older lineup than you might think for how quickly it all came together two years ago – the average age of their batters this season is 29.8, the fourth-oldest in the league. 

Buy it. 

Luis Robert’s base stealing

There was a lot of psychoanalyzing going on about Luis Robert’s horrible 2024 campaign. “He was on the worst team in history and he just didn’t care, but he’ll be better in 2025 because he wants to get traded,” seems to be a good summation of where a lot of people were.

And, I dunno, maybe! But I think I have a better explanation: He just wasn’t healthy. 

I know it can be hard to keep up with Robert’s injury history, but he missed basically the first two months of last season with a hip injury suffered about a week into the season, and that’s after he was coming back from a knee injury that ended his 2023 season. Which seems like a pretty good excuse for why Robert didn’t look like himself last season.

Now, you might be looking at his .188/.304/.342 line for the season and thinking, “He still looks pretty bad to me!” But he has 15 steals and 20 attempts in 33 games, after stealing 23 on 29 attempts in 100 games last season, which sure sounds like someone who is feeling a bit better. And, while Robert is still largely struggling as a hitter, a peak under the hood suggests it’s mostly been bad luck. Robert largely earned his horrible 2024, sporting a .279 expected wOBA that was actually slightly lower than his actual .285 mark. But that hasn’t been the problem in 2025. He’s cut his whiff rate by four percentage points, mostly because he has the lowest chase rate of his career, and he has paired that with a bounceback in his quality of contact. His expected wOBA on contact is up to .436 – shy of 2023’s career-best mark, but closer to that than his .389 mark last season. 

And we’re starting to see signs of him turning it around, too. Robert is hitting .250/.357/.479 over the past 14 days, which is a lot closer to what we’re hoping for from Robert. Not only am I buying Robert’s increased stolen base pace – he won’t lead the league or anything, but a new career high feels all but assured at this point since he’s just eight away – but I’m also buying Robert as a buy-low candidate.