Fantasy Baseball: Chandler Simpson’s return, Mike Trout’s bounce back worth betting on in the second half

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When the Red Sox, Athletics, and Pirates finish up their games on Tuesday night, they’ll be the first teams to reach 81 games played for the season. That doesn’t mean we’re quite at the exact midway point of the MLB season – let alone the not-actually-the-midway-point of the All-Star break – but it’s the first milestone for the halfway point, and that makes it as good a time as any to start looking ahead to the second half. 

In today’s column, I’ve got four hitters who were disappointing to varying degrees in the first half of the season who I expect to be much better in the second half. Call them buy-low candidates, call them breakout candidates, call them whatever you want. I’m picking these four to begin to turn their seasons around, beginning with a big prospect making his way back from a demotion to Triple-A. 

Simpson is back from Triple-A, and I’m expecting big things from him. Simpson didn’t get sent back down to Triple-A because he couldn’t hit. He wasn’t great for the Rays in his first stint, but he certainly wasn’t bad – his .285/.315/.317 line was very light on power, but it was playable for a player with Simpson’s abilities on the bases. 

And, with his elite contact skills – Simpson had the 11th-lowest whiff rate among all hitters with at least 100 PA and was tied for 13th in strikeout rate – a .285 batting average certainly isn’t the best he can do. He probably can’t get quite to Jacob Wilson or Luis Arraez‘s levels, but his strikeout rates were consistently in the single digits in Triple-A, so a bit of improvement there isn’t unreasonable. And his .318 BABIP could probably be even higher – Xavier Edwards has a very similar approach and has a .371 BABIP over the past two seasons. 

Edwards could be a true standout in batting average, and he was already a standout in stolen bases, ranking 10th in the entire league despite having half as many plate appearances as most of the names ahead of him on the list. The bat is extremely well-suited for maximizing Simpson’s Fantasy impact in Roto leagues, but if he can get closer to a .300 average and maybe draw a few more walks, I do think Simpson should be one of the nine best hitters on any given day for the Rays. 

How much he’s likely to play actually comes down to defense. He played center field more than any other spot in his first stint, but I imagine he’s going to be in left field a lot more often after he really struggled the first time around. And he needs to find a way to be at least passable out there – that’s something Christopher Morel has never managed, but he has gotten hot enough with the bat lately that the Rays probably aren’t going to outright bench him. But I would guess sometime between now and the All-Star break, they’re going to have to make some decisions about their roster construction, and Simpson is well-positioned to force his way into an everyday role if he can hit a bit better than he did in the first go around and hold his own as a defender.

If not, he’s likely to be a part-time player, and it’s not impossible to see a world where he becomes a Jarrod Dyson type whose speed is used strategically. But I have faith in Simpson’s unique skill set working out, especially when you can look around the majors and see a few other examples of guys making it work. I’m thinking a .290-plus average and 40 steals the rest of the way. With upside to force his way into an ideal run-scoring spot in the lineup if he really gets hot. 

I think the fundamental issue for Diaz is that his plate discipline is truly terrible. That doesn’t manifest in lots of strikeouts – his 18.8% strikeout rate is lower than the the league average even amidst his struggles so far this season. But the irony there is that his ability to make a ton of contact actually works against him – he swings at 43.5% of pitches out of the strike zone and makes contact with nearly 60% of those swings. 

It’s possible to be a “bad pitch hitter,” and Diaz probably qualifies, ranking in the 65th percentile in wOBA on pitches out of the zone since the start of the 2023 season. He’s in the 66th percentile on pitches in the strike zone, which is actually a fairly remarkable amount of consistency … except that his actual wOBA on pitches in the zone is significantly better (.411). That’s why it’s such a problem that he swings at so many bad pitches. And it might leave him more prone to these kinds of stretches than if he had more normal swing distributions.

But it’s still worth noting that this issue has always been there, and it hadn’t slowed him down to this extent before. Maybe pitchers are finally finding ways to take advantage of it. Still, it’s not like the rate of pitches Diaz is seeing in the zone is significantly different than in previous seasons, and it’s not like the types of pitches he is facing has changed much. Diaz is just punishing those pitches a bit less, and then getting significantly worse results on balls in play even beyond that – his wOBA for the season is just .283, compared to a .329 mark last season, even though most of his quality of contact metrics have barely budged. 

The ball isn’t traveling as far this season when hit in the air, which is a bit of a problem for Diaz, whose groundball rate has dropped from 51.2% to 41%. But the fact that he is hitting more batted balls in the air to the pull side – that is, to the Crawford Boxes in Houston – should help make up for that. At the very least, it shouldn’t explain why he’s been so much worse than last season.

Diaz was showing signs of pulling out of it in May, when he had a .283/.330/.465 line, but he has slumped again in June. That means there is still a buy-low window here for him, and I do believe his skill set is still intact enough to make trying to buy the right idea. 

Mike Trout, OF, Angels 

In many ways, Trout looks like the same guy he’s been for the past few years, if not the guy he was at his peak. The strikeout rate seems stubbornly stuck near 30%, but otherwise, he still looks like an elite hitter, drawing a ton of walks and hitting the ball incredibly hard about as consistently as anyone in baseball. His hard-hit rate is in the 95th percentile; his barrel rate in the 96th percentile; his .399 expected wOBA is bested by just 12 hitters, most of whom rank among the very best hitters in baseball year in and year out. 

And yet, 52 games into the season, Trout is hitting just .225 with a .769 OPS, by far the lowest of his career. The 12 homers are nice, but that’s basically all we’ve gotten from Trout; he has just 53 combined runs and RBI and only two steals in addition to the .225 batting average. 

But Trout still makes extremely good swing decisions and while there’s more swing-and-miss in his game than there used to be, his 81.3% in-zone contact rate is still right around league average. By PitcherList.com‘s Process+ metric, Trout still rates out as a well above-average power hitter who makes excellent swing decisions, and while his contact skills have eroded, he still looks like an elite hitter. Just like xwOBA says, but it’s good to have confirmation from multiple sources.

That’s not to say there is nothing that has gone wrong in Trout’s approach. His pulled-air rate is down to 15.6%, by far his lowest since 2016. It’s harder to hit for power if you hit the ball to centerfield, even in a good hitter’s park like the Angels’ which probably explains at least some of Trout’s underperformance. 

But I don’t think it explains much of his struggles. For one thing, while Trout is hitting the ball to the pull side in the air less often than he used to, we’re talking about a difference of 8-9 batted balls; from 2021 through 2024, Trout hit .654 with 32 homers on 133 pulled-air batted balls, and I don’t think adding an extra five hits and two homers to his season total would fundamentally change how we feel about Trout right now. 

I think the bigger explanation here is that Trout has mostly just gotten unlucky. Maybe he’s earned a little bit of that luck, but given the swing decisions and quality of contact we’re seeing from Trout, I still think he’s one of the better hitters in the league. And I certainly expect that moving forward. 

Harris, like Diaz, has long been a bad-ball hitter who overcame poor swing decisions with a preternatural ability to put the barrel on the ball no matter what. Unlike Diaz, that ability has largely disappeared this season. While Diaz’s average exit velocity is actually up this season, Harris’ is down from 90.5 mph to 89.3. That’s a problem when your swing decisions are as bad as Harris’ have always been. 

And it makes me wonder if Harris has tried to change his swing a little bit? His average swing speed is down a little bit, and he’s making more contact than in year’s past, with his contact rate on pitches in the strike zone jumping from 81.5% to 86.9%. That would be a good tradeoff if it was resulting in fewer strikeouts, but because Harris still swings at so many pitches out of the zone, he’s still striking out as often as he did last season. He’s just making weaker contact when he doesn’t, which is a pretty awful tradeoff. 

And that does make it tougher to buy into Harris. He’s always been an incredibly streaky hitter, and he had an xwOBA below .310 through the end of May in both 2023 and 2024 before ultimately pulling out of those slides. But now he’s moving in the wrong direction – he was at .315 and .313 in April and May and is now down to .254 in June. That’s not the kind of trend we want to see, and it speaks to Harris looking truly lost in a way he hasn’t ever before.

Which is why the price if you’re buying needs to be extremely low. Because the bet here isn’t that Harris is doing everything right and just getting the wrong results; he isn’t. The bet is that he’s been an elite player in the past and is still just 24 years old, and 24 year olds don’t generally totally lose it without some kind of injury. He wouldn’t be the first one to, of course, but as a general rule, I like the idea of betting on players this young and this talented, especially if they’re going to cost as little as Harris surely will these days. 

Heck, whoever has Harris on their team might view you trading for them as doing them a favor at this point. 

This news was originally published on this post .

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