The Argument Against Alex Bregman
Alex Bregman is a really good real-life baseball player who should continue to hit well. In 2019, his last full season, he banged out 41 home runs for us. In the following 580 plate appearance, though, he only has 18. This includes an injury-plagued 2021 that we can excuse, but it still begs the question:
Is Alex Bregman a 40-home-run hitter or a 25-home-run hitter?
This is crucial to answer before we plant our flag in one direction or the other. It’s important to take a stand on a guy who is in an average draft position range of his own among third basemen. On an island, so to speak.
Do we draft our third baseman earlier? Do we wait on Kris Bryant or even lower? Or do we confidently nab Bregman in that island between the 65th and 90th pick? Do we begrudgingly take him in that spot.
We should believe that his power is on the lower end because, well, it is.
| Season | EV | LA | Barrels | Barrel% | AVG | xBA | SLG | xSLG | wOBA | xwOBA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 88.1 | 18.5 | 8 | 5.3% | .264 | .250 | .478 | .427 | .336 | .306 |
| 2017 | 87.6 | 16.4 | 16 | 3.4% | .284 | .267 | .475 | .426 | .351 | .330 |
| 2018 | 89.4 | 16.7 | 38 | 7.4% | .286 | .269 | .532 | .464 | .396 | .370 |
| 2019 | 89.3 | 19.6 | 22 | 4.6% | .296 | .260 | .592 | .446 | .418 | .369 |
| 2020 | 88.9 | 17.3 | 5 | 3.9% | .242 | .252 | .451 | .391 | .345 | .333 |
| 2021 | 89.0 | 15.9 | 19 | 6.4% | .270 | .262 | .422 | .421 | .336 | .335 |
As great as his 2019 was, it was pretty lucky. His barrel rate was very DJ LeMahieu levels of low, creating a huge disparity in his expected batting average (xBA), expected slugging percentage (xSLG), and expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) relative to his actual batting average (AVG), slugging percentage (SLG%), and weighted on-base average (wOBA):
- A .036 drop from the AVG to xBA.
- A whopping .146 drop from his SLG% to his xSLG.
- And a huge .049 drop from his actual wOBA to his xwOBA.
We should be skeptical of Bregman’s power because there’s a lot of there there in the batted ball data. And I’m not just looking at his exit velocity (EV), as that’s a noisy data point on its own. It’s the combination of his EV with his launch angle (LA) that brings his career barrel rate all the down to 5.3%. Which is somewhere between Gio Urshela and Johan Camargo among third basemen.
It should be noted that Jose Ramirez has a 6.0% career barrel rate, but that doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Ramirez has had two straight seasons in double digits — 10.2% in 2020 and 11.1% in 2021. So the argument for Bregman finding a Ramirez trajectory doesn’t hold up because this is an extraordinary power boost.
The projections for Bregman are in line with the argument that his lack of raw power caps his ceiling: ZiPS has Bregman hitting 23 home runs in 2002; THE BAT X has 23; ATC has 25; and Steamer the most at 27.
Overall, Bregman is in the top-ten (if not top-eight) among third basemen. If you get him, you should be fine. We should be looking for more value in that round, though, when we can find it at the position.
In redraft leagues, Josh Donaldson just turned 36, but he’s coming off of a season with a pretty godly 17.4% barrel rate that was top-eight in MLB. The downside — of course — is his age, so we can only project him in the 130-to-140 range of games played. But we’re also getting him more than 100 picks later.
The guy who’s projecting very closely to Bregman is Kris Bryant. We don’t know where Bryant will be hitting his home runs in 2022, but he’ll be hitting them. He strikes out a healthy amount, so his numbers don’t eclipse Bregman, but we can wait for a round or two and get about double the barrel rate.
THE BAT X projects Bregman to have a .263/.362/.461 slash with those 23 home runs.
It projects Bryant to have a .261/.356/.463 slash with 23 home runs himself, continuing a career with a 9.7% barrel rate.
12, 15, or maybe 20 picks later, why not just grab Bryant?
In bestball, we should have exposure to Bregman around the frequency at which we can project that he has a boom like Ramirez; I’m not saying to fade him. In dynasty leagues, I’m looking to sell as soon as he has a hot streak to someone salivating at a return to 2019 production. In auctions, I wanna nominate him early, while people have the money to engage in an undue bidding war to, then, overpay for him. If snake draft leagues, I’m either drafting up at the position, waiting for Bryant, or gambling down on a pairing of Donaldson with an Anthony Rendon that will bring me a high ceiling for a low cost.
Alex Sonty is a professional DFS and poker player, while contributing to RotoGrinders and FanGraphs, as well as serving as a part-time political science professor in Chicago, IL. He’s been playing fantasy sports since 1996 and entered the DFS realm in 2014, currently playing high-stakes MLB and NFL cash games and GPPs. He is a Chicago Tribune and SB Nation alum, while holding a J.D./M.A. and L.L.M. from DePaul University.
I beg to differ; no questions are being begged. They are being *raised* however!
https://xkcd.com/2039/
No offense to Sonty and his hard work in putting this together, but I really don’t know how you can write a fantasy baseball article on who the “real” Alex Bregman is and ignore the multi-ton elephant in the room — namely, that rampant cheating most definitely inflated his numbers in the 2017-2019 stretch. I take Bregman’s stats from those years with an enormous grain of salt.
**I don’t want to hear anything about home/road splits, either, cause I’d wager the Astros were cheating on the road, too.
I’d argue that it’s much harder to have any certainty about what impact it had on their performance. Altuve, Correa, and Springer haven’t had substantial dropoffs in performance (I guess a bit for Correa and Altuve in 2020, but…60 games…).
Anyway, what is there really to say other than, “maybe the cheating helped, but who knows if it really did or how much”
The cheating substantially/meaningfully helped.
The truncated 2020 kind of makes a mess of analysis, but Altuve and Correa both saw decreases in their per-game performance post 2019, though certainly more mild than Bregman’s massive drop-off. I would perhaps note that Bregman, a guy who based on the “eyeball test” lacks the raw physical tools of some of his teammates, would seem to me to be a likely candidate to benefit from cheating to a higher degree.
You’re also ignoring the changes to the ball. 2019 was bananas for offense.
I think this is the real answer: Bregman is someone who massively benefited from the bouncy ball.
The cheating obviously helped them or they wouldn’t have done it.
The Astros stopped stealing signs in the middle of the 2018 season. There is no evidence that they were cheating in 2019.
They were cheating through 2019.
Exactly, they didn’t just randomly stop doing it one day. They transitioned from the bangs to more advanced means, ie “buzzers.” You can see plain as day in any 2019 postseason game that they know what pitch is coming.
I would say, for 2019 at least, that the juiced ball was the bigger reason.
They weren’t even banging the can in 2019 my dude
There’s this bizarre cult of morons here who basically refuse to acknowledge that happened, and when they do, they try to claim that *literally knowing what pitch is coming* didn’t help the Astros.
I suspect that the staff who do such have been paid off, but I can’t explain the commenters, other than they’re just stupid.
What you call a “lucky” 2019, I call “Right handed pulled flyball hitting in Minute Maid”
Right. This is one of the things I struggle with when evaluating a player like Bregman. The numbers say he was lucky, but continuing to be a RH pull-heavy, fly ball-heavy hitter in Houston makes it so you can potentially overlook that. Injuries may have affected the contact-quality last season, but he still largely was the same type of hitter he was in terms of batted-ball splits. You can still be concerned though, and I certainly wouldn’t be thrilled to pick him at his current ADP, but he=e’s just simply in a good situation in that ballpark where overperformance is likely, which makes it hard to fade him completely. If he were in almost any other ballpark though, I would not have the same opinion, of course.
2019 Home: 16 HR, .278/.400/.523
2019 Away: 25 HR, .315/.446/.663
Well color me green and call me Orbit
You forgot “Who knew the next pitch.”
Health is also an issue that shouldn’t be ignored in the analysis. Bregman noticeably struggled throughout 2021 with injuries. He is working with a smaller margin for error given his lower raw power compared to the big guys at 3b.
If he is fully healthy, there is reason to believe he can tap back into that efficient game power by hunting pitches that he can pull out of the park. I’ll take the over on the HR projection from a healthy Bregman in 22.
You don’t need to ask that question. Does anyone think he is a 40 HR hitter? That was peak juiced balls when he hit 40 one time. I don’t think he has ever cracked 20 without juiced balls. Or is that not a thing that we are talking about anymore? As I said every day during the juiced ball revolution – that entire period of history is worthless.
Analyzing Bregman based solely on Statcast metrics and without mentioning his spray angle and propensity to pull fly balls in home park that is extremely favorable to pull side power misses the mark. This is the same reason Altuve has success in the power department but the argument against Altuve is stronger because of his age. Also, Bregman was dealing with a wrist injury during the 2021 season partially sapping his power. I would argue both Altuve and Bregman fall short of 30 HRs with Bregman besting Altuve by 3-5 HRs in 2022.