Collette Calls: AL Hitting Bold Predictions Review

Welcome to accountability season! If you are a longtime reader of this column, you are well aware of this annual exercise where I resurface the bold predictions I make each winter to see how they played out. The main purpose of this exercise is to hold myself accountable, but it is to also help educate you, the reader, about where things went right or wrong and what we can all learn from that as we dive into our offseason prep. This is going to be a lengthy article given there are 15 hitters to look at, and I'm going to have more to say about some of these predictions than others. I'll rank the predictions like Yelp reviews, giving them one to five stars. Let's dive in!

Jorge Mateo repeats as AL steals champ - 1 Star

Mateo took the progress he made in the second half of the 2022 season and flushed it down the toilet, falling back to being the guy that could not get on base. He is still eighth in the AL in steals despite his loss of playing time and went 29-of-33 in stolen base attempts as play begins on September 24th, but his days in Baltimore are over. The frustrating part about it all is there isn't any one area of his plate discipline we can point to and blame for this demise as much as we just have to accept he is simply not a good hitter. It would not surprise me in the slightest to see him hitting ninth in Oakland next season.

Jarren Duran is a top-100 outfielder - 4 Stars

Duran was widely available in drafts (with an ADP of 554 when I made this prediction) and he ended up doing rather well for Boston before going down with a season-ending injury in late August. His eight homers, 46 runs, 40 RBI, 24 steals and .295 batting average have him 69th on the outfielders list for earned auction value this season as the young man showed more plate discipline alongside the athleticism that led us to overdraft him the season before. He will not come as cheaply next season. 

Oswald Peraza is a top-250 player - 1 Star

This prediction went about as well as the Yankees season did. Peraza has a 59 wRC+ over 163 plate appearances at the big-league level around some productive stints in Triple-A Scranton, where he has 14 homers and 16 steals in 300 plate appearances. He is only 23 years old, so this is an easy candidate to add to the value in the scrap heap list for 2024, as his market price should be well worth another chance since the raw tools are there even if they need more time to develop. 

Brandon Lowe outearns Nathaniel Lowe - 2 Stars

Damn injuries! Brandon earned $9 in a 15-team format around a mid-season back injury and a premature end to the season in mid-September after he fractured his kneecap with a foul ball. He out-homered Nathaniel by five despite recording over 200 fewer plate appearances, and Brandon was raking in the second half with 12 homers, 37 RBI, and 32 runs scored along with a .253 batting average before the final injury in September. This one was there for the taking, and it was encouraging to see Brandon in the second half once again look somewhat like the guy we saw in 2021.

Brandon Belt is a top-30 first baseman - 2 Stars

Speaking of back troubles, Belt is unlikely to reach the 100 game plateau for a third consecutive full season as he is currently on the IL with back troubles. The new dimension of Rogers Centre have not been as favorable as predicted, but Belt does have 16 homers and 50 runs scored. The biggest issue with him, and the Jays' lineup as a whole, is the amount of runners he and the offense have left on base this season, as Belt has driven in 38 runs on the season despite his 16 homers. Belt will be 36 at the start of next season and will be attempting to secure another one-year deal coming off three injury-filled seasons. Good luck with that.

Lenyn Sosa is a top-40 second baseman - 1 Star

Sosa's power has yet to materialize at the big-league level, and his plate discipline has worsened considerably. Sosa, during his demotions to my area in Charlotte, hit .271/.313/.507 with 17 homers, but at the big-league level, he had a 37 wRC+ with five homers while accepting three walks around 35 strikeouts. 

Josh Bell exceeds the 100-RBI plateau and finishes as a top-100 player - 1 Star

Bell hit his 22nd homer Sunday while driving in his 69th RBI with a solo shot in Miami's win, but the circumstances in 2023 did not materialize. The Cleveland offense was problematic this season, and Bell's struggles were a part of that. The 231st-ranked player overall hit .233/.318/.383 with Cleveland but has been more respectable with a .266/.330/.475 line since his move to Miami as he decides whether to accept his 2024 club option (TAKE IT!) or test the free-agent waters.

Akil Baddoo is a top-80 outfielder - 1 Star

Our current rankings show Baddoo as the 141st-ranked outfielder, as he missed quite a bit of time this season with injuries. He did still manage 10 homers and 12 steals, but that double-double feat certainly was easier to accomplish for many this season. The larger issue is Baddoo continued to struggle to hit for any kind of average for a second straight season, unable to repeat his improbable success as a Rule 5 player in 2021. 

Nick Pratto is a top-30 first baseman - 1 Star

Pratto missed seven weeks of the season with a groin strain, but that is not the primary driver for this prediction falling flat. The root cause of Pratto's issues are a career 38 percent strikeout rate in just over 500 major-league plate appearances. Three true outcome players are an accepted thing in the game, but when there are too many strikeouts, some walks and not enough homers, it's tough to remain fantasy relevant. 

Nick Gordon is a top-15 second baseman - 1 Star

Gordon broke his right leg in late May after fouling a batted ball off his right shin and still has not made it back on the field. Gordon was having a terrible start to the season before the injury and was in danger of losing his playing time anyhow. 

Jose Abreu is a top-five first baseman - 1 Star

Abreu earned less than the likes of Ryan O'Hearn, Brandon Drury and Andrew Vaughn at first base this year. He was hitting .214/.269/.20 with zero homers into Memorial Day weekend before finally going deep against Oakland on May 28th. He has hit .246/.308/.445 with 65 RBI since then, showing some value, but the clubhouse, lineup and ballpark upgrade could not protect Abreu from his rapid acceleration down the aging curve, leaving Houston to look long and hard at two more seasons of that contract on their payroll. 

Anthony Rendon is a top-12 third baseman - Negative 1000 Stars

Speaking of horrendous contracts, this guy is dead to me. I will take a dead spot in my lineup every week over putting this guy in my lineup ever again. Rendon had the perfect opportunity to recover his fantasy value this season with the supporting cast around him, but he hit an Oakland fan harder than he hit most baseballs this season and was finally put out to pasture with a leg fracture in the summer. The Angels only have to pay him another $35M each of the next three seasons for him to play an average of 49 games a season. Since cashing in on his big deal, he has yet to hit the 60-game mark in a full season. What a time to be alive. 

Zack Gelof is baseball's version of Brock Purdy - 4 Stars

Finally ending the skid of predictions with this one, as Gelof's 13 homers and 13 steals with a .277 average in under a half season of play was a tremendous amount of fantasy production for a guy whose ADP this winter was outside the 750 mark. If you were able to get him in a 50-man draft-and-hold format, you had quite the second-half play at your disposal when Oakland finally decided to give this young man a chance. He, obviously, will not be nearly as cheap in 2024.

Kolten Wong is a top-15 second baseman - Negative 500 Stars

The aging curve is not supposed to hit second baseman as hard as it hit Wong in 2023. He had back-to-back above-average offensive seasons for Milwaukee, and then absolutely fell off a cliff in 2023 first with Seattle and now with Los Angeles. Had Seattle not given 216 plate appearances to Wong, they might have already won the AL West, as they left his .165/.241/.227 production in their lineup entirely too long. I can't even explain this rapid decline into fantasy irrelevancy.

Nathaniel Lowe is not a top-15 first baseman - 3 Stars

Lowe is currently 16th on the first baseman earned values, so I'll take the small victory here. The prediction cautioned about his inflated 2022 batting average on bad contact to the opposite field, and that played out as his batting average has fallen 34 points from last season. The runs and RBI production were up in a Texas lineup that has been mostly red-hot this season, but his homer production has also suffered. 2022 looks like the outlier year of his three-year vitae as a Ranger.

Bonus Hitters

I publish the Value in the Scrap Heap article each December, so I wanted to briefly list some of the bats from that article and how they materialized.

• Joey Gallo - he is irrevocably broken as a fantasy player. It is crazy to see how a guy who hit 40 homers in consecutive seasons just six years ago may already be done as a major-league player.
• Wil Myers - let this be a lesson to us all that Cincinnati's park cannot fix all ills. It may have worked for Brandon Drury and Tommy Pham in recent years, but it could not fix Wil Myers's flaws, and the former Rookie of the Year also looks to be done as a big leaguer.
• Jeimer Candelario - my crown jewel from the article, as he bounced back nicely from his shoulder issues and irregular splits to recover his lost fantasy value from the 2022 season
• Jo Adell - he injured an oblique with the Angels just before all their other injuries beset the roster, so he wasn't able to capitalize on all the playing time. He was leading the minors in homers at one point this summer, but he is also now out of options with the Angels as they decide what to do with him this winter.
• Bobby Dalbec - Dalbec mashed 33 homers in Triple-A this season. The swing-and-miss is still as prevalent as ever and he will likely be trying to latch on with another organization this winter, as Boston has only gone to Dalbec once they ran out of other options on the roster this season.
• Brian Anderson - the disciplined hitter still accepted his walks around a below-average strikeout rate, but 2019 is firmly in the distant past as Anderson continued to struggle to hit lefties as a righty.
• Nelson Cruz - everyone predicted Cruz's fall from grace going on seven seasons, and that finally happened in 2023. I hope nobody pulled a hamstring from that long-awaited victory lap.

In short, I am rather disappointed in how poorly this round of review went. Candelario, Gelof and Duran dotted several of my rosters, but so did several of these other guys. I am hoping you cut bait on some of them quicker than I, or their real managers, did this season.