As each year passes stolen bases become more and more of a commodity in the fantasy baseball market. This has been a growing trend for at least the last five seasons, and we would be foolish if we thought that the 2023 season was going to be any different. The 2022 stolen base totals should finish very close to the 2021 totals, maybe a bit less, but the sentiment remains the same. You will have to pay up for stolen bases as not only have they become harder to find, but the player who might steal 60 bases in a season seems to have disappeared as well. 

 

 

 

Fantasy Baseball Player Spotlight: Jake McCarthy

All of this brings us to Jake McCarthy of the Arizona Diamondbacks. McCarthy in the second half has been a difference maker for players in most leagues. He has 18 stolen bases in just 84 games while hitting for a batting average of .304 and posting a very respectable slugging percentage at .471. So the question remains, will McCarthy be a player who will be worth his draft stock next season or should we expect these skills to slow down in his second MLB season?

One of the biggest contributing factors to a player's ability to steal bases is their ability to get on base, as you simply cannot steal bases from the bench. So with this, we will examine how McCarthy has been able to get on base to understand if he can continue to do so at the same pace as his sample size grows. The first thing that stands out about McCarthy’s hitting profile is that he hits a lot of ground balls. This season his combined fly ball and line drive total are only 9 higher than his ground ball total. For many players, this would be a concern, because of how much it will limit their ability to hit home runs. Still, because your primary objective here is just stolen bases, ground balls will work out fine, especially next season when you can no longer shift. That high ground ball rate, combined with the 99th percentile in sprint speed should allow McCarthy to maintain a high batting average on balls in play(BABIP) which should ultimately allow him to maintain a batting average that should at the very least the 0.250 mark. 

 

 

 

Another factor that should help keep McCarthy’s stolen base totals high is that he currently has the worst walk rate of his career at 7.3 percent. As he adjusts to major league pitching we should see this rate increase. If he could push toward a 10 percent walk rate that would allow him to have a very solid base for him to continue to rack up those precious stolen bases.

McCarthy is unlikely to ever be a player that you will be taking in the first couple of rounds of your fantasy baseball drafts, but he is likely to be a top-100 pick next year, and a player that you can strategically target if you’re looking to get pitching or some batters who are high average/high power but lack the speed component (Vladimir Guerrero Jr, Eloy Jiménez, etc) as McCarthy should allow you to further anchor your batting average while also offering you 40-plus stolen base potential. The home runs will likely never be there in high numbers for him, and at this time it is going to be difficult for you to bet on his runs scored or runs batted in totals, as the Diamondbacks are a team that is in a full-fledged rebuild, and also play in what is one of the more difficult divisions in Major League Baseball. All of this is to say that McCarthy is a player that you should have in mind when you start to consider how you will construct your rosters for next year's fantasy baseball drafts as he and his stolen bases do not look like they are going to go anywhere but up.

 

 


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